Transcript: How to Run Innovation Sessions with Bill Gates to Solve World Problems?
Read the full transcript of the conversation between Nataraj Sindam and Microsoft's Taylor Black on The Startup Project. Taylor breaks down the framework for running world-changing 'invention sessions' with participants like Bill Gates, from months of deep preparation to a rigorous, three-part triage process for filtering ideas. This episode is a masterclass in structured innovation and deep tech problem-solving.
2023-05-14
Host: I looked at the portfolio there and it's completely deep tech, uh, and sort of like invention-based, uh, ideas. Uh, so what was the process of like capturing an invention and taking and productizing it and you know, making a return out of it? Like what was the thinking process there?
Guest: Yeah. So the uh, and you can read Malcolm Gladwell's take on this in a in an article where he described our invention sessions.
Um, and the invention sessions are a bit of a riff on like an innovation session or an envisioning session or things along those lines where you you come up with wild ideas within a particular problem space, um, in a very unfettered sort of way.
Um, and the whole goal of the session is to generate as many ideas as possible. That's the sole ROI you're looking for in those sessions. Um, but there are certain conditions you set for success in those sessions.
And so the way that we ran those sessions and I and I I ran a number of them, um, is that we would prepare for months ahead of time in gathering all of the materials that related to the problem space.
And by materials, I mean the scientific research in a particular problem space, the uh market, uh and startup landscapes of that particular problem space, um, uh, things that people had written about it, books, articles, um, you know, YouTube videos, everything uh along those lines and the goal was to um inform kind of the fermentation moment of when you're thinking about a problem.
All of these things wouldn't themselves um be a solution necessarily, but they're all the things that someone who wanted to be completely informed or as as informed as possible as possible about a set of problems, um had all of the raw material there.
We'd also do customer discovery, we'd do customer interviews to understand those pain points, we'd bring people in, um, uh and run sessions with them where they would, you know, get deep into their own, um, the problems they were encountering, so that everybody who is and everybody who is part of those sessions had to understand those materials uh deeply.
We'd even quiz them on occasion.
Um, it also helped that uh Bill Gates, um, whatever he came to those sessions, he would have all of those materials like completely grocked and so you, you know, you needed to have them grocked too so that you didn't, you know, lose face in front of Bill, but um, uh, but a key so we we'd get everybody all of those materials and have them go through them uh a good month or so before the actual sessions happened.
Um, that gave everybody an an even playing field in terms of, you know, I may be a physicist, I may be a biz dev person, I may be um, an attorney, I may be uh, you know, a program manager, but I have all of the same raw material and my own perspective on it that I can bring to these sessions.
The sessions themselves then, um, were set around particular problem spaces and we'd start we'd start each um session and and there's a variety of different kinds of sessions that we ran.
Um, uh with a lot of provocations, a lot of conversation, a lot of like wild thinking and posted notes and whiteboards of just dumping ideas out uh that had occurred to people or occurred in conversation or happened in the in the hallway outside.
Um, and we'd get all those ideas down, documenting everything. If it wasn't documented, it didn't happen, right? Um, and then everybody would go away.
Sometimes we'd run those innovation sessions, you know, three days in a row, sometimes it'd be long, you know, nine hour days, sometimes it'd be, you know, short hour and a half or three hour sessions. It depended on the context.
Um, But we'd have a number of people who who were observers of the sessions who didn't uh participate in the sessions themselves, who would take everything down.
We'd record everything, we would uh take um pictures or copies of of any notes that people wrote down as part of that and really gather all the possible material and ideas that we could out of all of those sessions.
Um, and not only for patent reasons.
The attorneys some of the people gathering all these notes were attorneys in the room who were there in order to ensure that we had, you know, the necessary information if a patent was to come out of those sessions.
Um, but also for being able to triage. So we take all of that, uh turn each of those little ideas into an object in our database uh that I built out of Salesforce. Um, and we'd run those ideas through our triage mechanisms.
Our triage mechanisms came at it from three different uh perspectives.
One was the uh pure science perspective of uh, you know, is are there uh things that um is this technically feasible uh and and what would be the experiments that we've run against that to determine whether it is.
Um, there was kind of the customer business side of things where is sure we might be able to make a self- drying t-shirt, but is the market worth you know, large enough there? Do the customers really want that?
Um, which there's another layer set of experiments that we'd be running against these ideas to move them forward uh to to potential prototypes. Um, and then the third was uh uh kind of ensuring that it was within our um uh our funds mandate.
You know, we have a thesis at that fund that we we were inventing technologies that were, you know, intended to dent the world. Um, that was the goal of this particular uh accelerator.
And so we we came across a lot of great ideas that probably could have been, you know, great $10 million dollar companies but they wouldn't have served the thesis of our particular um endeavor.
And so that was our triage process and everything move forward on the basis of experiments.