Left to My Own Devices: Thoughts on the Do Lectures

By Drew Brisley

I recently traveled to Wales for the Do Lectures Startup event, a global gathering of bright minds from across the spectrum of business, arts, sports, and more.   It’s an event that is difficult to categorize, from the people, to the presenters, to the overall experience.

To call it a conference is a misnomer—conferences usually take place in large municipal hubs, at fancy hotels, and are full of people who come from the same industry or profession.  To the contrary, the Do Lectures events are out in the country, under a tent, where people from all backgrounds gather to learn what it takes to be Doers, with a bias towards action versus simply having ideas. Doctors, designers, programmers, surfers, chefs, world travelers—the whole spectrum—they were all there.  That diversity made the experience so rich, because we all came with something unique to contribute. 

This diversity sparked something unforeseen, giving the gathering a whole new life, as opposed to a normal conference—something that really couldn’t be planned. There was no segregation between speakers and attendees.  We were all just there to share ideas, have conversation, learn, and most importantly, do. 

The impetus of the group behind the Do Lectures as an organization is more doing, less thinking. So for this particular event, they tasked the speakers and attendees with joining small teams that would hack away at solving real problems.  From getting more local manufacturing back Wales to getting kids outside to play and educating people on sustainability, teams were hooked from the beginning  and hopeful of tackling these problems with a group of like-minded, but differently-abled people. Mentors from various backgrounds made themselves available to help the teams from remote locations via Skype, and each of our groups leveraged their advice and guidance to shape our solutions.  After 72 hours of brainstorming, each of the teams made their pitches on solving these large-scale problems.  The only thing we didn’t have time for was second-guessing our work; there was only enough time to learn the scope and nuances of the problem, quickly build our solution, and then iterate our pitch to the rest of the gathering.

Spread throughout the weekend were 20 talks from leaders and doers from many walks of life.  Just as the conference itself was rich with diversity, so, too were the talks.  I particularly enjoyed presentations from Zack Klein, co-founder of internet video portal Vimeo, and Scott Davis of CNWD, a Welsh food business.  

A recurring theme throughout the talks, no matter the walk of life from which the perspective emanated, was the notion that startups are “all about the people,” another way of expressing their purpose as solving real-world problems for real people, as opposed to ideas for ideas’ sake.  This foundational concept resurfaced over and over again, and, refreshingly, this was at the expense of discussion about bottom lines, exit strategies, and funding.  

To illustrate the point in sharp relief, Owen Rogers of IDEO spoke about a project where his world-renowned design firm was given the task of redesigning the emergency care experience in hospitals.   In order to gain a true perspective of the patient experience, design researchers placed video cameras next to patients, giving stakeholders a true patient’s-eye view of what it was really like to be a patient in their hospital. The result was a video clip of the hospital ceiling. Needless to say, the board of directors was convinced that something needed to change.

Several talks focused on branding, positioning the concept of branding as expressing the “humanness of companies and how brands connect people.  This may seem fairly obvious, but I was reminded throughout the Do Lectures how easily it’s forgotten. After all, the products, experiences, and businesses we are building, are for people. Somehow this can get muddled and for me, as a designer, the obsession with the physical product itself can overshadow the real, quite profound reason that it was created in the first place—to right a wrong. 

In the end, the Do Lectures provided a refreshing getaway, with the opportunity to be around so many people from so many walks of life, coming together with the common purpose of making life a little bit better for the rest of the world.  

NC State College of Management Features Trig Innovation Story

We’re honored that Sam Harris and the communications team at North Carolina State’s Poole College of Management recognized Trig Innovation and its founder, Ty Hagler (Jenkins MBA class of 2011), with a recent feature story on the college website.

In the story, Harris tells the evolving story of Trig Innovation, and how Hagler is using the training he received in the Jenkins program, along with the network of fellow students and faculty members, to drive the success of our company. 

Trig Innovation is a real intersection of entrepreneurship and innovation, both hallmarks of NC State’s MBA program for professionals.  Thanks again for the recognition.  Go Pack!

Trig’s Brisley Heads to Wales for Do Lecture Series

Trig Innovation industrial designer Drew Brisley has earned selection to attend the latest installment of the Do Lecture series.

An emerging ideas gathering based in Wales, the Do Lectures focus on launching big ideas to change the world.  While other conferences, such as TED talks, focus on inspirational ideas in technology, entertainment, and design, the Do Lectures target those who actually want to implement ideas, whether for new businesses, inventions, causes, or arts. Attendees across the globe must apply for consideration, and upon acceptance, enjoy three days on the Welsh countryside completely unplugged, pursuing an idea or set of ideas with the other conference participants.

Speakers and workshop leaders will include CEOs, inventors, artists, physicians, activists, designers, marketers, venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs, and web developers, creating a diverse array of global professionals who will share ideas.

Trig’s Brisley will be attending the April 23-25 Do Start-up conference in Fforest, Wales. At the Do Start-up event, participants will attend talks and workshops led by 20 entrepreneurs from around the world. Start-up topics include venture capital, intellectual property protection, branding, selling, scaling the business, hiring the right people, and much more. At the conclusion of the event, the conference participants will actually launch a new business based upon an idea generated at the conference, thus living out the group’s mission to actually learn by doing.

“I’m really excited to be attending the Do Start-up conference in Wales,” stated Brisley.  “This is a rare opportunity for me to be around so many leaders from around the world, discussing ideas that help to shape ideas into game-changing businesses. As an industrial designer, I’ve chosen a profession that specifically seeks to improve the human condition, and that’s what the Do Lectures are all about. I know that I’ll come back with a raft of ideas that influence my design work for clients moving forward, as well as changing my perspective on how ideas are shaped for wider acceptance.”

Innovate Carolina 2013: What We Learned

For the fourth year running, our growing team at Trig Innovation was proud to participate in the Innovate Carolina conference, the annual signature event of the Product Development and Management Association’s Carolinas chapter.

Representing Trig at this year’s event were our lead business developer, Lilly Ferrick, video and photography specialist Cristina Fletes-Boutte, and principal and founder Ty Hagler.  The fine people at North Carolina A&T State University gave us a warm welcome and a great venue for the event.  We thought we’d share what we learned while at the conference—the only shame is that we couldn’t possibly see and hear every presenter, so this recap, sadly, doesn’t include all of the great contributions made to the experience.

Chris Trimble, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and author of The Other Side of Innovation, opened the conference with an unforgettable talk. Taking a page from the world of mountain climbing, he said that the difference between novice and expert climbers is that the novices celebrate reaching the summit, while experts celebrate when they safely reach the bottom of the mountain again. So it is, as well, with innovation, he said, as the so-called “Big Idea” is only the beginning. 

Trimble went on to illustrate why innovation within large corporations is a difficult enterprise by outlining differences between what he called the Performance Engine and the Innovation Engine. The Performance Engine excels at repeatable, predictable, sustained business execution. To the contrary, the Innovation Engine is non-routine, uncertain, and building something entirely new to the world as the company knows it currently.  Leaders must mitigate the differences between the two, as the respective groups that form these engines within companies do not naturally mesh well. Without effective leadership, the Performance Engine will squash the aims of the Innovation Engine every time.

The key to successfully meshing these two engines successfully, according to Trimble is based on a model where the two engines are separate, but share resources through a partnership. 

As Trimble was wrapping up, we all had an out-of-body experience that placed much more than the conference under threat.  As many now know, reports of a gunman on campus marred the event for a time, but the authorities at NC A&T did a great job of making sure that the conference participants, in addition to thousands of faculty, staff, and students, remained safe and secure as police swept the campus.

So, the first thing we learned at the conference was how blessed we are with resilient leaders in among this group.  The Carolinas chapter is a plucky group, and the morning’s events just seemed to bring out the best in everyone involved as we resumed the conference at mid-day.

Undaunted by the security disruption, the PDMA conference rolled on, and we split into informative breakout sessions led by a great group of innovators throughout the Carolinas. One of our groups gathered together in an auditorium in another building where OVO’s Jeffrey Phillips, the conference organizer, gave an impressive impromptu talk on the process they use for delivering innovation at his consulting firm.  Particularly notable was his discussion on the the proper scoping of an Innovation Charter.  By setting boundary conditions from the very beginning of an innovation engagement, you narrow the scope and give the innovation team better focus and freedom to explore options that match business needs.

With his audience quarantined in front of a women’s restroom on the concourse of the university’s stadium, Jeff Grant of Charlotte’s Invue Security Products served as a model of adaptability, preparedness, and quick-thinking. Lacking a podium, he turned a trashcan up-side down, fashioning it into a de-facto lectern for his laptop-based presentation.  He shared the story of Invue’s development process for bringing a brand new security device to market for their retail customers.  Key to bringing a speed-to-market component to the process was Invue’s “Shop-and-Chop” method, as they bought commercial products and chopped them up to find the useful components inside that would influence their own development.  

Dr. Pamela Henderson, author of Killing Ideas, gave another stellar talk that helped to round out the day, keying in on the nexus of product development, the convergence of design and engineering with marketing and branding. She defined innovators as those who deploy opportunity thinking, creating as big of a pond of opportunity as possible to catch big fish (customers) with innovations.  She noted that teams must hold on to things that may seem weird or peculiar at first iteration, as these ideas are the ones that can be the ones that influence differentiators in the end. And while engineers doing marketing creates a mess, integrating their thinking among the marketers can be valuable, as brands explain technical differences that can shape the product’s marketplace success.

In the end, we learned a lot about ourselves on Friday, April 12, 2013.  The great host team at A&T rose to the occasion in a way they couldn’t possibly have foreseen, and so did the Carolinas PDMA team, from Jeffrey Phillips to all of the presenters and participants.  While the day may have been marked by high stress throughout most of the morning, we will remember it, as we have all the other Innovate Carolina events, as an event that feeds our passion for shaping products and markets.

Lilly Ferrick—the Tangents Interview

Lilly Ferrick has taken business development at Trig Innovation by storm since joining the company just a couple of months ago, bringing a wealth of expertise and experience in selling industrial design solutions to her new role.

We are honored to have her represent our company—she embodies our core values of inspiration, collaboration, pragmatism, and integrity with each client interaction, setting foundations for relationships that are mutually profitable, sustainable, and rewarding.

Tangents, the Trig Innovation blog, recently sat down with Lilly, highly-regarded as both a business developer and serial networker in the service of others here in the Triangle, to learn more about what drives this high producer in the field.

Tangents:  Tell our readers about your background prior to joining Trig. 

Lilly Ferrick:  Business development is actually my second career. From my teen years through my early 30s I had a great career as a contemporary dancer and figure skating choreographer; an all consuming love for an art form. These were some of the best years of my life, in that they were highly competitive, with a lifestyle consisting of blood, sweat, tears, auditions, low pay, no healthcare, and no unemployment benefits, but a daily commitment to being paid for my craft, and always having work, whether it was teaching or performing.

I retired from my coaching and choreography career, making an unplanned transition to sales, mostly because I could not see myself teaching for the rest of my life.  And after moving here to North Carolina with my husband, I was basically out of a job anyway, since there were no championship-level ice dancers or figure skaters here. For a short time, I considered becoming an exercise physiologist and started graduate work in it, but it just didn't light my fire. So, I landed in sales and fell in love again with winning, the sales process, and the fact that sales offers measurable feedback, which is like crack to me after being scored, either on my own dancing or that of the people I coached, my whole life!   A few years ago, I had the revelation that the discipline I had as a dancer is the very same discipline that drives me to close good business transactions as well as develop and work a process. 

A real turning point for me in my new career in business development was joining Forma Life Science Marketing of Raleigh, a wonderful opportunity to sell design and branding/marketing services.  A recruiter called one day and said she'd had an opportunity for me. I had limited science in my education except for the fact that I had a minor in exercise physiology and had prepped for my Masters in that area. So, while I wasn’t completely ignorant of material in health and life sciences, most of my educational was in fine arts.  They search firm conducted a personality profile as part of the interview process and my wiring—from all those years of dancing and coaching—hit  the nail on the head: “Driven, Influential, Rule Breaker and bores quickly without the opportunity to make things better where they need improvement” was the book on me. The CEO of Forma hired me because he knew I could sell.  I'd also been through some highly reputable sales training off and on for several years so I'd gotten better over time. I started on a cold database and had six months to close my first deal. I closed the first one in 11 weeks, another five in the first six months, and I was truly off and running!

Tangents:  What attracted you to work at Trig Innovation?  

Lilly Ferrick: I had met Ty Hagler, Trig’s principal, a couple of years ago during some of my networking activities here in the Triangle, and his reputation was the impetus for my interest.  He and the company have a growing reputation in the market that’s built on integrity and quality.  Without those two things, you’re nothing, so that piqued my interest when he approached me about a role.

But then after talking to him further, I saw that this wasn’t just a group of nice people who did quality work—he had painstakingly built this business with a take-no-prisoners attitude to building a high-performance team.  Not only was Trig committed to doing great, creative work in design, I learned that the company takes growth seriously, investing really early in the game in marketing and expanding service offerings where clients had needs.

I thought, dang, I want to be somewhere that people take growth—in its many definitions, from revenue and profitability to really pushing the creative limits of the people involved--seriously and will support the business development role with sound marketing and support.  What I also love about a young company like Trig is that the stakes are so high to not only achieve success but sustain it.  Things are changing every day, in the service of our clients, building a newer, bigger, and better Trig, and we can implement that continuous improvement starting now.  

Tangents:  What do you enjoy most about your role at Trig?

Lilly Ferrick:  One of our core values is collaboration—taking a collaborative spirit and having that drive everything we do, whether it’s working with each other, with clients, or both simultaneously, to do things greater than we ourselves can accomplish alone. 

Since I’m on the front lines sourcing new business for areas like industrial design and animation, I mostly collaborate with Ty. Like the other people on the team—a precocious group of designers, writers, engineers, and video/animation specialists, Ty is smart and fearless, and from his own world-class athletic background, maintains a highly-disciplined approach to following a process and achieving results on-time and within client budget.

This expression of the company’s pragmatic approach is huge for me on the front lines.  There are lots of companies that do great creative work in product development. As with any other discipline, those who separate themselves do so through their level of commitment to excellence, and I’ve found that commitment to be unwavering at Trig, with each individual playing for the team’s, and more importantly, for the client’s success.

Tangents:  How do you spend your spare time?

Lilly Ferrick: As for spare time, I have as little of it as I’ve ever had in this season of my life, but that’s okay, since I love what I do when I get up every day.  This is a great area to experience nature, so whenever I can, I like to get out and hike the Eno River area. And we’re close enough to one of my other loves, the beach, where I could just live and die and be happy.

I still enjoy dancing, and while I don’t do it formally or professionally any more, my kids and I sure do a lot of it around the kitchen at home!  I also enjoy reading, both for my brain and my soul, and I love recharging by going to the gym.