The Disruptive Technology that will Change Your Business Forever with Nick Webb

World renowned thought leader, author, speaker and futurist – Nick Webb

This interview will blow you away. You will be left behind in business if you don’t know what is coming up with technology! Nick is a futurist, speaker and holds over 40 patents.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The Innovation Playbook by Nicholas J. Webb
• Hanztoys.com

Go to NickWebb.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I have Nicholas Webb. I'm super excited and he might actually look a little bit familiar because he's actually the twin brother Charlie, who we interviewed not that long ago. He is also amazingly successful - he has over 40 patents, he's an inventor, entrepreneur, he's coming out with a new book. I'm super excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Nicholas.

Nicholas: My pleasure.

Jaime: It's insane reading your bio. My son wants to be an inventor so, reading all of the information on this, I have so many questions for you, it's insane. How did you even get into becoming an inventor? Was it when you were little or older?

Nicholas: I think inventing is a good destination for those of us who have ADD. I have a hard time having elongated interests in anything. I really started in, I'm going to have to say ninth grade, where I had the opportunity to get involved in a new program called Arts Science, where they combined science and art, and for some reason that class, merging the cosmetic of inventions and technology, all of a sudden the entire world made sense to me. I think that's really how I got started. I got started commercially, my first job out of college was as a sales rep for a very exciting company called Star Surgical. I was 21 years old, I had just got into the business world and what they would do is they would take these people out of college, they would train them in a lab where we did phacoemulsification surgery on pigs, on pig eyes, and for some reason that three dimensional environment of doing capsulorhexis and phacoemulsification, words I'd never heard of before, I mean literally a few weeks before that I was sitting on a lifeguard tower and going to school and the next thing I know I'm in a wet lab doing surgery. For some reason that just lit up for me and very soon thereafter I invented my first product which was a scalpel that was used for cataract surgery and it became very, very successful and ultimately it turned into a multi-million dollar company before I was 23-24 so it was really exciting. My brother accuses me of what he calls stupidicity and I think it's probably true because I kind of fell into it but what I realized is that to make it repeatable, to continually come up with ideas that are successful in the marketplace, is a little bit more of a challenge and it really required me to develop systems and methods and processes around inventing.

Jaime: Okay, I have a lot of questions to do with that. Number one - when you had the first job, were they grooming you to try to do some of this stuff? Because you just came up with an invention on your own.

Nicholas: I think that now most of what I do in my life is speak and consult with large corporations on how to get back to our entrepreneurial roots and how to become innovative again. What I began to realize early on, luckily, in my life, the reason that I've been pretty successful in that regard, is that it isn't as complicated as people think. Really, inventing is easy. The hard part, and it's a really hard part, is knowing what to event. If you're good active listener, if you have the ability to understand what the trajectory of usage of something is and how to deliver layered and dynamic value across the trajectory of that usage, you win at this. But when you think about the statistics it's really kind of sad because about 85% of new products that are launched by large corporation fail at market. Out of the 3000 patents that are issued every week, less than 1% of those products will ever reach successful commercialization. If you look at those ideas you will realize that they were actually pretty cool. The problem is that they weren't relevant to the user. Early on I had an organic sense to keep it simple and to understand what the real value proposition was and to really make sure that people cared about what I created. I have had many, many flops since then - many of them were multi-million dollar flops - and when you do that a few times, you really begin to learn the principles of innovation.

Jaime: Okay, so of course I have to ask how do you do this? If somebody has an idea, they're like "This is an amazing, wonderful idea," but it's so just in their own world, how do we check and make sure the user wants it too?

Nicholas: In my upcoming book I have a whole chapter on tough love for investors. I had a guy come up to me not too long ago and he presented his card to me in a ceremonious way - he gave it to me with both hands, kind of bowing, and I looked at the title of the card and, shockingly, the title was "Inventor". I'm like "Isn't that like "breather"?" There is no such thing as "inventor" - we're all born with an unlimited quotient of innovation and creativity. The problem is that most inventors, and this is the number one problem with inventors, most of them are actually "get rich quick" people. They want something for nothing. The problem that they have is that they work on the erroneous assumption,and this is where most innovations fail, I would say 90% of innovations fail, because the inventor assumed that there was value in an idea. Ideas, inventions,have zero value. Zero value. The real value I have learned the hard way and I've wasted millions of dollars and I've got some fun, yet sad, stories about how I've done this wrong. The real lesson here is that the invention itself has potential to be valuable but the value is created in your ability to take the risk and to drive it on home. Most inventors, when they come up with an idea, they assume it's valuable and then they want to pass it on to someone else. There is a constant law of the universe called the law of risk and reward - I've been trying to short circuit it my entire life with absolutely no success at all. What I've found is that, if you want to be a successful inventor, your value proposition has to be two things: one, be a tremendously good listener and observer, really understand at a core level what people care about, really understand that, make that part of your DNA, make that who you are, really feeling what people want and need, and then transmuting those observations into something that provides layered and dynamic value across the entire journey. If you can do that and you can do it routinely you can make lots and lots of money. This is not a get rich quick scenario, this is where the value is created, in the willingness to take the risk yourself, because nobody wants your idea. Most inventors think they're going to come up with something and go on Shark Tank or go somewhere and license it. Your idea is useless. It's only valuable when you've validated that people care about it and at that point you have something that's valuable.

Jaime: So how do we do that? Because, like you said, most people don't want to risk a lot. Now don't get me wrong - we have to. Like you said, you haven't been able to figure out the system of no risk whatsoever. But how do we do that and mitigate our risk?

Nicholas: That's the other thing - 80-90% of my day is working with Fortune 100 companies to help them get back to their innovative roots, because what happens with organizations is that they become successful, they're very customer-centric, and then they begin to move towards being risk-centric and they wake up every day trying to think of ways to mitigate and manage risk and those thought processes create an enterprise culture that destroy innovation - my job is to come back in and create collaboration and do a better job of reconnecting but I think that, at the end of the day, trust me, I've been there, you can't short circuit the system. You can mitigate your risk by doing one thing, the only way to mitigate your risk, and it's not about putting in less money, it's not about bringing in investors - the way you mitigate risk is to understand, ad nausea, what your customer cares about, because we tend to think, what happens with us, is that we become, as inventors, we become invention-centric, and invention centrism means "I love this new thing I invented. It has a left hand turn signal, it glows in the dark, it goes super-fast, it's really cool," and they think about the technology, the technology, the technology or the invention, the invention, and at the end of the day,these dopey, bright, shiny objects that we create as inventors do one thing only - they deliver value in the form of delicious, as my eight year old daughter would say, experiences to customers. You can do that if you can create delicious experiences from the pre-touch to the first touch to the core experience to the last touch to the end touch, you will create technologies that are absolutely amazing. Btu if you don't get the insights and you don't get that right, everything else you do will be wrong. The key is to know what your customer really, really, really wants and then you have to create an experience. Think of your technology as delivering a human experience, not a functional behavior.

Jaime: So take us through how you do that. It's great to say "Okay, we need to make sure that the users are in on this, that they're the ones that really want it," but how do you actually do that?

Nicholas: I'll give you an example which I believe we're going to talk about. I decided to develop a line of educational toys and what I have discovered is that there are many methods. Companies tend to use what are called CRM and VOC methods - which is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management, meaning rear facing data about how customers behave, and then VOC data which is kind of a squishy term really which basically means the best guess by interviewing and surveys and other cryptic means of trying to get insights. The truth of the matter is that some of the best ways to do that I have found more recently and is inexpensive is to use social listening. We use NetBase and we use a thing called netnography where we actually go out and we identify these key words and we find out what people hate about existing technologies and then we find out what people love and then from those passion points we begin to formulate a design input. For example, we did a netnographic analysis using social listening, listening to tweets and blogs and other social footprints, and we found that Lego, and I'm a big fan of Lego, but one of the problems is that it was invented in the 1930s and they had two channels to connect it - you could connect it on the top and you could connect it on the top - there was definitely a lot of frustration we found in a lot of sound bites, like "Why can't we make this more freeform?" or "Why can't we add connectivity?" This is very old technology so we took those insights from what the customers were saying in a naturally occurring dialogue of social media and we transmuted those into "Okay, we're going to increase functionality. We're going to allow radio connections, we're going to allow the things that people hated." So if you can find out what people hate and fix it and make it good across the journey and if you can find out what people love and layer that, meaning make it far more than what people expect, then you're on to something in terms of how you go through your design input. The problem is that most people just make an assumption that this is a good idea and they never verify that with existing market data, they're not verifying that with the success of other products. I go and look at other patents that have released to find out if they have had any success in that area. So the real effort you want to put in is into understanding what the customer really, really wants. The other issue is that good is bad and no longer can we be good. The Blackberry was a great technology - it did everything a smartphone was supposed to do, but it was at the baseline of customer expectation and because of that it created an opportunistic environment for a new technology and that new technology was the iPhone because the iPhone was layered, meaning that it was a lot better than what that Blackberry technology is. Obviously that company is circling the drain right now. It was a lot better and it was also dynamic because tomorrow your iPhone is worth a lot more to you than it is today because there's an engaged community around the technology that's creating apps that continue to update the value, making that technology more valuable. So to succeed with innovation you've got to get the best insights from everywhere you can. You have to make good assumptions from those insights - I know that isn't easy and this sounds a little bit ambiguous but, at the end of the day, there is a certain amount of voodoo to innovation. You've got to find out what people really care about through active observation, strategic listening and by using new techniques like netnography. Take what you've learned and turn it into layered, meaning better than what people expected, dynamic, meaning the value always gets better, and then you take a look at ways that you can make that experience exceptional across the entire customer journey. Most innovations are relevant and they're not delivering layered, dynamic value or they're not delivering value across the customer journey. If you don't do both, you fail. Apple is a good example of somebody who gets that. When I speak around the world I ask people "How many people have an Apple product?" and 80% of the crowd raises their hand and then I as the question "How many people in this room still have the box?" The same people raise their hand.

Jaime: Totally.

Nicholas: Why? What kind of weird, voodoo, black magic does Apple have to where we, otherwise intelligent people, would hold on to a piece of chipboard and occupy already space that we don't have in our office or our home? And the answer to that is that it's part of the engineering of the human experience. If you go to Best Buy, you first touch point is security, which tells you they don't trust you and, ultimately, they hate you, and because of that I don't trust them and I hate them too. When you get to the core experience of Best Buy, if you find somebody, in my experience, personally, the experience is not good. I was actually in there two weeks ago to buy a microphone, in fact the microphone I'm using right now, and I asked the guy a question, I said "Can you tell me about this microphone?" He picked up the box and started reading it to me. They now call Best Buy the showroom for Amazon, because I went on to Amazon and I had the benefits of crowd-sourcing the value of that mic. Yes, I could read the technical specifications from the people that made it, I could read the propaganda, but what I care about is what does the user community think about that? What do the people who have that microphone, that don't have any stakes in the game, actually think, to sell me that microphone? I read the reviews, the reviews were good, I purchased it online, I'm an Amazon Prime member, it came free, I actually saved $17 by not buying it from them. You go to Apple and they're instructed not to sell you stuff, they're instructed just to share their almost bizarre enthusiasm for a product but you get next to them and the next thing you know you're walking out of the Apple Store with a bag of super expensive Apple stuff and you're glad that you did.

Jaime: Totally. And then you get to open it up and it's like "This is amazing! Now I have a coolbox too!" It's so sad.

Nicholas: And you take that Tiffany-like box and you open it up almost ceremoniously and you look at it and you gasp, and you gasp not only because there is an amazing technology in there that's more powerful than most spaceships - what is incredible about that supercomputer that's the size of a wallet is that there is no user manual that has 70 pages of how to get out of user errors because there aren't any. Steve Jobs was an expert not at technology. If you look at his history, his expertise was in human connections. He was an expert, and in fact it's interesting that his hobby was calligraphy. He liked to take the uber complexity of the computer and create delicious icons that were completely and totally intuitive to perform complex computing functions. Every touch point of the Apple experience is layered and dynamic. It's super connected to the needs, problems and opportunities of their customer. That's innovation. That's what it's all about. Inventing is easy. Knowing what to invent and having the discipline of excellence to do stuff that's beyond what customers expect across every touch point with your brand or your product, that's what creates super stars.

Jaime: I love that. Number one, I didn't know about netnography at all, which is insane. Instead of going out and doing your due diligence and interviews and taking up time and getting a very small slice, you can take a huge amount of data and figure that out. The question that I was going to ask is there's a lot of competition for Lego, right' I have so much Lego in my house and none of them have really surpassed Lego. I don't know why; my kids are just obsessed with Lego over everything else. What did you guys do? I know you probably did the Apple experience, which you just talked about, but how did you do that when you were creating this new toy?

Nicholas: I think there are a lot of things that we did. Every once in a while I hang my head low in that I forget to follow my own advice. I have corporations that pay me millions of dollars a year for my advice yet, for some reason, I tend not to take it myself and it's usually painful. I finally decided, on the Hanz project, that I would follow my advice - I would behave as though I was my own advisor. I said "Nick, a guy with ADD who has a short attention span, let's practice what we preach." One of the things that I talk about in my books is that there's this discussion today about content marketing and those of us who are involved in social media, and I have a book coming out with Dr Malcolm DeLeo coming out this year called "Cacophony" and it's about what we the post-authoractive economy and how all of these social dynamics come into play so we've done a lot of fresh research into this area and what I've realized is forget a market, forget marketing, forget everything you ever thought you knew about marketing - it's an absolute waste. Marketing is out; developing authentic relationships with engaged, meaningful communities is in. That's what we have to do - we have to connect with communities and we have to, oftentimes, create those communities. Once I created the insight into what mattered the first thing I did was to create a community that had one purpose and one purpose only - I spent my first two months in developing Hanz, while I was waiting for my injection molding to be done, building the InnovationSuperstar.com website and that website provides free teacher training, the same training that we charge corporate clients $5000 per person, we have customized it for teachers and we have created lesson plans, we have developed a program to donate products to inner city schools through Teach For America. So what I first and foremost did was I realized that I had to earn my right to participate in this marketplace. I knew I couldn't out-Lego Lego but I did know that was an opportunity for me to leverage these new realities of a hyper connected economy to be able to create authentic contribution to a community that hopefully won't respond in kind. I mean it's not total gratuity, it's part of my overall strategy. What we've found is that people really respond to that - now we have the Innovation Superstar tour that's rolling out, we have people reaching out to us every day and it has created a movement around our products, but the first thing we really had to do was create the community. I think anybody who's doing a product, think in terms of, first and foremost what you can do for your customer community. The next thing that we learned from netnography and in fact Forbes did an article on me a few months ago on how we were the first company, to my knowledge, who has used netnography in the toy industry and we're maybe the first company that's really used netnography to drive design inputs because it works unbelievably well and it's reasonable. What we found was that, first of all, if you think about Lego - Lego is not a construction set anymore, it's really a three dimensional puzzle, and what really started this whole movement for me was I was walking down a hallway and I saw my, at the time, 13 year old son, laying on his stomach, reading a colored, step by step manual on how to put together a Lego set. I thought "I'm going to run that", I have a seat with Net Base that we pay for "I'm going to put that in and put some keywords together and see if everyone else sees that as kind of weird," and it turns out there was all kinds of passion, basically people saying "Why are we creating a nation of replicators? We're teaching kids to make three dimensional puzzles. When I was a kid we would take a box or a rectory set, maybe tear apart a couple of toasters, and make something. But today we're teaching kids to build three dimensional puzzles and we're calling them construction sets. So our model really is that construction is not included, and we know that we're not for every kid but it turns out that parents get that, kids get that - they want to be able to create their own stuff. In fact customization has become a big buzzword today. If you look at Nike - Nike did something very, very clever. They let the kids create their own sneakers and customization is very, very big across most consumer industries. Build it and make it yours. So we wanted to leverage that. We also wanted to leverage some other trends, and if you think about it, kids speak in packets of asynchronous dialogue - in other words, they send out packets via text. They don't have full time, duplex, rich dialogue like we have, so we wanted to address that in terms of building our community. The other thing is that kids have been gamified and they've been socialized so I wanted to look at all things related to how they develop hierarchical social credibility. There is a neighbor of mine, she bought a brand new Mercedes convertible, she posted on Facebook, and I happened to see her the other day and she looked like she was pretty upset so I said "How's it going?" I thought maybe her dog had died or something tragic had happened. She said "I don't know what's up but I only got 16 likes on Facebook for my Mercedes. Why don't people like me? Is it my hair?" Really? Are you serious? That's the gamification of socialization. We want social credibility and in fact in my book, "Cacophony", we talk about the social dynamics associated with how much we want those things. So we wanted to build the gamification piece and specialization so people can go onto the website, they can brag and post just like they like to do on Facebook, they can collaboration, they can co-create and they can compete. So what we did is we developed the anatomical reality of what that key customer, this new, emerging kid, wanted, and we created that kid. But we also discovered stuff that, surprisingly, large companies are not getting. We realized that there was a rapid movement towards things like Thingiverse and the Maker movement, where kids actually have their own 3D printer. In my office I have three MakerBot Replicator 2s and I just ordered the fifth generation Replicator 2 for my house. Today you can go on the MakerBot store, the digital store, and you can see a toy, you find a toy, you press a button - and this isn't the future, this is today - it wirelessly goes over to your 3D printer and it prints the toy. But, just to show off, it sends you a real-time video on your iPad or iPhone or other connected device so that you can watch your toy being built, with digitized music. Music is no longer a CD store. We've digested movies, we've digitized books, now we're digitizing stuff. So we identified that early on and we developed blended value. So if somebody buys our kit and they want to turn it into a robotics platform, they can download a robotics servo mount or our servo shaft adapter and they've got a robot - and we give that to them for free as part of the philosophy that we have around blended value. We were the first company, to my knowledge, that used blended value and it's very much part of we are doing, moving forward. Again, we found out where the pain was, because it used to be that we would look at market opportunities and we would look at finances, we would look at revenue - if you look at a business plan from just three years ago, market size - I don't care about market size, I care about engaged community. We used to talk about market universe and competitive analysis - I don't care about those things anymore, I care about how do we fit into and how can we architect a strategy that allows us to have an authentic and meaningful position within an engaged community? Because if you can do that, especially as a startup company without big budgets, you can be an innovation superstar. I think what we did very successfully and it was a lot of fun, now I don't even order breakfast before I go online and do a social listening to find out whether it's a good idea. It's a very powerful tool.

Jaime: I love this and I have so many questions. I was at South by Southwest the other day and our friend has a 3D printer and we doing all of that fun stuff but we put it in the window of this hotel and everybody kept coming up and looking at it and pointing. There were crowds of people watching the 3D printing of a vase being made. It's insane how many people, even at SXSW, didn't really get the technology and were like "Oh my gosh, what is this? This is amazing. Oh, it's one of those 3D printers." It seems so new but, like you said, it's the way of the future.

Nicholas: The other day I was hosing off my driveway. The nozzle broke so I went in and printed off a new nozzle. It's the best nozzle I've ever owed. It cost me 28 cents to build - I actually calculated it - compared to the $23 nozzle that broke in a matter of days. I will never buy a nozzle again; I will never buy lots of things again. My eight year old daughter had a bunch of her girlfriends over, this bunch of second graders, and they wanted to come over to make Christmas cookies, so they came over, but Christmas cookies are so 2009, so before we do that, let's make the cookie cutter. So without my help they go on Thingiverse, they find a customizable cookie cutter platform and they draw their picture - literally without my help at all - they draw their pictures of Christmas trees and snowmen and stuff like that and then they download the STL file and then the Makerware turns that into a slice file. So a lot of this stuff that used to be complicated is duck soup now. They put it into the printer and they're all sat there, watching it print. It's just beautiful. Then they made necklaces and they all left wearing their cool little cookie cutters. That's where we're at today - eight year old kids can easily create and customize their own things - we're onto something. My last punctuation point on 3D - it's coming at people a lot faster. Next year we'll have $300 and $400 self-leveling build platforms, the Microsoft store is going to start selling the MakerBot, you're going to start seeing it at Office Depot and at most retailers. Consumerized 3D printers - it is here and it is going to be the most disruptive thing to happen, I believe, maybe since iTunes. I think it's on that level. And you have these open communities like Thingiverse where there are tens of thousands of things that you can download for free.

Jaime: Free. My husband made a ring that he created in a 3D printer. He printed it in silver but it's only $30 of silver, which is insane. If he'd printed it in plastic it would have been $1 or something. It's insane. I'm obsessed with this sort of stuff anyway, just in general, 3D printers and the future of that so before I get off on a tangent talking about that, because I care about this other stuff too, how do you create a community? I have a community and people come up to me all the time and ask "How do you create an engaged community?" How did you guys do it? Especially if you didn't have a huge budget. What was the most important thing for you to do?

Nicholas: There are some old fashioned things that I would say that are kind of obvious. The first thing is that you have to create something that people care about. That may seem like "Duh!" but most of the people that try to create communities have obvious and, again, to quote my daughter?s wisdom, icky intentions and it really shows in the community they create - the banners and the cross marketing. The only thing that we ever show are people who are kind enough to support us, and these are mainly people that we partner with in the educational space, so like Teach for America, they're not for profit, so we like promoting other not for profits to help them. so the first thing you have to do is you have to create something that people care people. Seth Godin is famous for saying "If you want a popular book, write a book that is good," and most people write bad books and can't understand why their book isn't selling well. Communities are very much the same - the first thing is to start with a really, really good product and, again, that product has to deliver. A community is in the business of doing one thing - delivering gratuitous value. Every decision that you make should be against the instruction of test - does it deliver gratuitous value? If it doesn't, then you suck, and you don't want to suck if you're going to build a community. The second thing you have to do is you have to connect in a very authentic way with other people that care about what you created and if we don't do that we don't get the proliferation of the work that we did in developing a good, authentic community. I can go down to 30 different things. In our case, we followed my innovation philosophy - deliver amazing experiences across the entire journey, make it layered. In our teacher program there are people that are charging schools $10-15,000 for what we are giving them absolutely free, we never cross market them, we never use a database for anything other than to give them more free stuff. I guess what I'm saying is there is not a catch. Most communities have a catch, so it's got to be genuinely authentic, it has to be layered, meaning that it's far more than what anybody else is offering, it has to be dynamic, meaning that every day there is some other, free gratuitous value that that community gets. And if you do that, it's incurable how fast a community will grow on its own.

Jaime: Okay, that's what I like. Because before you were like "marketing's kind of dead, it's all about the engaged community," and I was thinking do you market to get the engaged community or is it word of mouth? Did you do anything to start that fire?

Nicholas: In the case of Hanz, I look at this as two buckets - I created the community bucket, which is why we're important when compared to the other hunks of plastic in the toy business, so I spend a lot of time focusing on that gratuitous community of delivering fun, cool value, but obviously we have to develop channels. I don't call marketing "marketing" I call it channel development and that's stuff like I have to set up a national network of independent rep agencies, I have to go to national trade shows, I have to actually put advertisement placements in targeted journals, so marketing, from that perspective, in my view, isn't the same. I see that as just our ability to develop channels. We don't do the old fashioned approach towards marketing. The good news is that if you've done the work and principally focused on community development then when you go to the trade show and present your product out there, when people look you up online, they see tremendous value, they see us doing free programs for children's hospitals, they see the Hanz brand associated with delivering free programs for museums, our Innovation Superstar tour, our goal to train and certify over 1,000 teachers in 2014. That's what they think of when they think about us because, as I said, you can't out-Lego Lego. Lego is in the business of selling terminal toys - in other words, toys that you buy, you put them together where there's a termination point, because they're a puzzle, and their philosophy there, I'm sure, is todrive consumption. Ours is the opposite - we want that product that we sell to last that family for multiple generations. We want that to be under some kid's bed and he hands it down to his kid brother, his kid sister. So that's the difference. We do marketing that we call channel development that is the mechanics of distribution. Our principle focus is in developing that relationship with our customers.

Jaime: That's really interesting. How has that been doing? Because you said you only launched it a year or so ago. That's an insane amount of work that you've done in the past year.

Nicholas: Totally. What was weird about it was that we didn't actually launch the product until June or July last year. So we're not even a year into this. What's interesting is that it is the most award winning construction set, to my knowledge, in the toy industry. It's won seven major awards - best product, best toy, top ten by Doctor Toy, top one hundred by Doctor Toy, the Tillywig Brainchild award, Top Fun award, and we just recently, a few weeks ago, won the Sterling Award for the new Genius Box, so it's been very, very gratifying to see that these theorems that I've reasonably successfully applied in my life historically continue to work and I've built on those as I've started to learn more about how these social connections work.

Jaime: I love that. That's impressive, most fun toy. I was telling you right before this interview that I showed it to my son on my phone and he was like "Oh my gosh, that looks amazing!" and it was a picture. He's seven, so he gets excited over small things, but I was really impressed with how excited he was over this concept. He does exactly what you said with Lego. I want to go through the little manual and be like "No, you want to build this," and he says "No, I want to build something crazy!" It's interesting that they don't have a lot of stuff like that - like you said, it doesn't do what you want it to do. I want to teach him, being as young as he is, to use this innovation that he already has instead of, like you said, stifling it, because I think that next generation, he's going to be growing up with 3D printers - this is going to be normal to him. It's going to be insane.

Nicholas: We do a program, a junk food hackathon, and that's where we put these kids in groups of four to six and they make marshmallow launchers, and you can see that on the Hanz Toys website, in the gallery. It is the most amazing thing to watch. I've done this many, many, many times and every time we do one of our junk food hackathons it's incredible to see the stuff these guys come up with. I've never seen two marshmallow launchers the same. It just goes to show. You look at the kids, and it's worth watching that video, because you can see that they're in this Zen-like state, and not the Zen-like state where they're learning to be replicators - in fact I would argue that the problem with our educational system is that we grade people based on compliance so that they can get into good colleges where they are great at compliance so they can work for some corporation where they're great at compliance. I think what's changing is that recently you're seeing Google starting to hire kids without college degrees. The new movement is "I don't care about where you went to college; I want to know what you created." That's what we need to create with the new generation of innovators. We need to teach these concepts of innovative ideation, we need to teach gamification and the principles of socialization. One of the things that's really exciting in my consulting practice is that we bring in enterprise social networks, so sort of like Facebook pages, and we create innovation challenges and the people that work in these companies that are smart, engaged people that have become organizational robots, all of a sudden they're participating in a game and the game has been socialized and now they can develop that same level of credibility and competition and game dynamic that they enjoy in their own life, with Facebook and Instagram and all the other things that they're gamified with. So it's a very exciting time, it really, really is.

Jaime: I love talking about this. I could talk about it for way too long but we have to start wrapping up, so I'm going to ask you the last question that I always ask, it's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Nicholas: I would have to say stop. One of the problems is that we really tend not to do that. We become so involved in the minutiae of the operation of our business that we really don't stop. We need to realize that the work that we do is a serious of sprints and not a marathon and we need the time to step back. I have a board that is a scuba board to write underwater and at four o'clock every Saturday morning I take my scuba board and I go into my Jacuzzi and I come up with my best ideas. Innovation is the opportunity to be away from all of the noise, no matter what it is you're doing in your life. If you want to succeed, what I have found is that those great moments where I came up with the ideas that were multi-million dollar ideas for me came to me by stopping. I gave myself the opportunity to connect to that special place where I find those innovations that I then act upon. I can't think of an innovation that I have made a lot of money on that I didn't come up using a stop method where I gave myself the opportunity to create.

Jaime: That is so the opposite of what everybody assumes is how we become successful. You just keep chugging along, that's exactly what you do. But taking the time, which probably no one would put on their calendar if you hadn't said that just now, so thank you for that, is really where those pieces come from. I'm so excited. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Nicolas. Why don't you tell us a little bit about when your books are coming out and where we can find more about you online?

Nicholas: Sure, so "The Innovation Playbook", which is one of my favorite books, it's green. I also have "The Digital Innovation Playbook", but "The Innovation Playbook" is on Amazon. That's been out for a few years but the principles in there are quite good. The "Invent Stuff" book will be available through Hanz Toys because we sell it to a lot of educational and toy retailers. You can actually reserve it now online and it will be in Barnes and Noble and on Amazon and all top book sellers probably in July. I don't have a delivery date yet for "Cacophony", we're in negotiations with our publisher right now and that will probably be out at the end of the summer or early fall. It's taken me three years, both myself and Dr DeLeo, who is the Chief Evangelist at NetBase, to put this work together and we're really excited about it. So probably the best thing to do is just touch base periodically. My website for my speaking business, which is where I spend a lot of my time, is nickwebb.com and my consulting business is lasseninnovation.com and that's where we help out companies and do a better job of finding and launching successful technologies.

Jaime: We're definitely going to link up to all of that and I'm excited about that book coming out at the end of the summer because it sounds like a lot of data - I'm a big data freak so I can't wait to get that. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Nick. I really, really appreciate it.

Nicholas: My pleasure. Thank you.

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Tags: Innovation, innovative marketing, millionaire interview, Nick Webb, technology

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Millionaire Interviews

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