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The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

by Phil McKinney · 728 episodes

BusinessEntrepreneurshipEducation

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Forty years of billion-dollar innovation decisions. The real stories, the hard calls, and the patterns that repeat across every organization that's ever tried to build something new. Phil McKinney shares what those decisions actually look like. Phil was HP's CTO when Fast Company named it one of the most innovative companies in the world three years running. He co-founded a company and took it public. Now he runs CableLabs, the R&D engine behind the global broadband industry. This isn't theory. It's what happened. And what you can see coming if you know what to look for. Running since 2005, originally...

Latest episodes

  1. Why I Cried on Stage as a CEO

    I cried on stage this week, in front of thousands of people. In front of the entire industry. The press in the room wrote about it. I couldn't believe it. Some people will tell you…

    13 min
  2. How To Build Innovation Teams (My Playbook From HP and CableLabs)

    Why do people believe you can build an innovation team by hiring a few smart people and giving them a creative space? In my experience, teams built on this false premise die within…

    38 min
  3. How to Improve Analytical Thinking Skills

    Any team can fill a whiteboard with ideas in an hour. What most teams skip is the analytical thinking that tells them if they're solving the right problem. An idea pointed at the w…

    27 min
  4. How to Recognize Failure Patterns: How HP Quit and Apple Won

    Recognizing failure patterns is the closest thing an innovator has to seeing the future. If you can recognize the patterns, you can change the future, because most failures are not…

    17 min
  5. How to Improve Your Abductive Reasoning Skills

    Sherlock Holmes never once used deduction. Open any of the stories and watch what he actually does. He notices a tan line on a wrist or mud dried on a boot and leaps to the best-fi…

    18 min
  6. The Customers Who Walked Away

    Think about the last thing you almost bought and did not. You picked it up, you looked at it, you put it back down. You had a reason for choosing one item over its competitors, and…

    24 min
  7. When One Word Steers Your Answer

    In 1974, a psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus showed a group of people a film of a car accident. Afterward, she asked half the group one question: how fast were the cars going whe…

    14 min
  8. What Half of 13 Reveals About Your Thinking

    What is half of thirteen? Stop. Answer it. Don't think ahead, just answer. You said 6.5. I know you did, because everyone does. Nobody chose to answer that question. Your brain sol…

    5 min
  9. How to Tell a Good Decision From a Lucky One

    You trust your gut because it's been right before. But "right" is exactly the thing you've been measuring wrong. A hitter never has this problem. His batting average is honest. It…

    13 min
  10. How to Improve Weak Signal Judgment

    Everyone collects weak signals now. Most of what they collect predicts nothing. A weak signal isn't a thing you spot, it's a prediction you make, and the edge goes to whoever bets…

    13 min
  11. How to Improve Your Second-Order Thinking Skills

    In 2000, Toys R Us paid Amazon $50 million a year to sell their toys online. It looked like a great deal. The company that defined toy retail for two generations was solving the in…

    15 min
  12. How to Improve Your Inversion Thinking Skills

    Every playbook, every case study, every innovation workshop is built on the same question: how do you succeed? You map the path forward. You model the upside. Nobody teaches you to…

    16 min
  13. How to Overcome Expert Bias

    Last June, I was on a business trip in Silicon Valley when a second cardiac device failed. Same problem with a second surgical team six months apart. The full story is on philmckin…

    15 min
  14. How to Improve Your First Principles Thinking

    Most product decisions get made by analogy. Someone says, "This is how we've always done it," or "This is what the market expects," or "This is what the competition is doing." The…

    17 min
  15. How to Overcome Confirmation Bias

    Confirmation bias is shaping your decisions right now. Not occasionally. Every day. And the unsettling part is that the smarter you are, the harder it is to see it happening. By th…

    15 min
  16. Why Most Organizations Aren't Funding Innovation

    Twelve official definitions for R&D. Zero agreement. The US government publishes at least a dozen distinct official definitions across agencies, accounting standards, tax authoriti…

    21 min
  17. R&D Spending Is the Most Misleading Number in Business

    Every public company's R&D number is a lie hiding in plain sight. Not because anyone falsified it. Because the number was never built to tell the truth. It was built to satisfy an…

    17 min
  18. The Innovation Metric Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard Used

    Every public company in the technology industry measures innovation spending the same way. R&D as a percentage of revenue. Why? Because Wall Street tracks it. Boards benchmark it.…

    20 min
  19. The R&D Metric Mark Hurd and HP Got Wrong

    Twenty years. Nearly one thousand episodes on this show. And starting today, we're going to try something a little different this season. Season 21 is about the decisions that actu…

    14 min
  20. How To Build a Decision System That Protects Your Thinking

    The best decision-makers aren't better at deciding. They're better at controlling when, where, and how they decide. It took me twenty years to figure that out. Most people spend th…

    25 min ↗
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