Rethinking Classical Innovation: Fulll Conversation with Jason Frasca and Iain Kerr of Emergent Futures Lab

[00:00:09] Hi everyone, and welcome to the Siemens Xcelerator Community Thought Leadership Series. I'm Bill Johnston of Structure3C, 
 [00:00:17] David Erhard: And I am David Erhard, host of the Siemens Xcelerator Community. 
 [00:00:20] Bill Johnston: And today we're delighted to speak to Jason Frasca and Iain Kerr co-authors of what I consider the groundbreaking book "Innovating Emergent Futures" and co-founders of Emergent Futures Lab. 
 [00:00:32] Jason Frasca: I'm doing great. Bill. 
 [00:00:33] Iain Kerr: Thanks so much for having us. Really excited to be here. 
 [00:00:38] David Erhard: It's great to have you here. I'd love to dive right in. In your book, in innovating Emerging Futures you argue that traditional models of innovation are insufficient. Could you explain what you mean by that and why you believe it's critical to rethink that? 
 [00:00:52] Iain Kerr: Yeah, the, I mean, this is really the core of the book, right? And where we started, and I think, you know, [00:01:00] classically we think and define creativity and innovation as all about ideas, coming up with new ideas and then putting them into action. And it's a kind of ideate plan, make model. Now the really big problem right off the bat is that if something's really new, if something's really innovative and novel, we don't have the words, we don't have the images, we, it doesn't exist. 
 [00:01:27] Iain Kerr: We have to realize that ideas emerge. Ideas come late in the process. Um, we might know what we don't want to do at the beginning, but if, if we're expected to know what we want to do in this kind of eureka manner. 
 [00:01:41] Iain Kerr: We have to actually experiment, co-evolve, make things happen, and we learn as we do. So I think this is the really big mistake, and this goes all the way back to the. Greek tradition and the early Greco ChristIain tradition where, God is outside of [00:02:00] the world and he ideate things and we've reproduced that model. 
 [00:02:03] Iain Kerr: And no matter what you add at the beginning, say design thinking with the empathy part, you still just jump into ideate. And when you do that, you can improve things really well, but you can't really come up with something genuinely new. 
 [00:02:19] 
 [00:02:19] Bill Johnston: so I am curious if we could unpack, the process and the, the methodology that, that you all have come to you over the years. 
 [00:02:29] Bill Johnston: In the book you describe it as this process of engaged, disclose, deviate, and co-emerge. Right? And it's not necessarily a linear process. Can you talk us through that, at a very high level, and then I'd love to dig into, to each step? 
 [00:02:44] Iain Kerr: Yeah, I, I could do the high level really fast. And so I think the first thing to say in that is like, if, if ideate is usually thought of as the first step, we want to completely shift to something. Let's just say like [00:03:00] engage where you're genuinely embedded in something. You understand it in an embodied, experimental way. 
 [00:03:07] Iain Kerr: You're not just sitting in a boardroom. You are bringing people together to really work on things. And now the key magic to this then happens in this second task of disclosing where you're you. You're not trying to figure out what should we do? What's the big idea? You're in fact trying to do the opposite. 
 [00:03:29] Iain Kerr: What should we not do? What should we block? What should we kind of put a wall around so we don't go backwards, that will push us forward? So you're disclosing at a deep level what's the underlying logic of something, um, what are the normal habits, practices, meanings, and then you're strategically deciding which of those to block. 
 [00:03:51] Iain Kerr: And then the other. part of disclose is you're trying to get a sense of what, um, unintended possibilities could we follow. [00:04:00] You know, and, and by that there's this really important concept, um, that comes from evolutionary theory of exaptation. And that's looking at how, for example, dinosaurs became birds, not, um, through getting better. 
 [00:04:16] Iain Kerr: Um, but in fact by repurposing things for unintended reasons. So feathers evolved to keep birds warm. Dinosaurs warm. Warm. They became sexy, they got bigger. But they got repurposed. I'm like simplifying the story radically, but they got repurposed to, you know, parachute then glide and then fall. But you're trying to do something similar. 
 [00:04:40] Iain Kerr: If we know what we can't do, we start following things and repurposing and co-opting them into new directions. And that's then becomes the deviate stage task where now we're trying to deviate, which is leave something. And develop a new framework approach, [00:05:00] um, logic to something. So before even thinking of an idea, a solution, a practice, you have to come up with a new way of thinking about it, framing it, engaging it. 
 [00:05:11] Iain Kerr: Um, you could think in terms of paradigms. We like to think in terms of worlds and world making. And then you start to genuinely coem emerge with that and that you bend it towards. Um, where you needed to have an impact. Um, so the co-emerge is kind of happening the whole time, but you're kind of pushing it through this. 
 [00:05:33] Iain Kerr: Engage, disclose, deviate, co-emerge as a model. You can do this really fast, really simple. Simply with anything. We, I think we do this a the time where you block something like, we're not gonna do this. Something else comes about. We find the unintended in all sorts of ways. Um, radar was that way. 
 [00:05:55] Jason Frasca: Other ways. Velcro, right? Was unintended, um, outcome of the, uh, [00:06:00] little seeds sticking to your socks. Right? And, you know, they're not ideation based. Um, you know, uh, Viagra, um, no one had the idea of Viagra serving the current purpose, right? It was a blood pressure medication that ended up, you know, what else can it do? 
 [00:06:13] Jason Frasca: What else can I do? Um, you know, uh. Picking up kind of where Iain left off and bill your question that it's a non-linear process innovation design approach and with engage, disclose, deviate, and emerge and they're all kind of happening all the time in varying degrees and looping back and forward upon each other. 
 [00:06:29] Jason Frasca: And so, there's different places that one can interject and, and pick up and use the model. Uh, based on, uh, their, their desires, their goals, what they're trying to do. If you've already have something that exists, right, you're trying to disrupt and move further, right? You're going to in, inject into the, into the process a little bit different space than if you're starting from scratch and, and you have, , no starting point whatsoever. 
 [00:06:54] Jason Frasca: Of course, like Iain said, you're going to, you have to start somewhere. We say begin anywhere. [00:07:00] Um, an idea and an idea is the place to start. But, um, I, letting go of your ego and what you, you suspect the end point would be, and allowing yourself to follow this, emergent process, non-linear process to where it can take you. 
 [00:07:16] Jason Frasca: We've all had the experience, um, of, uh. Someone, uh, having a conversation with somebody who is suggesting to you in a space that you know really well, really deeply how they can disrupt the space. But you can tell very quickly, um, that they've never actually done anything in the space whatsoever. 
 [00:07:34] Jason Frasca: And we, you know, um, we see this in the 3D printing lab, uh, that we manage at the university all the time. Somebody will walk in, professor, a student, it doesn't matter, and they'll say, oh, I've got a great idea on what you can do with your 3D printers. Right. And what they can do and what they're capable of. 
 [00:07:48] Jason Frasca: Right. And within like 18 seconds, it's clear to you right, that they've never actually done anything with a 3D printer before. They've never actually touched one. I. Manage their, , from a hardware [00:08:00] perspective, software perspective, designed anything, printed, anything. And, , it's this disengaged approach that so many, um, take to a creative process where they're not engaged, they're not disclosing, they have no true understanding. 
 [00:08:13] Jason Frasca: They've not become a part of it. And that's really, um, a really big part of, um, I think, you know, where we wanna begin, um, in, in all facets, regardless of where you're interjecting into, into the model, um, to be a part of it, right? To truly understand it. And the more that you understand, the more that you know it's histories, it's cultures, it's logics, then you have a better, um, image larger, uh, spectrum than to block and follow from. 
 [00:08:41] Jason Frasca: Obviously there's an endless list. It could be an endless game, right? Where we never actually get to understand the entire history of anything, right? But the more time we spend understanding what's happening, why it's happening, gives us the ability then to refuse what's always been happening to get to somewhere novel and unique. 
 [00:08:59] Bill Johnston: [00:09:00] The, the embodied component of engage really appealed to me when I first read the book., And I think I mentioned to you all in a previous conversation, , I was at an organization several years ago where there was actually an innovation room, right? It had fake grass and whiteboard walls and beach chairs and, that was the place innovation happened, right? 
 [00:09:22] Bill Johnston: Like, if you wanted to innovate, that was where you went. And it was just always sort of threw me for a loop when I walked by it. Just the idea that. , There, there's some connection to the world you're trying to change, right? And it's not abstract, it's not purely mediated via digital, although that's clearly, you know, our world and an important component today. 
 [00:09:45] Bill Johnston: And so I really just that, that idea of actually participating, with all your faculties as a human is really appealing. . I do want to circle back to a term that you used earlier, which is "world making", and I [00:10:00] wonder if you could unpack and contextualize that for us, please. 
 [00:10:03] Iain Kerr: I think we choose world making for a number of really important reasons, but the simplest is, uh, it's. Uh, to point to what you were saying, um, Bill, about being embodied, being engaged. You, you could say we have to change our worldview. You could say we have to change how we think about things. 
 [00:10:23] Iain Kerr: But all of that's disembodied. It's about ideas still. And, and, um, the second part of world making is the making part. You know, we're not, um, creatures that live in our heads. We do things and as we do things, we change our environment and our environment changes us. And there's this kinda looping that's then shaping and giving rise to ideas. 
 [00:10:47] Iain Kerr: So it's really important to ground ourselves in that reality. Very different one from being in our heads and commanding things to just happen or imagining. It happens in this Godlike model. [00:11:00] Um, but we're in the middle of this ongoing world making this, and we're trying to, at a high level shift the type of world we have. 
 [00:11:11] Iain Kerr: And as we shift the world, we have new possibilities emerge. And so it, I think the term really helps ground us in, um, the direction, the heading of a practice that's more embodied, more engaged. More experimental. And it's not like that room with the whiteboards and the grass. It's like, let's get out there, let's poke around, let's probe, let's stumble on things. 
 [00:11:37] Iain Kerr: Let's have hunches, let's experiment with people. Let's block, let's push. It's in the world. We're co making things. We're not just sitting back. Let's have, you know, another brainstorming session. Um, whatever it might be, you know? And we're gonna have to make that. You know, experimental spaces, um, and they probably won't ever look [00:12:00] like whiteboards and grass 
 [00:12:02] Jason Frasca: We should write a book on all of the interesting ways organizations have tried to facilitate innovation. Whiteboards, grass, beach chairs. We've heard skateboards and palm trees and HawaiIain shirts like, you know, innovation, theater idea and management software. 
 [00:12:16] Jason Frasca: We could have a lot of fun with that, I 
 [00:12:18] Bill Johnston: Y. Yeah, it's at least a really good blog post. Right. 
 [00:12:20] Jason Frasca: Yeah. 
 [00:12:21] David Erhard: You described the. The tasks engaged, those deviate and Co-emerge, and that sounded super, super interesting to me. I would love to hear more about how you actually walked a client, through that process or help like a company, for instance, like going through that entire process. 
 [00:12:42] Jason Frasca: Yeah, there was a, um, a, a nice project that we worked on, uh, with, um, New Jersey Transit, who is one of the largest, um, uh, transit systems, uh, in the country. Um, their, um, their challenge was, uh. Stove pipes, silos [00:13:00] within the organization. Um, and a, uh, ethos of we've always done things this way, right? They, the, um, people don't often leave organizations like that. 
 [00:13:09] Jason Frasca: The long-term commitment in terms of pensions and things of this nature. And it left a real, um, uh. Challenge for the organization to disruptively, evolve and innovate in new ways. So they had identified, you know, a number of, um, key people within their networks and nodes within the organization that, you know, people go to, to kind of disrupt and change. 
 [00:13:33] Jason Frasca: Um, and where, you know, the, the, um, it may not be the person on the top of the org chart. But it's that person that we all go to in an organization that has that influence, that knows the right people to connect you to other points in the network of the organization. They have that influence to kind of put in a good word, right? 
 [00:13:50] Jason Frasca: Or kind of guide and push things in the right direction. So there was about 20 people, um, that they had identified. They committed, um, every [00:14:00] Friday for eight straight Fridays, which, um, uh, which was really, really, , quite a significant amount of time, I think, you know, uh, recognizing that this was not something that was gonna be done in a workshop, uh, two and a half hours, you know, this is gonna take a long-term commitment, um, giving them the full day offsite. 
 [00:14:16] Jason Frasca: Um, for each Friday, empowered those individuals right to be engaged fully in the process, right? Uh, so that they were fully present, they were not being pulled. Um, all of their managers understood the project that they were working on. So there was an allocation of time. This is always a big issue. Um, how can we as organizations disrupt things if we're never given the space and time to do that? 
 [00:14:40] Jason Frasca: Right? If you can't keep piling on and on, nothing ever really happens, right? So if you wanna add something, something else has to be taken away. So I think they did a really great job of that at the time. And, um. And what they did, these individuals were from all different parts of their organization. So they had, it was, um, you know, it was [00:15:00] collaborative. 
 [00:15:00] Jason Frasca: It was breaking silos, knocking down the stove pipes, you know, it was, uh, spread across the organization. None of them knew each other, uh, going in, which was kind of interesting. And then they all sort of like picked up and wrestled with, um, a particular challenge, um, that they agreed to as a team. So Go ahead, Iain. 
 [00:15:18] Jason Frasca: You wanna jump in? 
 [00:15:19] Iain Kerr: I, I would just say one, like, Yeah, go for it. Textual thing that we, we do a lot in these is that we often call them pirate projects. So at a high level, we, we don't want to, um, we don't imagine in these eight to 10 sessions. They're gonna come up with crazy revolutionary, um, you know, new innovations. Um, but that's a useful frame, you know, to say like, let's work on things and we'll come up with something. 
 [00:15:51] Iain Kerr: But what we want to do is Jason's alluding to, is like, um, seep into all of the, um, [00:16:00] pathways, the informal pathways of the organization. With a different set of methods and practices and logics that then follow these networks of trust. So they're doing, um, the project. Um, but really we want this long, this other, um, emergent change to happen. 
 [00:16:21] Bill Johnston: What I love about this, and I wasn't expecting it, is we just touched on the role of networks generally and , Maven Super connectors, whatever methodology you wanna bring into play, but the role of networks in innovation process and in change, which is just so fascinating that it came up that you essentially pulled these super connectors from the organization who maybe didn't know each other. 
 [00:16:47] Bill Johnston: So then you created this meta network of the hyperconnected to facilitate change within the organization. I'm curious. Obviously it's client work and it's confidential, but, could you like give [00:17:00] maybe an example of how some are part of the group working together came up with a novel change, 
 [00:17:06] Iain Kerr: uh, if you're allowed to talk about that, I think there's one Jason that. Would be really good. Right. And, um, this one, it, it, it was in a way, you know, infrastructure's really hard because it, it costs enormous amount of money and once you put it in place, you're stuck with it. It's got hugely long lead times. 
 [00:17:28] Iain Kerr: Um, so one of their challenges was how do we make, um, you know, a car, the train car of the future? Um, because we're gonna be stuck with it for 20 years and it's gonna take us, you know, five years of development to get to it or longer. Um, so how do we approach this? And, um, so they, they had already gone through a whole ideation process. 
 [00:17:56] Iain Kerr: They'd gone through, you know, a design thinking, sort of customer [00:18:00] discovery process. Um, and they had, they had come across this. The, the, their trains were too crowded. Um, and so they wanted to figure out how to fit more people in a train. But it turned out, so then we were, we, we said, we're gonna put that all aside and we're going to do, you know, this, engage, disclose, deviate, um, coem emerge process and. 
 [00:18:27] Iain Kerr: We, we did a number of, um, much more engaged things where like ride the trains, get super users do things. It turns out that the reason, um, the New Jersey Transit trains were crowded isn't because there's too many people on board, but because when you get to Manhattan, you want to be in the train car where the door is right beside the stairway. 
 [00:18:53] Iain Kerr: Because if you don't, you will be waiting 20 minutes to get out of Penn Station. [00:19:00] Um, and so you're, you're changing, you know, you have a, a 10 or 15 minute commute for most people to get in Manhattan, and then you're stuck in Penn Station for 15 minutes. So it's like, it's all about that. 
 [00:19:12] Iain Kerr: So you didn't actually need, um, to change all the cars, for example, to do this, but you needed these key cars. 
 [00:19:21] Iain Kerr: Um, where people are actually not on the train for very long to, to hold people in a totally different way. So, um, just moving to this much more engaged, and we just said we're gonna block these assumptions and criteria. We're going to start to follow the unintended things that are happening. There's this unintended environmental thing here with how people are using the train, where they're getting off. 
 [00:19:48] Iain Kerr: How do we make these things synergistic, gums and criteria we're going to start to follow. It led to the, the, these key people [00:20:00] realizing that what they had to take back, I. Into their, um, organizational areas was a much more experimental approach that also did a lot better job of understanding the dynamics of the ecosystem and the, where they thought the boundary was. Like they just looked at the car full of people, but they didn't see it as the system that went all the way to the, you know, where somebody worked and where they started home and what have you, and that they had to change these frameworks. 
 [00:20:32] Iain Kerr: So that was a really helpful one. 
 [00:20:34] David Erhard: No, I just meant that could have been a Siemens use case. I mean, talking infrastructure, talking trains, uh, building trains. Uh, we, we do that quite a lot. So I gotta, I gotta share that thought with some of my colleagues to, to listen in. That's, that's super interesting. 
 [00:20:46] David Erhard: I. 
 [00:20:47] Bill Johnston: And I think we could all envision like, , blueprints of trains and, you know, 3D models of train cars and , hey, we should add like a third layer and TVs and. And it would miss [00:21:00] the whole point. Right. So that's, that's such a great and, and thoughtful example. Thank you. , So as we shift into the back end of the conversation, I would really love to hear from you both, given your experience, given who you've worked with and, what you see as the state of practice in the world for the members of our community who are are working in industrial settings generally , what advice would you offer those folks to be more innovative or to affect change in their organizations? What guidance would, would you give them? 
 [00:21:37] Jason Frasca: You know, I, I think an easy place to start might be, um, a little story we like to tell, um, when we start, uh, various workshops and, um, with clients. Students, uh, it doesn't matter. We, we, we tend to start with this little story about, um, I. Uh, a crow. Uh, we like to show a picture of an intersection with, um, a traffic light, four-way traffic light, [00:22:00] um, and a, a nutcracker beside it, uh, one that you would find on your ho holiday table that would crack nuts, like, uh, walnuts, that sort of thing. 
 [00:22:07] Jason Frasca: And we ask, imagine you're standing in that intersection and holding the Nutcracker in your hand, looking at both together. Are they exactly the same thing? And once we get past, well, they're both images and they're both bits and colors right past that stuff. They're both material and get at the heart of it. 
 [00:22:22] Jason Frasca: Are they exactly the same thing? Um, invariably most we'll say, um, no, of course they're not exactly the same thing. They're one's a nutcracker, one's an intersection, and we proceed to tell them a story, um, about, um, crows. Who like to hang out on the, uh, power lines of intersections waiting for red lights. 
 [00:22:42] Jason Frasca: And when the light turns red, they'll fly down and they'll drop a nut in front of the stopped cars, tires, and then fly back up to the wires and wait. The light turns green, then cars run over the nuts and will crack the nuts, and then the light turns, red stops the cars and they come back down and they pick up the crack nuts and they eat the nuts. 
 [00:22:58] Jason Frasca: And so therefore. [00:23:00] Yes, they are both exactly the same thing. We have a Nutcracker and a Nutcracker, right? The crow does not see an intersection as an intersection. It asks, what can this intersection do and what el right? It's like, what is it capable of? And for the, and for the crow, it's capable of cracking nuts. 
 [00:23:17] Jason Frasca: And so to answer your question, bill, on this very long-winded little story is, um. To ask what things can do, not what they are. So, you know, when we, when we say what something is, right, like we're, we're quite limited. It's quite conservative. But if we ask what it can do and what else it can do and what else it can do and what else it can do, I keep pushing the boundaries of potential possibility. 
 [00:23:39] Jason Frasca: You know, at some point we leave our head, we're gonna have to interact and engage physically with the thing, whether it be a train car, right, or, or an intersection or whatever it might be that we're 3D printer, whatever you're wrestling with, right? You're gonna to engage. Be embodied, experiment, try, do, take action, and we're getting out of our head, which I think is where the conversation really started right back at that, [00:24:00] you know, whole ideation model and, and approach. 
 [00:24:03] Jason Frasca: And so, um, that would be, uh, my quick little, um, 
 [00:24:07] Iain Kerr: suggestion. Iain, you have one. 
 [00:24:09] Iain Kerr: Uh, I have a, a couple to add. That's a great one. The, the first thing I'd say is to, you know, to trust, um, your people and your ecosystem and so to, to do a number of workshops in it That got people to, uh, in an embodied way understand a much more experimental emergent. Logic and then see how they would change the organization to make it more, um, of an ecosystem that spontaneously generated innovation. 
 [00:24:42] Iain Kerr: I think this is, the really important part. It's not about just one person. It's not about having better ideas. It's about making an ecosystem that shifted from an ecosystem that generates the same every day to one that can also generate novelty. And, [00:25:00] but it's not gonna come out, you know, by, um, a kind of template like where we say, let's just do this. 
 [00:25:08] Iain Kerr: Um, but I think it's by perturbing the system with a number of workshops that bring in, like these networks of trust, um, to get people to feel and experience an emergent disruptive process. The language, the techniques, the tools start to percolate. And then people realize, well, we need to change this with hr. 
 [00:25:31] Iain Kerr: We need to give space over to that, change this, make teams work that way, and it'll coem emerge. And then having an organization that's willing to do that, you know, a, a bit harder work than, rather than saying, here's the innovation people, they're gonna just do that stuff for us, or it's gonna be a one-off thing, but we're gonna make an ecosystem that allows innovation to. 
 [00:25:55] Iain Kerr: You know, we like to say spontaneously emerged the way, [00:26:00] um, you know, dinosaurs spontaneously emerge into birds and fish come on land and things happen. 
 [00:26:09] David Erhard: That is, that is super cool. I really also love that story of the Crow and the Nutcracker. Probably gonna steal that , here and there if I may. So thanks. That was super, super insightful, really. Um, and we, we've been a bit short in the beginning about, you know, asking who you are and on the introductions, but I would still love to, to learn more about. 
 [00:26:31] David Erhard: How you actually became you. Can we get a little bit of a highlight reel of like your journey so far and, you know, especially how did you think about, or how's your, your thinking about practice of design, um, did shape how you approached your career and, um, was there any influential factor in all that? 
 [00:26:50] David Erhard: Like a, a mentor maybe. 
 [00:26:52] Iain Kerr: Um, I could start, uh, I grew up in, uh, Vancouver, Canada. I, I went by chance [00:27:00] my parents were immigrants. Uh, I went by chance to a highly, I. Experimental high school where there was no school and you just said what you were going to do. Um, and all I wanted to do was be in the outdoors and climb mountains. Um, and I had no, uh, no thought of ever going to university. 
 [00:27:19] Iain Kerr: And, but being but doing these things like very experiential led me to get curious in all sorts of things. I ended up studying philosophy, but then that got me. Lost like in idea world. And I was like, well, you know, how does this connect back to the, the world at large in, in real ways? And so I studied architecture and then I realized like, now we're just going into like, um, a different space. 
 [00:27:49] Iain Kerr: So I, I went from architecture to get really involved in community, um, community design practices. Like how do we work with communities to make change happen? I. [00:28:00] Um, it could be an environmental issue, social issues, infrastructural issues. And in that I was like bringing all of my experience from, um, climbing mountains and also from, uh, philosophy that was much more engaged and experimental and, um, about emergent processes. 
 [00:28:20] Iain Kerr: And it was meeting a world that was all about things like design thinking. Like, we'll just all sit around in a room and we'll like diagram systems and we'll come up with the idea. And, um, and these very limited, um, models of change. And so I was always really frustrated and, and so we started to just experiment with our own practices, you know, where it's like, um, this isn't really gonna be helpful, let's try something else. 
 [00:28:51] Iain Kerr: And those, um. You know, really where, for me, the start of developing these things. And then, um, [00:29:00] I came, I was hired, um, to, um, be part of the, a brand new, um, entrepreneurship and innovation program at MCL State University alongside Jason. And, um, there was this magic synergy of the two of us working together that really then founded Emergent Futures Lab. Yeah, my journey. 
 [00:29:24] Jason Frasca: a little less interesting. Um, you know, uh, wasn't a good student in school. Um. Majored in marketing because I think it was the easiest potential degree I could have graduated with. Uh, ended up in marketing, you know, before the internet. Um. And, uh, indirect marketing. And, um, yeah, I was just always the person that understood how to do the digital software things in the room. 
 [00:29:50] Jason Frasca: Um, and that created some opportunities for me, uh, as things went along. Uh, you know, uh, throughout, uh, my first, uh, [00:30:00] I, this is my, I'm in my kind of like. Third stage, that first stage of direct marketing and, uh, uh, invented a couple of, you know, various, uh, tools, um, to kind of augment our sales processes and, and, um, ended up getting, uh, involved and, uh, taking over the family business. 
 [00:30:16] Jason Frasca: And, um, again, uh, you know, it was a small business, uh, a lot of constraints, uh, but figured, but really understood how I could leverage software to, uh, and, and digital tools to maximize our output and our bottom line. And then had a successful exit there, which, um, you know, again, led me to, uh, this very unlikely opportunity of becoming a, a professor. 
 [00:30:41] Jason Frasca: Um, and, um, took advantage of that because, um, even my 4-year-old understood the joke at the time. Uh, you know, are they gonna call you Professor Dad? I was like, I really don't know. It's probably not a good idea. But, um, you know, and, uh. You know, um, 11 years later, you know, uh, working alongside Iain [00:31:00] and, um, kind of again, you know, um. 
 [00:31:02] Jason Frasca: Digital tools like 3D printing and, and those sorts of things. Like how can we incorporate these possibilities into our world of curriculum? And, you know, we use 3D printing and digital design to teach these methodologies that we've been talking about today. Um, the entire, uh, um, innovation design approach. 
 [00:31:20] Jason Frasca: And it's led to a number of, um, you know, uh. Different, uh, projects here, uh, at the university and then in emergent futures lab obviously as well. And, and, um, you know, to be honest with you, I never designed my career. Um, I just kind of emergently followed it because all of my ideas have always been terrible and whenever I followed them, it didn't work out. 
 [00:31:39] Jason Frasca: But when I kind of just followed the reality of opportunity that was presenting itself, um, has always worked out much. Much better for me. And, um, you know, then like Iain said, you know, uh, you know, connecting, hooking up, linking up and, um, and really starting to see what, what I'd been doing and not knowing what I'd been doing as a result, you know, and [00:32:00] kind of Iain putting some words and labels to that, you know, and then our very, uh, complimentary skills and, and backgrounds, you know, um. 
 [00:32:07] Jason Frasca: I'm, I'm a New Yorker, uh, you know, grew up, uh, uh, New York City Metro. I've lived all around Manhattan, uh, my whole life. So, you know, um, we operate at different speeds. Uh, we think on different, different freq wavelengths and frequencies, you know, and, and that kind of probably averages us both out to some medium in which I think others can hear us both. 
 [00:32:28] Bill Johnston: Fantastic. Well, thank you both for sharing those stories. It's always fascinating to hear how people have become and as it turns out, thematically, aligns perfectly with your methodologies and, and the book. Uh, so thank you both for joining us today, for sharing all of your wonderful ideas, for talking about your book, which again, is Innovating Emergent Futures. 
 [00:32:53] Bill Johnston: We'll have a link to it in the in the notes for this, uh, for this session. Uh, and, [00:33:00] uh, you know, we really look forward to seeing how, uh, your ideas play out in the world. Uh, one question that we like to ask all of our guests is, where can we find you online? 
 [00:33:13] Jason Frasca: Yeah. Um, our website is probably the best place to start. Emergent futures lab.com. Uh, every Friday, uh, we publish a newsletter. We're coming up to our 200th, uh, volume, uh, in a couple of weeks. So we're very excited about that, uh, milestone. Um, you know, it's, uh, it gets at the heart of all of these matters, you know, um, emergent future. 
 [00:33:35] Jason Frasca: We're wrestling with two questions that's driving all of our work. What is innovation and how do you innovate? The newsletter is, uh, our attempt, uh, to answer those questions. We don't claim to have the answers, but we certainly have some ideas on, you know, what they, what innovation is and how you, you know, how innovation can happen. 
 [00:33:55] Jason Frasca: And that's where we wrestle very deeply, uh, with these topics, [00:34:00] um, far beyond just the model. And, uh, so I would encourage people to, you know, if, if this is interesting to subscribe and, and reach out and email us. We're very open. We love to talk about this stuff all. 
 [00:34:09] Bill Johnston: Fantastic. Well, as, as a longtime subscriber to the newsletter, I can attest to the fact that it's always thought provoking and a great read, during the week. So again, thank you both for your time, and, um, the conversation today. And , David, , thank you for joining as well and co-hosting. 
 [00:34:27] Bill Johnston: And, with that we will come in for a landing and we will, see everyone, on the Siemens Xcelerator Community, for the next conversation coming up in a few weeks. 
 [00:34:36] Bill Johnston: Thank 
 [00:34:37] Jason Frasca: Thank you, David. Thank you, bill. 
 [00:34:39] David Erhard: Thank you! 
 [00:34:39] Iain Kerr: Thank you guys for joining. Yeah, thank you. This is really great.