Innovating our Way to Better Business ft. Noah Redler (Arche Innovation)

If you have been listening to The Resilience Report for a little while, it will come as no surprise that I deeply believe that innovation (from entrepreneurs and business leaders) is going to be what helps us take meaningful environmental action. Learning more about these brilliant minds and their businesses is truly where I draw my energy from in regularly recommitting to this work. In other words, I believe that in innovation, we can all find hope.

We often think of innovation as something that happens in the lab, or in the workplace. We can also fall into the trap of thinking that innovation is something that should just happen naturally. But did you know that there are experts and communities out there specifically focused on helping to drive innovation?

Our next guest is someone who has spent more than a decade creating this very culture of innovation amongst entrepreneurs and companies.

Noah Redler is the founder and President of Arche Innovation and an active member of the global innovation community. He is passionate about understanding how organizations and people are evolving in the era of perpetual innovation and a believer that we can ensure the harmonious integration of humanity and technology in society and the workplace.

His unconventional professional background includes a variety of professional experiences, each one another opportunity to learn. Previously, Noah has held the roles of the first Campus Director of Montreal’s Notman House, VP of Communications and Government Relations for Gestion Immobilier Quo Vadis, political attache at the City of Montreal, campaign manager for 5 elections at all levels of government, communications coordinator for Canada World Youth, and logistics and hospitality manager at Just For Laughs, in addition to a variety of other contractual positions.

Always involved in his community and a strong believer in the value of volunteerism, Noah has given his time to support organizations in roles that include, Director for Quebec communities for Startup Canada, member of the Bureau de Direction of the RJCCQ, co-animator of the Dérangeants podcast, a mentor to numerous entrepreneurs, co-founder of La Tournée des Entrepreneurs, co-founder of Hackerfest and Smart City fest events in collaboration with Montreal’s Startupfest and member of the advisory committee for the Africa Web Festival in Abidjan. Noah is also a member of the Board of Directors for Kids Code Jeunesse, and previously Éco-Quartier Peter-McGill, NAHA center, among others.

Since 2010, Noah has been directly involved in the creation, development and implementation of programs designed to support entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems. He is frequently asked to speak on the subjects related to creating innovation cultures within organizations, the future of work and organizational transformation.

I consider myself lucky to know Noah, and to be able to see how he energizes, inspires and supports those around him. He is an absolute wealth of knowledge, and I hope that this episode gives you the spark you need to further integrate innovation into your sustainability path.

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Welcome, Noah. Thank you so much for joining us on The Resilience report today!

Thanks for the invite, Lauren. I'm happy to be here.

You have such an interesting background, and I would love for you to share in your own words a little bit about how you got to where you are today and what you do today in your in your job.

Absolutely. It's a great question – how I did it. I still kind of asked myself that - not that it was some kind of outstanding feat, but it was completely unplanned.

I think about a little bit about my background as just hopping from curiosity to curiosity and seeing where I ended up. But I had the pleasure of, like, starting to work relatively young. I always liked working when a lot of other my friends were working as camp counselors. That's when I started my first official job at Just for Laughs at 15 years old.

And you know, it was this incredible experience where I got to work for the logistics department and the programming department, and I was what you call a runner at the time. And a runner is what it sounds like. Run and get me coffee. Run and do this errand for me, run and etcetera. But you got to really be a part of a lot of different conversations, and you got to really see how things were organized and how things were run. And from there, I just kind of got completely, I guess, addicted to the flow of things and these high adrenaline work scenarios, you know, learning through experience.

While I was going to school through my university, every summer, I went back to Just for Laughs and worked there all the way until I became the Director of Logistics at the wise old age of 21. And it actually led me to decide to launch my first company with one of my colleagues, Lena Bodea. We started an events company at the time, and Just for Laughs became our first client. We started working on a lot of different promotional events and that's when you realize that no matter what you're doing, even though you're working at Just for Laughs, you don't know how to run a business.

And so, I found out 100 great ways to screw that up really fast and had an exceptionally good first year, but then realized, well, what about business development and human resources and all these other things you're supposed to do. So, we said goodbye to that adventure and moved on. And from there I had a variety of different experiences.

I actually have had over 37 different jobs in my life. Some of them were as short as a few days, some of them for a few months, some of them for a few years. And I went on to work in a few, like a few interesting different fields that I found very interesting. I worked in politics for many years, specifically of the political attaché for the City Of Montreal back in 2007 to 2009 until around the election period at that time.

But also getting involved with the provincial at the federal level in a variety of different ways, on a variety of topics. I got to see how the political machine was working and I got to understand how decisions were made and, you know, realizing that from an outside perspective, it's easy to criticize. But when you have hard decisions to make and you have opposing viewpoints that have that come into all of your decision making, well, we live in a democracy and your job is not to just make decisions, but to make decisions that take people into consideration and don't put at risk people's livelihoods. So that was a great education, and it was a very painful election loss. So that was another wonderful life lesson.

And from there I jumped really more into the real estate space, working with really a visionary in the in the real estate space, Montreal entrepreneur named Natalie Colins, an expert in sustainable construction. She works a lot on social programs, within buildings and in the community. So, someone who taught me a lot early on.

And it was actually Natalie who helped me start my first business, because I was working for her at the time, and we were working on a on a coworking project for her buildings back in 2010 (I guess at this point). And it was going medium well, not fast enough apparently, but we really liked working together, and Natalie came to me one day and said “Noah, I've got some good and bad news. The bad news? I’ve got to fire you. But the good news is, if you start your company tomorrow, I'll happily be your first client and we'll continue to work on this together.” And Natalie kept true to her word and helped me get a few other clients. And that was actually the beginning of Arche Innovation 

And so, all that to say, what do I do today? I am the President of a company called Arche Innovation that I founded in 2011. What we do is we help our clients develop what we call transformational projects. The general idea around this is the future is scary. A lot of things are coming our way that are way beyond what we expected to be dealing with.

You know, what we would have considered more science fiction just a few years ago, and this is not simply things that we're inventing anymore: these are things we are putting into practice, whether it be artificial intelligence, which we're talking about more and more today or extremely advanced sensors-based technology, automation solutions, these are things that are becoming a part of our lives and we have an entire world that is not trained for this.

And so, what Arche Innovation does is we work with our clients to help them create a transitional process into the future and doing so by giving them concrete results around a project that actually delivers something more than just training. It becomes a type of digital transformation, cultural transformation and economic transformation for a private company, for municipality or for an academic institution. It allows us to think of new ways to use all the richness of schools that we have at our disposition today and this incredible wealth of interconnectivity that we have around the world.

We don't appreciate it enough what we have at our fingertips; like we've gotten so used to it. But it's only 20 years old. The people who run the world learn to where I grew up and developed a world where computers were not connected, really. That is the system that we live in today. You know, when you wonder why your employer doesn't understand why you should have a chance to do more remote work, it's because they built their company and they built their operating system at a time where you literally had to go to work to have access at a computer because not everybody had home computers in the 90s, you know, it's the Internet (he popular Internet) is less than 30 years old. The smartphone is 17 years old. If you don't count like if you talk about the modern smartphone, you know iPhone first launched in 2006 or 7. This well, now it's a little bit longer, older, but you know, these are new things that we're still learning how to use. Our society is not built around them, but they are the fabric of our society.

All of that long story to say that we work with our clients to teach them to do that and through our consulting services we work with a lot of municipalities. We're working on some projects, we'll talk about a little bit later. And, through our training programs called “Re-Innover”, we provide people with the tools to become autonomous in this future world. And I think that's what's the most important is the future needs to belong to us all. And so innovation really needs to be accessible to everyone, and that's what we try to deliver.

I hear some common threads in there: that of transformation, innovation and it is said that the only constant in the world is change. And yet we know, as humans, that we can be very resistant to change and changing ourselves, changing our practices. Do you have any recommendations for businesses and I would say even kind of economies and societies to (while still feeling a little bit uncomfortable with change) take on this transformation and innovative approach.

You know, it's funny because I hear that a lot. It's like, oh, people don't want to change. People get very comfortable in their way of working, in their way of acting, in their way of being. And it actually is true. You know, like if you if like if you look at how the human mind works and just at a very basic level: we're designed to be comfortable in comfort.  When things are easy, when things go well, when things are positive, we see this as us being in our happy place / in our comfort zone. We don't want to disrupt that, we want to maintain a constant.

But the reality is (and I think we know this personally) our reality is that we change every day little by little. Experience teaches us that if we're out in the world, if we're interacting with people, every little action has an impact on us, and we learn from it. And you know, they're maybe not perceivable changes every day, but we do. And companies and organizations and institutions and startups and all those other groups, they change as well. They adapt because the world is changing around them. Our needs change. Emergencies change. We go from, you know, January 2020 (one where the economy was thriving and under every measurable metric, and everything was going amazing) to a period where we completely changed the entire world not in years, but in months.

You know, that for me was one of the biggest indicators is that when you look at COVID for real and what happened over the first three to six months of COVID, we changed like that. When we're motivated to, we change extremely quickly. We don't love being told to change. We don't love when people say you have to change now. We don't, really love when it's being imposed on us, and so we see the reaction to it when it happens. But it took very little time for most industrialized nations to go to go, decentralized to go virtual for everybody to just be at home with a laptop and a smart camera. It wasn't even that expensive anymore, and so we adapt very quickly to things and like, you know, if you watched any kind of apocalyptic movie, it's funny to see how quickly humans adapt to this new reality. It's like ohh well, this is the world today. We're there.

But when you want to change the way you work, when you want to change people, people need to be involved in the change. You know, when you look at any type of organization that helps people motivate themselves to change habits, to remove addictions, it always has to start with the person accepting it, the person wanting or seeing change.

And what we found is the best way to do that is to make change participatory. If people get involved in the change, even if they're not actively involved, just passively just to be invited to the discussion, to be able to see what's going on. You know, I think the mistake that most organizations make is that you think change should come top down and you have managers who are addicted to solving problems and saying, you know, I this is what I need to do right now to fix what's happening right now. But when you fix a problem too quickly, you don't get the full, holistic view of what's going on.

I work on a regular basis like with the concept of innovation ecosystems. But every organization is an ecosystem unto itself, and when you disrupt any kind of ecosystem, there will be an impact. There will be some kind of action that will take place, whether positive or negative, and the majority of tech transformation projects or any kind of cultural transformation projects that fail is because we go in and we just say “learn to be different. Here is your teacher; in one hour a week, they will teach you to be different. And we will bring change to your door.”

Change is a participatory process. It's an evolutionary process. We have to see it. We have to feel it. To sense it. And our minds have to tell us that we want to change. And so I think it's not a question that we don't want to change, because we're ready to change on a daily basis if it's to our benefit. We just need to do a better job of explaining to people how this is going to be better for them in the long run, and including them in the chain, that's got to happen because it will impact them in some way.

And your organization and I might muddle the words slightly, but the mission is to ensure that you're embedding innovation really into the DNA of each of those individual organizations. Is the way that you do so and approach this concept different depending on the size or the type of organization that you're working with? 

When we're talking about embedding these ideas into an organization, we have to understand that they follow the same basic principles. Like the way they're structured may be different; they may use different terms, they may use different language, but at the end of the day, whether you're a government, a business, a nonprofit or an academics institution, we all start with the same questions. We all want to ask what value am I trying to deliver? Am I delivering a program? Am I delivering a product? Am I delivering a service? Am I inventing something for the betterment of humanity? Like what is the value I'm trying to deliver? Now the next question is always alright, well, this is what I want to do, but ideas are easy. Action is very expensive. What resources do I need to deliver this value? Do I need human resources? Do I need material resources? Is it physically or scientifically possible to do what I want to do?

It's easy to say that we should help everyone in the world have access to clean water and clean air. We all want that. It's something that is an ambition, but what does it take to actually deliver that? And you know, you really need to go down to the basis of what it's what it takes to bring about this type of thinking and this type of change, because at the end of the day, someone's going to have to pay for it. Just because your intentions are good, just because you're trying to bring a positive impact and you know this is – I think the most common mistake I see among especially the research community who develop such incredible things, but think that the work is just going to speak for itself and someone's going to see the value and pay for the deployment of it.

Changing the world, like it or not, costs a fortune. Changing an organization costs a fortune. And the only thing that really changes based on the size of your organization is how much you need to invest in at the end of the day. But, again, it's all a question of scale. If you're a small organization, it will probably represent the same percentage of investment as a larger organization will invest towards the same type of change. It's just a matter of scale.

And now you have got to start thinking about budgeting all this; you have got to think about paying for all this and convincing your stakeholders or investors or your banks to lend you the money or give you the money or invest the money. And so, you have to always ask the question well, what is the return on this investment? And more and more today, what I think is nice is that people answer the question of returns differently. Before, it used to be purely based on financial, but now you see people thinking about impact returns, social returns, environmental returns. You know, these are things that we can measure in terms of societal value and even future economic value. What we have to really think about is the entire gamut of these questions before we really go integrating this type of approach into the organization. If you could answer those questions, you can prepare to change.

The last part that I should probably mention is you should also think about how much time you're willing to invest in this, because I have never worked on a project that requires a major transformation that has taken less than two years. Things take a lot of time, like even decision making processes take time, and whether you're a private corporation or a public entity. When it comes down to the paying for things, there's a lot of people who have to say yes and there's a lot of people who have to see that that yes return into benefits for them, whether it be through generating something public for society or generating more returns for business. And the reality is, if we understand what the motivation of an organization is, if we understand what they're worried about, what they're hoping to achieve, we can help them integrate innovation into their DNA. Because innovation is, at the end of the day, really about making things. Better improving your situation, improving the quality of life, thinking about how to do things differently and we should all be asking this as a very deep question and looking deep into doing some deep introspection into what our businesses are. Because, before we used to be very focused on this is our business line item. This is our focus. This is what we do. And you know that was the core of what was done. Now we're seeing that the same resources can be applied in a variety of different sectors. And so, you can maximize your opportunities by working on the same types of projects, just by changing your perspective and thinking a little bit different. But we have to think about these things today because the opportunities are before us, and they're being structured and organized by some. But the beauty of it is that they're available to everyone, and so we just need to learn to take advantage of it.

It sounds like, and I completely agree with you, that we need to be conscious of the fact that this change can take a long time. It can, on average, take about two years. But, if we bring it all the way back to the start, let's say we have an organization and they want to bring in a change. For example, they really want to embed sustainability into the culture and strategic direction of an organization. When you're bringing on that kind of change in innovation, what would you recommend being the very first step that an organization take?

The very first step, it kind of goes back to what I was just saying: it really does start with introspection and understanding who you are as an organization and how you work. I think one of the things that used to shock me a lot (but now surprises me less and less) is how little most employees of large organizations understand the inner workings and the governance models and the mechanisms of the organizations they work for. You cannot go in and just demand that everything change immediately. I used to use this analogy a little while back, called the theory of two bridges. And the theory of two bridges is basically when you need to build a new bridge or replace a bridge, you obviously don't start by demolishing the old bridge. You don't put up a sign that says “do not drive here. But we're building a new one. Wait five years until we're done, and you'll enjoy the experience later”.

The complexity of today is that we're not trying to build something new. We're trying to build something new on top of a moving train that cannot stop. The train can't stop, and if it does well, there are implications of that. That means there's no more money to invest in that change. That means that you know, investment in innovation stops. That means that people aren't working towards solutions. That's what the train is. That's the train, all of this moving forward. And whether it's talking about economic progress or social progress or environmental progress, we're all on the same train and it's got across this bridge one way or the other. So of course, the best practices are always to ensure that the bridge stays standing while the other one is being built and you so you have to reinforce the foundations of what exists and make sure that this back and forth can keep happening, it's essential to how we live. But at the same time, you're going to be building something new right next to it. And when you build something new, you peak people's curiosity. You have people asking questions. Will this be better for me? How is it going to improve my life? What's it going change then? Like our minds naturally go to these questions, even if it's just about a bridge. And eventually and like - I love this - when the Champlain Bridge in Montreal was completed, there was this one beautiful afternoon where both bridges were operational and it was this perfect analogy of, at some point, both systems will be working in tandem, but eventually, sooner than later, the old system will start to close off. And people will say like ohh the new system, the new bridge is a smoother road. There are more lanes, it's more organized. There are advantages to this. We're going to have an REM train running through each in a couple of years, and so we're accepting this new change in this new model, but it's a transitionary process.

And so, to go back to your question, what it takes to bring about this change within an organization is that you have to start with what exists. You cannot change the rules of an organization. You cannot change your business model. You cannot change all the employees. You cannot change the leadership just by snapping your fingers. It is a long, elaborate negotiations and for good reasons. You know, there's a project I'm working on where we're dealing with something similar recently. And at the end of the day, the end result will be to the benefit of society, but real people's lives will be impacted. Somebody will lose a job, somebody's jobs will become irrelevant, and so you have to think about what do we do with this. How do you manage this transition into the new and so you don't create that friction of people resisting against it because it harms their livelihood. And it's not a crime for people to be worried about how to pay their bills, how to take care of their family. It's how they're going to secure their future. These are normal concerns that everyday people have. And when you take that into consideration, well, you have to go towards how things work and not just demand change and try to force it. You have to build it into existing mechanisms and, step by step, build change over time.

And usually what we do is we work by creating mini pilot projects, transformational projects. This is what change looks like. Isn't this fun? We create excitement about the change and how people we use internal testimonial to say hey, didn't this benefit your organization? Yes, it made my life better. Now you have the neighbor effect. Ohh well, my coworker’s life got better. I want my life to get better too. It's the same thing as like, oh, you got a new car, neighbor. I'm going to get a new car too. And like, this newness makes my life better for some. And then you can start to create change from within and have people walk towards the change that you've put in front of them at the end of the day. Instead of dipping their toe into the water and seeing if the temperature is right for them, you have to guide them towards it.

And so, when you're looking to build in any type of transformation to organization build within the existing framework, see how the framework has to transform over time and put in motions to make that happen. But don't forget ever that this will be a multi-year process. If you're a small organization, if you're a big organization, it'll be a multi-year process because you still have to keep the train running and still have to cross that bridge every day and the new one will be there soon. But work towards it. Don't expect it to just air drop into life one day. I often use the expression: you really can't change the direction of the wind by yelling at it, but if you spend some time and energy into it, you can build wind tunnels and direct the wind wherever you want.

Those are all such great analogies, and as someone who lives on the island Of Montreal, a bridge analogy goes right to our hearts. So thank you for that.

Island life!

I know you have so many different projects going on with different customers and clients to the point where you're calling in from a different municipality right now where you're actively working on a project. Are there any projects in particular that you're very excited about that you can openly share on today's episode? 

Well, as you mentioned, I am speaking to you from sunny Victoriaville. I'm in town actually meeting with our client and we're working with “La corporation de développement économique de la ville de Victoriaville et sa region”. So, in English, it's really an economic development agency for the City of Victoriaville in Quebec. We're working on a project, and I'm actually in town because last night there was an event called the “Souper du maire” (the mayor's dinner) where he, the mayor of Victoriaville, Antoine Tardif. He’s areally an interesting dynamic mayor who has brought a lot of change around the organization – I mean the city (I say organization too often!) region. But he actually announced publicly, in front of 500 people, this new project called “La cité de l’innovation circular”. And so, it's essentially a territory for circular innovation and circular economy. The city is now committed to delivering a transformational project where we will work to develop mechanisms, programs, funding sources for all the businesses in the territory and to build also access to research tools, innovation support, startup development to create new services for the circular economy because it will be a job creator which is absolutely incredible.

What they're hoping to do is to turn the territory of Victoriaville into a model of circular economy. If you've been reading a little bit about the circular economy, and over the past year, I've had the opportunity to do an intense crash course on the subject due to this project: it is extremely broad. It is extremely complicated. It is as far reaching. It has implications over the entire planet, our entire supply chain, how we deal with everything.

If you ever, I don't want to say have the opportunity, but if you ever have a chance to go see a dump site, you will understand the importance of the circular economy because we are building cities that have piles of garbage. And these are materials that actually do have good purpose, do have value can turn into something productive for the economy, for society, for people. And we have not learned to truly embrace this reality or this way of thinking about our supply chain. Everyone's heard of the supply chain as a concept of where we take goods and we turn them into products and then it goes out the door, into your garbage bin, and then we just kind of lose visibility on it. But it does end up somewhere. It transports quite a distance. It ends up in landfills. It ends up in under, like in giant holes that get filled with dirt. And so, it's contaminating soil. There are serious implications. And the worst part is we could turn this into something valuable. The science exists today, the capacity today, to build the tools, the machines, the equipment we need to transform these products more readily. We happen to be arriving in an equally interesting time where the cost and the availability of raw materials is equaling or surpassing the cost of recycled materials for the first time in history. We've seen dips before, but this is the first time where we're seeing a complete transition towards what is the cheapest solution. And so, people are taking notice.

Here in Victoriaville, in the neighboring city of Kingsley Falls, Cascade is one of the major corporations in the area and they have a serious sustainability policy. They spend an enormous amount of money investing in circularity and reusing products and recycling and making sure their products can be reused. We got to visit their laboratories; it was actually really cool and impressive, the amount of time and energy and when you see it, the amount of investment they put towards it. And that has become a part of the culture of Victoriaville. It's always been known as the “berceau du development durable”, like really a destination for sustainable development. And now the mayor is putting the resources of the city and our client “La corporation de développement économique de la Victoriaville” resources towards turning this project into reality.

And you know, why I mentioned before, it's important to have a mayor who's behind the project, who announces it at his event in front of 500 people is because, to make a project like this come to life, it's not just about a desire to do so. It's not about good intentions. It's not about people saying, yeah, that's a really cool idea. If you don't have the political will and the political support and the vocal political support to say that, yes, we are behind this and we are going to deliver this well, things move much slower. But when it becomes an announcement, it becomes a community project when the mayor says this is our challenge, well then people get involved very quickly and people take it much more seriously, and so I'm extremely excited about this project. It's still very early on, but I can talk about it because it was announced publicly yesterday and that there's the video online you could check out on their Facebook page to hear a little bit more about. And we are just at the beginning; there's going to be a Center for Mutualized Innovation, there'll be projects about getting more of the community involved and participating in it. And I am extremely excited about it.

The other project I could talk about is that we're working with the Canadian Space Agency, Department of Earth Observation. And it's not something that everybody thinks about every day: satellites looking down at us. We think about it in terms of our telecommunications, our GPS, you know the basic systems in our daily life. But space innovation is becoming more and more powerful and also more and more affordable. Recently I worked on a project related to the development of nanosatellites for Earth observation related to the environment. And if you haven't heard of nanosatellites yet, these are essentially miniature satellites about the size of a shoe box that cost about $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 US to build and deploy into space. And it starts circling the earth and collecting data in real time. And this is incredibly interesting because normally a satellite would cost anywhere above the like around the price, like at 50 to $75 million and up and up and up. And so now it's becoming actually accessible to cities, to corporations, to nonprofit organizations. You know, it's still a heavy price tag, but we can imagine that in the next 10 years it'll become more of a $500,000 investment, and if you're an environmental organization or environmental researcher, well, now that's getting comparable to a major equipment or a major machine that you would want to buy to do an experiment here on Earth. And with companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin, well, we'll have commercial solutions to be able to deploy them relatively affordably in the near future. And so that gives us access to a lot of Earth observation data and the Canadian Space Agency Earth Observation department has been working to really unite the Earth Observation data community from the public sector to the private sector to the academic sector and think about how we can share data to support research and development and solutions in a variety of fields.

One of the most important fields, of course, being environmental monitoring and protection. And so this is everything from monitoring forest fires to waterways, water quality, the depletion of ice shelves in the Arctic. We can now more affordably and more readily observe these trends in real time. And the value of that is incredible because real time information, real time data allows for real time decision making. This allows us to have a much broader understanding of this situation, to take in a variety of different data sets and information to find correlations and to think about solutions on a much more macro scale. And I think that's something that's going to bring a lot of benefit to the world and to our understanding of how to protect the environment. It's a really exciting project and the team behind it is very active in building an ecosystem and really doing some interesting things to try to connect the Canadian Space Agency more directly with the community. These are things that I think are really going to help progress better collaboration, and I think what's more important data collaboration so that we can really use that combined information coming from government to private to eventually academic and municipal satellites to really think about broader solutions for the Earth.

I think it's fascinating to see how your projects all around innovation can go from a municipality level to space. It is really impressive to see and, at the same time as you were saying earlier, it all goes back to those same conversations as to how can we really, truly embody innovation at all those different levels. 

You mentioned a concept a little bit earlier that I don't know if all of our listeners will be super familiar with it. So maybe if you don't mind first just talking about the concept and then the impact on innovation, but this idea of tech hubs or kind of innovation hubs that we can have? I know you were deeply involved in one in Montreal, but the role of those organizations in innovation overall.

Absolutely. And so, the buzzwords of today are about innovation hubs, incubators, accelerators, ecosystems, you know, all those fun buzzwords that essentially resume into the physical or virtual locations where we can unite a group of either entrepreneurs or researchers or innovators, or a mix of them all to work on their projects or joint projects together. What does that mean, essentially?

We have an insane amount of incredible and smart people in the world. It's funny to say out loud like that is like, oh, we have a lot of smart people in the world, obviously. But we have an insane amount of very well educated, very smart, very capable people in the world. And these people are incredibly good at one or many things and they and you know, specifically the sciences - just a generalization trend that I've noticed - is that you tend to find these hyper specialized experts who work in either the field of artificial intelligence, who work in the field of medicine, or work in the field of engineering or work in the field of so many others. And they're extremely good at the science. But when it comes time to do project management and implement that science into the real world, well, you can often use a little bit of hand. It's not necessarily in your, it's not necessarily a part of your past experiences. And so these innovation hubs or incubators or places are where you come to be supported to take your projects to another level (what we often say is taking your ideas towards to an impact or a commercial commercialization level) and how to enter it into the real world. Because it's not just about inventing something and saying hey, here's the invention, everybody should use this. Who's going to produce it? Who's going to distribute it? Who's going to pay for it again? You know, all these questions come into play and you have to answer those questions to be able to turn your idea into a reality. And so, these innovation hubs become places where you can go for training, support, access to resources both in business and in whatever your scientific or engineering project might.

They're also a place where you can connect with people like you. And I think that's one of the greatest values of these centers, these physical or virtual spaces, is that when you're an entrepreneur, when you're a researcher, when you're an innovator, sometimes you spend a lot of time alone working on the problem or in small groups working on the problem. And you can often feel that your problems are your own or you could also get very tunnel visioned in your problem or in your project. Being in places where you can learn that you are sharing the same reality, the same difficulties, the same operational challenges as pretty much every project that has ever existed, understanding that there are people that you can go to give you different perspectives to help you think differently and that are ready to share that knowledge with you freely over a cup of coffee. And a place where you can go for training to understand that when you have it at this level of your innovation at this level of maturity and it needs to get all the way up here, well you need to find investors or funding and you need to think of the business model and the return on it on that business model and the marketing strategy and the human resources. And those may be new subjects for you. So, these places are places you can go to really become more complete to entrepreneurs, entrepreneur researchers, entrepreneur innovators and learn the skills necessary to go further. And I think most importantly, to develop the network of peers and support to be able to guide you throughout this very, very long and arduous process.

I am curious as well, certainly from sustainability lens, I do see it slightly, but less so definitely in the past few years: the impact of economic changes. Does investment and interest in innovation; does it ebb and flow depending on the state of the economy? For example, if things are booming, people want to invest in innovation, and if we're going into a recession, people clutch their wallets a little bit closer versus investing? And, if that is the case, have you seen any tactics that can still help innovation progress even when we are going into economic uncertain times?

So, to answer your question, yes. And at the same time, no. I mean, as we mentioned before, innovation does cost money. And obviously, when we're in times of economic downturn, when we're in a recession, there's less money to go around. Private and public investment will be reduced, there will be less investment going into startups, less corporate investment going into research. And so naturally, the pace of innovation will slow down, but it will never actually stop. And you know, I think when we're going through tough times, those are the times that we really need to think about investing differently and using that time to become more resistant to these crises in the future. I think, as most people will know, that the best innovation usually comes from a time of crisis.

But one of the big factors that has changed recently, and I think one thing that most people haven't really come to terms with, is that while innovation will always cost money, the process of thinking about solutions, of inventing solutions has now become unbelievably affordable. If you want to buy access to cloud computer space. If you want to buy sensors. If you want to buy microcomputers. If you want to buy a laptop that's powerful to enough to run AI algorithms or big data models, these things have all become exceptionally affordable to the everyday person. For an investment of less than $10,000, you have the equivalent of the same innovation capacity as General Electric would have had in the 1970s. And that's astonishing. And so that means that we can go online and go on a variety of websites from Amazon to Alibaba and order the key components and electronics and tools required to build prototypes. We can go on to Microsoft Cloud or Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud and have relatively free cloud storage to be able to program applications and you know, develop software solutions. And what is even more incredible is that, today, we also have this incredible capacity to learn autonomously. You know, there was a time where if we wanted to learn engineering sciences, you had to go to university, you had to go through a very specific academic career because there were only specific certain amount of people who could teach you. And there were only certain places where you had the infrastructures to truly learn practical and applied knowledge related to various scientific fields. This is different today, most things can be replicated. You know, if we put aside Health Sciences, anything related to engineering or software we can build in our garage right now and we can do this just by saving, like if we really have a project in mind, we can just save up a little bit for a year or two and we'll have enough free capital to invest in the early prototypes ourselves. You don't need big investors. You don't need this big fancy job. You can take the time to learn relatively freely online how to code, how to build. You can join a makerspace. You can go to coding schools, and you will be given the basic tools needed to be able to innovate on your own. But people don't really take advantage of all this richness. Of course, it takes time, of course it takes energy. We’re working, and so of course, we can't just stop working and, you know, start this new career path. But I assure you and like from my own experience, you can give up an hour a night of Netflix and focus on this instead. And within a few months you'll be very advanced. This is it. This isn't hard anymore. And you should be learning these practical hard skills because our collaborators in the future will be software. They will be hardware. We will be interacting with AI bots as much as actual physical robots. And it will be important to be able to learn how to interact with them and also to think like them on a on a different level. And so people really should be learning about the skills of the future today and all that giving so that you can make innovation accessible to you even during the hard times.

One thing we do internally at Arche Innovation is that we actually train people on a variety of hard skills. Everything from graphic design to video editing to web design to learning how to program, Arduino and little basic robotics because it opens up their mind to a whole new way of looking, it helps them understand technology in general better. And again, if you understand the basic mechanisms and the basic concepts, it allows you to adopt and more freely explore the opportunities ahead of you, and you can literally turn your entire workforce into a force of good. And find different ways to compensate them for coming up with ideas or bringing things to your attention. But why wouldn't we do that today? It's so obvious and so interesting and so valuable, and it's a question not only for our own organizations making them better, but it's about societal equity. We do not want to be in a world of technological have nots and know nots. That is the greatest inequality we can create for the negative future generations. Everyone should learn what they're playing with because these are the tools of the future.

These are all amazing recommendations I think for anybody at any point in their career, so thank you for sharing all of those. For you personally, was there a moment in time (you mentioned maybe when you were in the real estate space and there's a sustainability overlap), but where you realize that you wanted to include at least elements of sustainability in your professional career? 

I've always hated waste in general. I just don't like the idea of being wasteful in with anything. So it's like that's something that's been a part of me for a very long time, but I would say more recently and  to be perfectly honest, I resisted for a long time of having a title of being focused on sustainability, specifically because I'm someone who really thinks that the world of the future is about not one subject or another, but we have to think in terms of multitude of subjects that interconnect and that are interdependent to really build the future that we deserve. The environment should not be a subject. It should be a part of every discussion we have. When we think about building a new company, when we think about building new products, we should be thinking about building them sustainably.

One of the things that excites me thinking about the circular economy is about training an entire generation of entrepreneurs to think circular first. How to ask the question before they put even the slightest piece of plastic into their product, before they deliver any kind of solution: am I able to deliver this in a sustainable way?

I've always admired a lot the Patagonia model where not only do they have a philosophy of improvement and making their clothes more sustainable. they admit where they're faulty and like they literally declare on their website “this is what's wrong with it and we're going to make it better”. Not only is that incredible in terms of comfort for me as a consumer in terms of transparency and understanding company values, but as innovators, we can attack those problems. Oh, you want to make that / you want to use 20% less water in that shirt. I'm on it. And that's the army of the world today. The Army of independent innovators, some of them, some people, call them nomads. But they're, I know a lot of people out there who are really in freelance technologists who just go around solving problems, sometimes for profit, sometimes for social good. It's a mix of everything, but they give their time to it, and it's really a beautiful thing to watch. So, it encourages me a lot for the future.

But for me, I think more recently, through discussions I've had on boards that I'm on like the Digital Moment, we've had a lot of focus and discussions about the importance of instilling ESG values into the students we work with even in the tech space. And I would say that in the discussions I have with our clients, we no longer want to make this a secondary subject. We no longer want this to be something that we talk about in addition to. We never want to hear the discussion “should we have a focus on sustainable technology?” All of your technology should be sustainable. There is no longer a debate about this. You should think this way 1st and that's how your entire entrepreneurship movement should be built. Build the entrepreneurs of the future. And so when we talk about building the CEO's of the future, when we talk about going back to innovation hubs and the incubators and the roles that they can play, they can create a new breed of entrepreneur. We can create entrepreneurs. We can create leaders. We can create people that will run organizations that have these values at heart. And you see that in territories, in places where the sustainable environmental values are already there. How much that impacts the way that businesses think. And how much they think about the next factory they're going to build and what the impact on the environment around it will be.

You just have to think about it that way. You just have to put that into your thinking and if you do it from the get go, maybe it takes a little bit more energy, but your final product will be better. It will be more sustainable and at the end of the day you'll feel better as an entrepreneur because you've built an organization that is not only bringing value to you but is not harming anybody else, and I think that should be the ultimate aspiration of everyone. I guess more than anything, I felt that it's necessary lately to be more vocal about it, and to really be a little bit more direct in our messaging that we will not exclude this from the consulting that we give you. It will always be a part of the advice that we include, that you should have this as a part of your DNA and the way you move forward. This is all of our responsibility. And I guess coming out of the pandemic and that all the things that aren't being done for all the wrong reasons. Yeah, you have to speak up a little bit more and so I guess that's it. It's been a long time coming, but now it's going to be a lot more vocal.

I think it sounds like you are, but would you consider yourself optimistic about where we are in terms of the path of innovation towards a positive environmental impact?

 I'm always up. I'm always optimistic. I have a lot of faith in people. I have a lot of faith that the discourse we hear online, the discourse we see in the media, yea it is real. But I have a lot of faith that people actually do want to get through this, that we want to get back to creating a better future. And no matter what side of the political lines or what you believe in this world, we all want a better future for the next generations. And one of the hardest things that we have that we have to deal with as humans is that we don't think often enough past our own lifetime. What are the implications past the world that we'll enjoy? But most species on the planet essentially exist to perpetuate the success and the longevity of their species. And we need to start changing our mentality to start thinking about: every act action we do today, we may not live to see it, we may not get to really enjoy the fruits of our labor. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It doesn't mean it's like we should delay in doing something. This is the greatest inheritance we can leave for the future. And I think we're on the right track for it. It doesn't feel like it all the time. When progress is slow, it feels like it doesn't exist. But if you look at every single indicator related to the environment or even related to quality of life, it has improved dramatically over the past 100 years. I recommend to everybody a book called Factfullness. If you want to feel a little bit better about the future, read this book because it gives you a better indication of how we are making progress, even if it is imperceivable from time to time.

At the end of the day, I also believe that we're not in this situation because of malice. We came into this world that we live in because we wanted to create a better a better society, a more affordable society for everybody. We talk about industrialization and mass production as negative things today. But I don't know anybody who's willing to give up their forks and plates and home niceties, because that's what we're talking about at the end of the day. When you want a sustainable coffee mug at $15 instead of $1000, you need mass production. These things come at a cost. We invented our way into a more affordable society. We created a middle class. We improved the quality of life for millions upon millions of people, and that came at a cost. A horrible environmental cost that we're that we're coming to terms with today. But we invented our way into this problem, and we will invent our way out of this problem.  And there is not just a few people working on it. There are a lot of people working on it, a lot of really smart, really dedicated people like yourself Lauren. You are very involved in this movement. And so you know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, of course. We're going to get there. We're on it, yeah.

Well, I definitely consider you one of those very brilliant people working on this as part of our broader ecosystem. And I want to be mindful of your time. So I just before we wrap up, we always ask the same last question on The Resilience Report, which is: what do you think it will take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward?

You know resilience in the future is going to be with the ability to deal with much more rapid change than we're used to. Business leaders, by nature, deal with constantly changing circumstances on a daily basis. When you're a leader in the business world, you understand that you are not in control of your entire environment. There are things that you have a vision on, there are things that are within your control, but the entire world is out of your control. You cannot control weather, you cannot control sickness, employee circumstances. You cannot control global pandemics. So I think business leaders are already in a mentality that we have to deal with complex decisions on a regular basis. But in the future, we need to be a lot more open in the way we're thinking and a lot more agile in our thinking. I don't mean agile of movement where we have to change. To change course to change paths every single day. You know agile thinking and our ability to like to make strategic plans quickly that can adapt on a daily basis because things will change daily.

And I think it's important that we all realize business leaders and the general population alike, is that where we are in history right now, you know, in 100, a 150 years, they're going to talk about our time in history where we were and they will not talk about it as a new economic era. They will talk about it as the transition towards. Because that's where we live right now. We are in that transition between the industrialized idea economy towards a pure innovation economy where we where we can literally change the rules of the game. You know the impossible is becoming possible in the future and this will require business leaders to rethink the entire question of how they've been doing business from day one. And that agility needs to be in the sense that if I produce shirts, I need to start thinking about how I'm going to produce a shirt in the next 20 years, and it's not going to be in a factory with people sewing. It's going to be a 3D printer with composite materials that is made to order within a that will be printed within 30 minutes of purchase online delivered via drone.

The basic rules of business won't change. We are going to create products and services. We are going to promote them. We are going to deliver them and we are going to start all over again time after time again. But the way we're going to do it is going to change drastically. It needs to change drastically. And so, the agility I'm talking about that business leaders really need to adopt is really accepting that the world that they became experts in and that they're so good at is changing beneath their feet. And by filling in the hole as the quick sand sinks you, it isn't going to get you to the top again. You really have to start exploring how your industry is going to change. Start doing five-year innovation impact reports, what's going to be happening to your sector? Where should you start investing strategically so that you're ahead of the game, you innovate and you invest for tomorrow, not for today. And this thinking will require changing the way we design our organigrams, how we structure our businesses. In my personal opinion, the very definition of what an employee will be will change drastically in in the next 30 years.

This will require us to be a little bit open and agile and breaking the rules of the standard business of today and really kind of coming back to this basic question of: what do I really want as a business leader? I want to create a project that adds value to the world. I want people to buy my product. I want employees to work with me and be happy. And I don't want to have a negative impact on the world. And so, if I can continue to do these things well, the process might change the how might change, but the what remains the same. So: rethink the how, don't worry about the what, and start to really explore the tools that are already readily at your disposition. And don't be worried that they're going to replace your job. Remember, they are tools. Tools require somebody to manipulate them in some way. It'll be different but get comfortable in that difference. Get comfortable in that change. Learn to appreciate it, learn to enjoy it. You know, we'll figure it out from there. 

Well, thank you so much. It is such a pleasure chatting with you. I'm so excited to see what you do next, what your various projects end up turning into. This idea of the circular economy is fascinating to me, so I'll be keeping a close eye on all of this. Thank you again for joining us.

Well, thank you for inviting me, Lauren. This is a great initiative; congratulations. I’ll keep you posted on everything coming up. I think we're about to enter some exciting times!