Tag: #tech

Stay Curious! Innovation & Motivation

February 18, 2020 / Hannah / 0 Comments

On Episode 111 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re continuing our conversation with inventor Falk Wolsky! This time we’re talking about why it’s important to stay curious as an innovator! 

Sections

Introduction
Stay Curious About Everything
What Makes You Unique is Curiosity
Innogate Tech
You Need To Have An API Strategy
Falk Asks About Paul’s Inventions
Is Automation a Good Thing?
Making People Useful Again
Training People Who Are Willing To Learn
How Do You Motivate People To Change?
Conclusion: “Stay Curious”
More Episodes
Show Notes

What Sets Inventors Apart From Other People? – Part 2 of Our Conversation With Falk Wolsky

Introduction

Paul: We’re talking with Falk Wolsky. He’s the Chief Innovation Officer with Innogate Tech.

Is there anything specific you would like to talk about in this interview that would be helpful, you think, that I haven’t touched on yet?

Falk: This is a hard question.

Paul: I know. I’m sorry.

Stay Curious About Everything

Falk: Yes, yes. I will not sell my product. That is not fair. We talked about innovation, but I’m very interesting, hearing about how maybe we all will see supernova very soon. Scientists are very interested in it because in the nebula of Orion, there is one star, and he lose in the brightness, right? And in these days, in these weeks. And people are very curious because it’s maybe a sign that he will have supernovas. First time we actually can watch supernova.

Why I tell you this? Because you come back to this curiosity. Now I might say, “Why I should care? It’s not economically relevant. It’s not relevant for my calendar. It’s not relevant for my relationship and so on and so on.” But somehow, we are all part of this very big game. Right? We are the very small bubble, in a very small blue planet, flying around the very small star, in a very small galaxy and surrounding us. Might say this is a wonderful to trigger to look up and say, “Wow. Cool. Amazing.” This wow-cool-amazing is a wonderful world.” Let’s come back and have a wonderful world for Michael Ende, one of my favorite authors as a child. He was writing “The Neverending Story.” He said if you’re getting adult but don’t stay a child, you’re not a human.

Paul: Yeah, that’s true.

Falk: But what it is, is the eyes of children, not everywhere to see wonders but to stay curious. The one is you cannot see any time. Again, you have seen the buck. It’s still a buck. Wonderful. And after a thousand times, it’s still a buck. You learned it. Nevertheless, there is so much interesting things and to keep curious and stay curious.

What Makes You Unique is Curiosity

Falk: When you ask what is to say, what is to talk about, this is the key. Staying curious. In our world, it’s the definition. Maybe even to connect it to Masamune Shirow’s “Ghost in the Shell.” It is one of the best and most accurate future prediction, some of any book I read. I read Asimov. I read Stanislav Lem and a lot of Strugatski. And so on and so on. Everyone has this vision how the future could be. But this Masamune Shirow was most accurate for fifty years. I’ll watch this because we get a good impression of what will be.

And there’s one scene – everything is very philosophical in this, and very military. It’s crazy all the time. It’s a shooting. It’s the special force of military for the government and so on. But there’s a scene with robots. They’re getting their own artificial intelligence, and they must curious. And that curiosity makes them special. And there’s one sentence in this time in which we live now, when everybody can have access to information as much as he need, because we all have internet. What makes you unique is curiosity. Because only then you will go and search and find and will build your own uniqueness. That’s a wonderful reward.

Paul: Yes, I think you’re right. I think, as I’ve been taking notes here, I underlined curiosity twice. I think that’s the definitive differentiator for an innovator. It’s somebody that’s really curious and how are we going to solve this in a different way.

So, one of the things that we will include in our show notes is some of the links that Falk has alluded to and also some of the things that he reads and frequents, both on the supernova and different things that he’s interested in as well as to his company, which… Well, tell us a little bit about that. You’re headquartered where? And what do you actually do on a daily basis?

Innogate Tech

Falk: The very first is it might be interesting. I live in two different countries, mostly likely in the hotels, because I work in Germany, and I work in Ukraine.

Paul: Okay.

Falk: Ukraine because I met my wonderful wife last year, and she was actually from Ukraine. I was, you will laugh about, curious to fly there and get in contact because she was reading, as one of the last people even I know — and then women — she was reading Strugatski. I said, “Not true. I need to get to know to you.” I come to Ukraine and we get in touch, and we fall in love, and we married. So, Ukraine. This is where Innogate reside.

Innogate is mainly focused to business applications. Roughly speaking about all this AP. And doing this for very big companies in the energy sector. In Ukraine you have DTEK for example. It’s a very big one. And what I dislike, they have, it seems to me still over 80% of charcoal to power. This is coal to power. Right? So, this is not really friendly. And in Ukraine, nobody cares. Right? They are not developed like, for example, Germany, when they look really close to the detail. How will we make electricity?

But they had a very good program and energy tariff in Ukraine to support solar and wind power. And this was a huge push also for this DTEK. And the baseline is still there’s people working there already. Roughly 300,000 people so far, I remember. That’s a lot. And they somehow need to work. And a workplace software all the time, contracted to customers, contracted to suppliers, management, field service — all this stuff.

And this kind of software Innogate makes. And, DTEK has a digitalization, master plan because they also understand when we do all of the paper forms. It will be a little bit slow. We cannot grow internationally. We cannot grow. We cannot save cost. And to digitalize, processes, is a huge thing.

Actually it starts very boring with the first question. Do you have everywhere Wi-Fi?

They say, “Huh? Yes, yes, we have. No, you mean office.”

“I don’t mean office. I mean do you have everywhere Wi-Fi? In the production sites, in the markets, at the stations where you go around?”

And then, ah-ha, okay, if you have everywhere Wi-Fi, people can work in a close network, and you have applications. Everyone has a smartphone that they need to access. That’s the first step.

You Need To Have An API Strategy

Falk: Then the question, do you have an API strategy? API is the possibility to offer you services for first to yourself. You will develop faster when you have a clear API strategy, and you can show others that you have these services. It was a very nice example. I worked once in Germany for E.ON, also energy producer. And they had to — you cannot believe. They had 800 internal — no. 800 external APIs and,1500 internal. It’s pretty lot. They said, “We have somehow we have 18 APIs only to get zip codes.”

Paul: Wow.

Falk: But these APIs, it’s a very good point when you can first invite developers, companies, and external service partners to go with you, together, and create a value. If you have smart meters, it’s very nice but how to connect and how to invite all the companies to invent something on that infrastructure, go with you? You need to have an API.

This, for example, I did also here in Germany, in GK where I worked for retail. This is one of the biggest companies producing software for retail. Whenever you go, for example, there’s retailers like Lidl, Walmart, we step by step. Also, go for American Market. And so, we go step by step then to produce software for the point of sale. One of the biggest, because this is a quite complex process. And it’s the same. I came to company and say, very brave actually, I said, “You don’t have an API strategy. You have to one. You have to have one.” We have now a very good API, and people, step by step, can integrate with us.

Falk: And that’s a very first point when you come in the sense of innovation, first make the basics. Right? Because you cannot invent something if you cannot connect to a company. API first, the right structure to scale. That is the point when you’ll come up, and then you can build step by step. I said, “Okay, we have to payment, we have to integrate with different software windows. We have to do this and this and that, and create products and so on.” And then teams, step by step, develop it.

Paul: Fascinating.

Falk Asks About Paul’s Inventions

Falk: Oh, okay. Now I have a question too. What about you? We talked a lot about me. Pretty boring. What about you? Who are you? And what you did? You’re also an inventor, I heard.

Paul: Yeah, I’m multidiscipline, done a lot of manufacturing stuff, a lot of technology stuff and when technology, computers come out, I saw a way to do a lot of the things that you would do in the manufacturing sector without getting your hands dirty. It’s like a manufacturing suite without – there’s no oil or grease. You don’t have to get dirt under your fingernails. I’ve done a lot of that over years, and I love technology. You know, the same stuff that you’ve done. We’re taking software, writing it. I’ve written software. Did a startup that was e-forensics in the email sector.

Falk: Yeah, okay. Very interesting.

Paul: Ended up selling that. I’ve done publishing software, publishing automation software for financial publishing and things like that. And the company I’m currently doing is sort of more a labor of love, but it’s an IT services firm, and I had an IT services firm in — let me think… I sold it in 2000, after about ten years. I really enjoyed that company. So, I started another one, IT consulting. And I’m sort of building that up right now. And that’s going very well and I’m enjoying it.

Falk: You’re so very early to potential in this software to automate everything. Right?

Paul: Yes.

Falk: This is the footprint I see when you told this.

Paul: Very much so. Very much so. There was an Apple campaign with Kinkos, very old, called Wheels for the Mind. And it really symbolized, or encapsulated, what you could do with technology. It was the ability to automate and give people more efficiency and basically amplify the number of people you had.

Is Automation a Good Thing?

Falk: Let me ask you something about it.

Paul: Yeah.

Falk: With my wife, we will build a foundation. And the foundation should take care about what we call the youthless society. I’m pretty sure you have heard already about it. Youthless society is the people, they get out-automated of their jobs. We have this discussion a lot, and I mean we have now a huge quote of people in the university already, and their jobs they later do still don’t exist.

And on the other hand, we have a huge amount of people, they will just out-automate, I say. As I see two directions as a very first — the truckers and the lawyers. The problem on them is they’re not high-skilled. If the trucks — especially the trucks are super easy in exchange to cars on the street in the city, but on the highway, it’s easier. And the big companies are very near to getting full-automated solutions of that in the range of five years. This is millions of people. Millions.

What they will do? They go to elderly care? I don’t believe so. They have, most of the time, no second job. And this is what you call the youthless society, and they will get more and more by this automation. So, one of the philosophical questions goes exactly this: If a human understands he can automate something, he will do. But it’s not always a good thing. How do you see this?

Making People Useful Again

Paul: Well, first of all, I mean, what we’re doing, we’re in the IT space. And the unemployment rate in the US is under 4%, under 3%. You can’t hire anybody. And what we we’re doing is we’re taking people that are unemployable or not skilled in technology and training them. If we can take a person who has good personality skills, we can add to them systems, automation, that can help them deliver technology solutions to a certain level.

I think that the new economy can be bent to the will of making people useful again. I think there’s a tremendous need for making them useful. And I think it’s going to be interesting because there’s going to be people who are not willing to want to learn something new. That’s the hardest thing to overcome, is how do you motivate somebody who has invested the large majority of their life into something that is now obsolete. And how do you get over that? I think that’s something that we need to come to terms with.

But I think it’s happened. There’s been industries. You know, you look at here in America, there’s been many industries that have come and gone that have been overseas moved to Asia or different countries. And, now many of those people, I don’t think were properly mentored or properly brought along, if you will. They weren’t really stewarded well. They were sort of allowed to just exist or have a basic subsistence life. But I think they also allowed themselves to have that basic subsistence life. And I think our society, in some ways encouraged that through welfare and things like that.

Training People Who Are Willing To Learn

Paul: There’s a big argument there is, well, we should take care of these people. But if you didn’t have it, and they were forced to go out and get a job, then they’d learn the new technologies, and so what I’m trying to do is, I want to take people and offer them free training and see if they’re interested in technology jobs and offer them… and hire people that have a good personality. Because that’s the one thing I can’t train is, if you have a bad personality, I can’t do anything about that. But I can teach you how to talk to a person and say, “Oh, what’s your issue? Oh, okay. Well, let me get the right person for you.” I can do all sorts of levels at that.

And so I think that, in some ways, we have a lot of green fields coming up. You know, that there’s a lot of opportunity in ways that people would have never imagined they could have worked twenty years ago or ten years ago. But it’s what we do with that. I think technology enables that, just like it enables all these other things. These people who are unwilling to change, I don’t think we just dismiss them and say, “Well, tough for you.” I think we need to, as a society, figure out how to shepherd them along so that they feel okay to…

In some ways, it’s sort of like “Well, you made the wrong bet. You went into the wrong career that isn’t going to be a long-lasting career, that you’re not going to be able to retire into.” I mean, even doctors nowadays, who knows what’s going to happen with them in America with the healthcare changes. If you were a doctor, you were set for life. Well, now it may turn into no. You have a standard wage, and that’s the way it is. It’s an interesting change.

So, I agree that we need to be good stewards of technology. And I do think that there is a tremendous potential for it to do exactly what you’re saying, that, for all these people to just be lost and not to be able to do that. I think what will happen is people will realize a little bit too late. I think we’re early realizing this. That they will realize that “Oh my gosh, we need to make these people useful to the technology economy because that’s the only way it’s going to scale.” So that’s my two cents.

Falk: Very good one. Very good one. I liked your answer a lot. Thank you very much. Some points I do agree. Some points are on my radar, let’s say two. Some are completely new.

How Do You Motivate People To Change?

Falk: What I take out of it is, what is not new is education, education, education. What is new to me, motivation. The big point is to motivate the guys who don’t want to learn new things. That is interesting. That is really a point when you say, “Okay, wow! How I do motivate them to change with the time?” And that is maybe the bigger one instead of education. Education you have all the tools in the moment. They’re electronic, classic. Right? You can do it. You can measure it afterward. But to motivate them, it’s a very good question. I will chew on it, I would say.

Paul: That’s the work. That’s the real work is to motivate them. So it’s an emotional thing is to…

Falk: True. That’s very good. This is something for my wife. She’s very good in all emotional stuff. She’s a marketing officer. She created a lot of brands. She’s very famous in Ukraine. [She has her own community, I might say. When she, step by step, going for international, and she is my emotional brain. So, I am the technical brain, and we are absolutely… Some people say we, as a couple, are complete. Might be. Might be.

Paul: I understand. I know exactly what you mean.

Conclusion: “Stay Curious”

Paul: Well excellent. We’ve been talking with Falk Wolsky. He’s the chief innovation officer with Innogate Tech, and you’re headquartered in — what would you say? Both Ukraine and…

Falk: Kiev. The one is in Kiev, Ukraine, and Germany, Berlin. Let’s say Berlin.

Paul: Okay. And we’ve had a great talk about innovation, and there’ll be a lot of links in the show notes to both his company and some of the things we’ve talked about. Any final words you’d like to say?

Falk: If I say now “stay curious,” it’s too, too simple.

Paul: Well. That’s a good one to say. Stay curious. I like that.

Falk: Stay curious. The final thought is that I’m very thankful for the talk. I enjoyed it a lot.

Paul: Excellent.

Falk: It was very good questions. Thank you also for that. And I wish all of us, especially in this times we have, in 2020 good year. Let’s come safe through to the year. This is concerning most of us in the moment, I believe.

And stay curious is the key. Right? Because, especially we see our future is more and more speed up, uncertain, flexible, changing. Everything is not like it was yesterday already. We will only survive if we are flexible and curious.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. Good words. Well, thank you very much.

Falk: Thank you very much too. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Paul: It was a pleasure to talk to you too.

More Episodes:

This is Part 3 of 3 our interview with Falk Wolsky. If you missed Parts 1 & 2, you can listen to them here:

Part 1: Exploring Innovation & Inventing With Falk Wolsky
Part 2: What Sets Inventors Apart From Other People?

Show Notes:

What Sets Inventors Apart From Other People?

February 4, 2020 / Hannah / 0 Comments

On Episode 110 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re continuing our conversation with inventor Falk Wolsky! This time we’re talking about what sets inventors apart from other people! 

Sections

Introduction
The Necessity of Curiosity & Patience
Curiosity As a Child
Falk Wolsky’s First Invention
More of Falk’s Inventions
Making Money By Inventing
Being Able To Sell A Product: The Magic Of Timing
The Story is What You Sell
Building a Story For Your Invention Takes Time
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

What Sets Inventors Apart From Other People? – Part 2 of Our Conversation With Falk Wolsky

Introduction

Paul: We’re talking with Falk Wolsky. He’s the Chief Innovation Officer with Innogate Tech.

So, what’s different about your experience? How did you grow into this? What happened to you as opposed to somebody that you grew up next door to? What’s different? Why are you somebody that looks at a problem and can say, “Gee, I got all of these tools or parts out there that I can go and build stuff with, or I can invent a new part.” As opposed to somebody who you said, you know, with the pie chart, which we’ll provide a link to if you can provide that. Why are you sort of saying… You ended up in the 1%. And I’ll bet you didn’t, when you were five or six years old, say, “Oh, I’m going to be an inventor.” Maybe you did. But…

Falk: Let’s say I was eight, it seems.

Paul: Okay.

Falk: I cannot say.

Paul: But what’s the difference? What’s that trigger that makes you want to say or just see? Because I think that, as I’ve experienced my own innovation development, I just see things and I’ve been eager to talk to people, other innovators and inventors of why do you see differently? What makes it so obvious to people like you, to people like me? And how do you explain that to other people that don’t see it? That don’t even see things that might be obvious?

The Necessity of Curiosity & Patience

Falk: I might say… Let’s go back to my age of sixteen years old. And my parents actually gave me, really early, pretty heavy books. I mean, I was reading Albert Einstein in the— what is it? — ninth class. So before high school anyway. But this is nothing extraordinary. I was just interested.

Well, let’s go back. I had a lot of books. I was reading. So, I had an attention span. I could survive a question. I was not being frustrated fast. And, after my six years, I was unbelievable. A lot of time just in the nature. We had a garden outside from our hometown, and I spent kind of every weekend pure into nature. I was turning everything. Stones, animals, grass, trees. I learned about how, how things moved, what is inside. So, I was just turning it. I was curious about everything.

And the difference, I do believe, is curiosity compared or connected to state of mind, that you don’t accept things at the first moment. I have an insight trigger that, all the time, let me ask, when everybody runs in one direction, a huge crowd, one direction, the first thing I said, “Stop. Why? Why they run?” Maybe it’s not good. Maybe it’s good. I don’t know. Let’s look at it. At least have an opinion to it. Not simply run.

And this question to everything compared with the curiosity then leads into the possibility to combine to make these sparks out of… You have seen a lot. And you have read a lot. But you do all of this and, honestly, without stop, I break up and brain start to work, and I go to bed, and the brain hardly stops to work. And between that and I swallow again, everything was just really interesting.

I have also, like you, exchanged with a lot of people. But I read also a lot. Right? This is kind of, 50%. I cannot say. But let’s say 20% of time per day, at least, I read. And this in combination, I believe, it makes it, for me at least, curiosity is kind of… Everything is interesting. I want to turn everything, and see how it is working.

Curiosity As a Child

Falk: I had a lot of technology stuff at home. What I did, actually I damage it. I just was kind of, I had this screw or tools, what you need, and I just kind of look inside. What is inside the clock? What is inside the radio? What is inside electric power? I was hit seven times by this 220 volt.

Paul: I’ve been there myself, yes.

Falk: Yeah, so I was curious. Right? And, the good thing is I was patient enough to put things together again that they work. And most people would get frustrated fast, and they left things in this age damaged. And maybe this is also the point. This attention span by the early reading, that I could survive frustration and go through and see hope, the possibility that things will work again compared to curiosity, compared to, or connected to this. We question things. I don’t accept status quo. And that is maybe the key.

Paul: Interesting. Now, how did your parents react when you took apart a clock or a radio or something like that?

Falk: I must say, from the point that when I see them now — they’re pretty old now, eighty years already and more — they must have an unbelievable patience with me. It seems to me actually there was, at that time, when I was young, they were already forty-something, almost fifity — I get adopted. Right? They were already pretty old when they get me. Maybe Five. Maybe they just said, “Let him do.”

Paul: Right.

Falk: And to make it, this was the huge chance I had. I had a free space, and I had the free space to, to try, and I was not cleaning up the room. It wasn’t mess, but it was all full of this technology stuff. And they somehow accepted it. I cannot say they were supporting it, but they accepted it simply and was not, not caring maybe too much or they were smiling. But it did allow me this freedom to have all of this.

And I might say, in all the time we say clean up in childhood, maybe this is bad. Maybe this small mess or this let them do helps.

Paul: Well, it sounds like they didn’t scold you, which is a big benefit.

Falk: Yes. I might say yes. This is true.

Falk Wolsky’s First Invention

Paul: Interesting. So, what was your first recollection of doing something innovative that was beyond just something that was interesting to yourself, but other people paid attention to.

Falk: The very, very first patent I wrote was virtual acoustic renderer. I was that time selling studio electronics — synthesizers, mixing poles and all this stuff, because I was DJ. I was young. I loved techno music — boom, boom and so on. And so, I was soldering a lot of stuff. But then I came to, what is, if you can calculate like in the [inaudible], a 3D rendering, but you can calculate sound. Actually, it was existing somehow to make architecture possible but not in the effect scene. In the effect scene, we still had a very classic compressors, echos, delays, and all this stuff.

Paul: What year was this about?

Falk: Oh, 2000 maybe. Something like this. It was roughly the time when I found my first company, agency. And, what happened, I got a lot of attention because at that time I was employee. So, they said, “Young boy, this is our invention.”

I said, “No, no, no. It’s my invention.”

“No,” they said, “No, this is our invention.”

“How’s that?”

“No, because you’re an employee.”

“Yes, this is an employee. This and an employee innovation.”

So, I was really angry.

Paul: You learned an important lesson.

Falk: So, I was a little bit disgusted with them. It was very nice to me. Gave it to me. I resigned immediately, and since then, I’m a freelancer. That was really the first time I got, recognition about an invention I did.

Paul: Wow. So that was pretty bold. I mean, that was a pretty big invention in the year 2000, to be able to do that type of modeling. It was not really easy at that time.

Falk: It was not. And now it comes from curiosity.

More of Falk’s Inventions

Falk: But fantastic story to tell. Can you believe? I’m born in the Eastern part of Germany. So actually, till I’m roughly twelve, we had no access to modern computers, let’s say. Exactly today, I shared on my LinkedIn, a picture of the computers of Eastern Democratic Republic we had. And I was experimenting on them. I cannot say I’m the super hacker. No, no. I was just experimenting and trying a little bit and was curious. And then we had the C64 Commodore, like everyone. And already on C64, I made a lot of music with trackers, and then we had Amiga. Wow. Huge. Amazing. Amiga 600 I had.

And then I’m stumbling on ray tracing program. It was calling. The first private ray tracer. You could 3D generate pictures at home. That was something completely outstanding. You couldn’t believe. We have 320 and 256 pixel. And this computer was calculating days. For once, in the picture, you could even watch, pixel by pixel, how it calculate backwards. It was not that clever like we do today. We have a lot of shortcuts invented since then in the 3D modeling.

So, I was watching these pixels calculating, but I did understand, as the documentation, it was very nice and described everything, how this works, how this ray tracing actually. What is the fundamental principle of following and live stream back from the object to the camera and so on. And that brings me to the idea, why not to do this with sound, and actually then you can…interpolate. You can say, okay, sound has these characteristics. It has resonance, it has some material, characteristics on the wall, on the instrument and so on and so on.

But this ray tracer from the Amiga 600, it was the birth of the idea, I might say. It was where it comes from.

Making Money By Inventing

Paul: Wow. Wow. So now, as you started to come up with these technology ideas, you learned that important lesson that you work for somebody, and they said, “Oh, no. We own it.” So, you started to crossover from ideas to the business side of it to understand that there’s a business aspect to it. How did that go? And what did you learn, and what lessons would you say to other people? Because, inventing something is one thing. Making money out of it is another thing.

Falk: That is a pretty hard thing. I completely agree. I had pretty struggling years with everyone, because mostly likely, I started after the dot-com bubble. So, all IT things was already suspicious in Germany especially. So, I had hard years with low income, I might say. I was running my own agency, and I did very classic things — websites first, corporate design, styling for companies, small programs. Then they asked me, “Can you do something that we can manage the content on website by itself?”

“Ah, database. You need. I can do it.” Develop.

“Can I sell something on a website?”

“Yes, you can sell.” Ecommerce, in this case. I did payment APIs and all this stuff. Very, very classic stuff. Right? No innovation here. That was for sure, some years.

Being Able To Sell A Product: The Magic Of Timing

Falk: And, then it comes to wonderful thing when we invented this coffee machine. And exactly as you say, this step, we’re still struggling. The coffee machine with this Twitter, is a nice thing. And actually, if you do it right, it could be a wonderful thing for brands, for customers, for food service and so on. And even though he liked it a lot that time. But wrong timing. It was too early.

At that time, investors didn’t even heard, in Germany, from IoT. They didn’t understand. There was still an ecommerce. There was a lot of rocket internet, and there was a lot of ecommerce stores, and that was the huge invention. So, we actually, we developed it, we presented it, but we did not land it. We was not able to make something bigger out of it. Actually, after one and a half years, we just gave up. This also could happen because we was not able to convince people, that time, how cool is it.

As you can imagine, it was 2009. And in 2016, they present a product so near to our first prototypes that we was frustrated a lot. And this is the magic of timing. They had the better timing for it.

Paul: Well, I’ve always said, “It’s not inventing the product. It’s being able to sell the product.”

Falk: Exactly. Exactly.

Paul: This is probably before your time, but there was a product called WordPerfect, and WordPerfect was not the better product, but it was sold much better than Word at the time. And, the story works out that Word was a better product and eventually got better sales, but it’s a fascinating story of, if you haven’t heard or read about WordPerfect, you should go back and do that. More for our listeners. But, I mean, that’s really the story between Mac and Windows. I don’t know if you’re a Mac or a Windows user, but the many people, the Mac ecosystem is very mature. But it has to be sold. And Windows was easier to sell.

Falk: Well, the most sales I had was actually, in all this time till of 2013 was my brain, that is IT stuff. Right? I made a lot of solution. I connected systems. I helped people to manage the different data stacks they have and so on and so on. So, this was more fundamental. And it was easy to sell because people needed this solution.

Products came later. But exactly as you say, that there’s a large gap between a technical solution, an idea, or a fundamental new way, how to see things, and how to sell. So, I collected, in this time, valuable experience exactly about this, what I call fundamentals. Right? Technology, business model. And all this together shapes products. And not technology itself, not the marketing itself and so on.

The Story is What You Sell

Paul: So, well, let’s get into that a little bit. How do you cross that chasm of selling? Do you see something that a customer has a need for and approach them? Or do they approach you? Or is it a combination? Or how do you talk about that?

Falk: Hmmm. That’s very interesting and fantastic question. And, that is the hard part, I might say. When we come back to the pen, somehow it happened all in this first twenty minutes. Because I saw the situation. I saw the kid. I saw him struggling, and I do understand it was all about attention, and all our economy is now already about attention. Do we have fundamental attention? Not problem but it’s in the room. Right? The topic. So that was easy. And let’s say all that was born in this — the story was there, and the story is what you sell.

Now I work already since, one and a half year on the product. It’s still a little bit in stealth mode. But it’s somehow in redefinition of how we work and working place and IT sector. And it took me, honestly, one year to find a good story for it. I understood what it is. I had seen clear where to go. I was already in a product development with my team. But I was not finding a good story, the catch, where, where you can explain what actually it is and why it is so good. It took one year to find it.

And it, I cannot say when it happened, somehow maybe in an airplane. Maybe it was even on a back flight from New York. It could be. I had six hours undisturbed, and I believe I did it in that time. I just opened the PowerPoint, and I start the question. “What will do if you go now to an investor? What you will tell him?” And the investor is somehow a little bit of an, of a preflight for the customer. Only if you convince investors you will have enough power to later on tell the story to the client. And investors are very critic. Right? So, we have just elevate the pitch, and we must fit or not. And I believe only by then, by this strong focus to this question, I was able to solve it.

Building a Story For Your Invention Takes Time

Falk: And I came actually to the very remarkable and fast thing. Let’s say if John, and John is the CIO, the chief information officer from big companies, and they have all the same problems. They need to deliver applications to their people. And they have not enough resources or not enough money to actually – the desire for application is kind of several ten times higher than John will ever be able to deliver.

So, I do develop a system. I mean, low code is nothing new, but we do it in a very nice way when you actually save, you can develop in ten times less. You don’t weeks. You need some days. You need a lot of less people. Instead of nine in a team, you need two people. That’s wonderful for an IT budget.

But the story behind is I have very first picture of John jumping out of the window. Right? Because he has the big problem. And the next picture is like on the fire workers, they have some time when they secure people. And that’s a nice picture. It’s a story, right? When you fall down on this pillow, we are glad for him, and he’s now safe because, well, we show him how we can deliver faster the applications. In some way, this gets visual. It gets tangible. People can understand there’s a pain from someone and so on. And so, we build a story on that, but it took me one year.

Paul: Interesting.

Conclusion

Paul: Well excellent. we’ve been talking with Falk Wolsky. He’s the chief innovation officer with Innogate Tech. And we’ve had a great talkabout innovation and there’ll be a lot of links in the shownotes to both his company and some of the things we talked about.

Well, thank you very much.

Falk: Thank you very much too. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Paul: It was a pleasure to talk to you too.

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of 3 our interview with Falk Wolsky. If you missed Part 1 you can listen to it here:

Part 1: Exploring Innovation & Inventing With Falk Wolsky