Lessons - The Human Side Of Innovation | Mauro Porcini , Chief Design Officer at Pepsi

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. So the book he wrote, the human side of innovation. It's interesting because when I think innovation incorrectly, I only think of, how do I innovate the product? I don't think of design, I don't think of creativity, I don't think of brand, I'm like, how do I build something better than what already exists? But that's incorrect because that's not how people, that's not how people purchase and how people communicate. People need a story behind the product. It's not just functioning utility, there's always a story. Now whether or not it's something you create or whether or not, if you don't create it, then the customer is going to create a story in their head about that product. So talk to me about the human side of innovation, the side that we should focus on that you've built your entire career around. What is the human side of innovation? What is, how does design and innovation intersect? Look, there are, first of all, two dimensions of this humanity in the world of innovation. And they are somehow clarified in the subtitle, people in love with people. The first dimension is the second people in this sentence, essentially the fact that we need to refocus all our innovation efforts on the human being, on cleaning value for people, real value, not value for the company, economic value, value for people first. We can talk more later about what I really mean with that. But the second dimension is the first set of people, innovators, entrepreneurs, designers of the world. And love somehow, summarize everything that these people do for the other people. Why design? I mean, and this is the big misunderstanding about the world design in our society. A lot of people think the design is aesthetic. Somebody think that is form and function, when we are lucky, you start to associate the aesthetic factor to the function. Design can be applied to different dimensions. You study industrial design or product design, you design products. You study brand design and communication, you design packaging, communication, pieces, eventually more and more. There is the digital world, you design fashion, you design clothing. So you can apply design to different kind of substrates, to different kind of objects and solutions and experiences and brands. But in general, the designers, they all do one thing. This is what you study at school. A school they teach you to observe people, understand their needs, their wants, their frustrations, their dreams, and figuring out solutions for them. This is the number one focus. That's why, for instance, at Design School, we don't call these people consumers. We don't care about that consuming our products or buying our products. We call them people, eventually, eventually users, because we focus on the use of our products. What drives us is not to sell them stuff, is to create value for them. Now these needs, all of them, all together, the needs of humanity, can be summarized and decodified in the mask of pyramid. From the bottom, physiological needs, safety needs, all the way to the needle, surface pressure, sense of belonging, connecting with others. All the way to the top of the pyramid, sending yourself something bigger than you. The summary of all these needs, create what we call happiness. If we fulfill all these needs from the bottom to the top, we reach our happiness. And this is our life. Our journey in life is to reach the kind of happiness. So designers essentially are trained as school to create fragments of this broader social happiness. If the world would be driven by designers and not by business leaders and not by other kind of profiles, would that be worth? Now designers have also taught a school that on top of this dimension of the human being, what we call desirability, you need to consider two other dimensions for your product to go to market. Because at the end of the day, designers create products that are producible in scale and you can sell. And there are artists and is another kind of discipline. So there are two dimensions, addition of dimension, feasibility. So you need to understand technology, science, data, to make these things a reality. And then by ability, you need to understand the business model. And so these three pillars are the pillars of design thinking, desirability, byability and feasibility, the human factor, technology and business, or translated in the vernacular of these companies. Biggest model is what this company is called innovation, or eventually if the desirability is the primary focus over the other two variables, this is human center innovation. So design is nothing else than the only education that forms you to drive innovation. There is nothing else. If you study business, you study the viability part, eventually they teach you something about the desirability component, even though they look at that as a, again, a level of the marketing mix, a level to succeed, but not the only one. You may succeed with a very mediocre product because you are able to use the other levels in a great way and you're still a successful business leader. But they don't teach you mathematics, physics, material science, you know, art core technology. If you study technology, if you study chemistry or biology or engineering, they don't teach you the human factor, anthropology, semi-artic, human science. So in design school, they teach you these three dimensions. The problem is that then all these designers get out of school and they go in companies and companies truck them in a very niche definition, job description. They ask them to be a static science, to design a static or a product, and again, sometimes if you're lucky it's forming function, but rarely they're leveraged for what they can really do. And so one year, two years, five, ten, fifteen, twenty of these, at the end of the day also these designers forget what they learn and school and they lose their way. Some of them try to change the system, the dreamers, you know, this is what happened to me. I was like a naive dreamer, twenty seven, I entered three AM in Italy in the periphery of the American Empire. I was not hard in San Paul, Minnesota, I was hired in Italy as a design coordinator for the consumer business. It was one of the six businesses of the company just for Europe. So imagine it was anyway a small part of the big business. And here I am with this dream of changing the way three AM does innovation, leveraging as I'm thinking, infusing human centricity, obviously it was a naive dream. And I say this in the book, if you don't have a dream, you'll never be able to make it come true. And so you need a dream and a dream is by definition naive at the beginning, and by the finisher you'll face so many people that will try to stop you from dreaming, they will laugh about your dream, they won't understand your dream. But the real innovators, the one that keeps pushing, no matter all this resistance from the system, but also trying to connect the dream with the reality of the business, of the process of the company, of the reality, the living. This is what they do, they combine the dream with execution and operations.