[Music] [Mike Pell] Hi. I'm Mike Pell. Welcome to The Microsoft Garage here in New York City. The Garage is Microsoft's worldwide innovation program where we help employees to take their ideas and their passion and make them real. What we've been doing a lot of lately is taking our new technologies and new approaches and try to get to leaps forward, real breakthroughs, much more quickly than we've ever done before. And we like to call that AI-Powered Innovation.
Throughout my career as both a designer, technologist, and entrepreneur, I've always tried to push past the ordinary, to the edge, to do something that was highly creative, very clever, very inspired. But that's not easy. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of work, and sometimes a bunch of luck.
The nature of innovation is something that you cannot rush. True innovations are things that are very, very rare, very hard to put together because they require a certain amount of people, and timing, and materials, and opportunity.
We know that when you get to a true breakthrough, they're completely obvious. You look at them in retrospect and think, "Wow, they should have always been this way." But the truth is that happens very, very rarely.
When you talk about creativity versus innovation, it's much easier to understand that we can all be highly creative, almost on-demand. That's why you're here. You're clever. You're imaginative. You have incredible skills to do things quickly to help people realize their own ideas. But innovation is a different story. Innovation is really pushing past the expected, something that is incredibly better than where we are today.
But the fact is, you cannot manufacture innovation. You can't time-box it and, on-demand, think that you're going to come up with something truly innovative. It happens every once in a while, but that is something that just doesn't happen every day.
The truth is that we can accelerate the innovation process very easily, and I'm going to show you that today. Oftentimes, we use Microsoft Copilot to help speed up the ideation, which is sometimes the very, very first thing that you would do. In this example, I'm working on a project where I have to figure out how to create a high performance athletic wear, that's 100% sustainable materials. So I asked Copilot, "You are the world's most creative product designer. Generate 5 innovative ideas for producing athletic wear that's made from 100% sustainable materials but still maintains its performance and durability qualities. Be wildly creative but practical since we have to keep this affordable to purchase and cost-effective to manufacture." So after either saying that or typing that in and hitting return, Copilot is able to generate a set of ideas that I probably wouldn't have gotten to very quickly. Even if I had done the research, I may now have come up with bamboo fiber blends, algae-based fabrics, and if I scroll down, recycled ocean plastics, hemp and organic cotton mix, and mushroom leather.
So these are some really interesting ideas, but I need to see these side by side, so I asked Copilot to create a table for me with certain attributes to help me see the differences between them. Very quickly, it formats a table where I can see the material aspects, benefit, performance, cost efficiency, and the rationale for why Copilot put this in the list in the first place.
That's really great. I'm starting to get a better idea of what I want to go with, but I can also ask Copilot to make a recommendation. In this case, which one to pursue? It thinks that recycled ocean plastics of all the attributes that is reported out, has the best chance of being desirable yet affordable. So I think that we can go with that. So in a very short amount of time, Copilot has helped me to make something that I can probably base my pitch on, but would have taken me days or weeks in the past.
The reality of using AI is that it is helping to speed up everything we do if we now learn how to use this in different ways. But the truth is, AI is not innovation in and of itself. It can help us to get to very clever ideas and be highly creative. But just by itself, it's not the innovative part.
It will accelerate your creativity. We've all seen this. It can generate ideas that we wouldn't have gotten to, it'll come up with visual aspects and directions that maybe we're just not good at. So in the end, AI can really help us toward innovation. But it's not the important part. Creativity and you are the important part.
Another example is using Adobe Firefly to help me to go to the next part of my innovation cycle. Once I've ideated, now I want to show someone something visual.
I can easily go into Firefly and say, "Create some designs for athletic wear made from Recycled Ocean Plastics that are highly desirable yet remain sustainable." This is this idea that Copilot generated for us. We plug that into Firefly, and very quickly, it generates some visual imagery that helps to inspire me and open up my mind to what the possibilities are. There's one in particular that catches my eye right away. It's in the lower left. The reason that it is is that it's showing a high performance garment that looks very, very lightweight, yet it's showing elements of the plastic bottle that was maybe floating in the ocean, some other elements that are helping me to make the connection between these recycled materials and high performance fabric. So given that, I can download a copy of this that I can use later, and Firefly very, very quickly has helped me to get something that I can show other people to share my idea.
And that is a huge help in accelerating our process.
Given that we're all being asked to innovate more quickly, we have to find ways to both personally and professionally leap ahead, get much further than we are as far as our skill set, our abilities, and being able to do things consistently that look brilliant. I've told you before, I don't think that innovation can be done on-demand. But I'm pretty sure that being brilliant can be and is done on-demand all of the time. I know that you do it. I have to do it myself. And one of the ways that I've been able to do that more often is by going through a mind shift.
I've had to prioritize going fast over being perfect. I know this sounds horrible to any designer, having to prioritize, not doing an absolute perfect job, but by getting it done on time, you're actually helping your team get to what they need to get too much more quickly. So for me, I've had to learn to prioritize speed over perfection.
Another thing that we need to do to be able to leap forward is work much faster, which means we need to show our work and show our ideas and concepts to our teammates and to management. Showing those bold ideas in a few minutes is more than easy by using Adobe Express. It has so many capabilities built in, that for this project that we were just working on, taking a sustainable garment and being able to make it desirable yet affordable is something that I can illustrate using Express very quickly. I go in to start, and I say, "You know what? I want to do a presentation so I can show this to my team." I go in and I look through all of the templates of all the different presentation types. I pick this one because it feels a bit sustainable and green to me, and I start working to edit the text very, very quickly. So I'm using the name of the fictitious company I want to work with this time. I go in and I pull in that image. Remember, we downloaded that image that we generated in Adobe Firefly. I crop it, and all of a sudden, I have a very, very quick impression. And that's all I need to go fast, right? I need just an impression of the idea to show to my team.
I download that, and I'm done. It's that easy to, I think, prioritize speed over perfection to get to the next level.
Hacking together some kind of a prototype is extremely helpful in not only being able to present ideas, but to get people some clarity on what you're actually after. In this particular case, we're actually working on an advertisement, a video that shows what this product could be, and that's how we're going to sell it. So I can go back into Express and just as easily start a new video project. I pick a video template that feels like the way that I want it to feel. I start editing the text again, and I start with the question, what if? What if your clothes came from the ocean? That's an interesting new tagline. I'm not a marketing guy, but that could work.
And then I pull in some of this imagery that I had before, combine that into my timeline so not only do I have a setup, but now I have the punchline. I have the product and I have the feeling that I want very, very quickly. And I can go off and create an MP4 that I can show my team.
And that quickly, I can go to Adobe Express, make a video, and get it to my teammates fast enough to get some interesting feedback. And that's so important these days in being able to truly innovate because you have to be able to get feedback early to be able to make adjustments.
You also have to really have a mindset shift in taking everybody with you on this journey. The journey to innovation is not easy. You need as many people aware of what you're doing as possible. In the old days, we used to keep the secret. Now we used to do a lot of things that that we would not show until we were done. But these days, we found that we really need to include our team and collaborate in ways that we never have before to be able to get that speed.
And the true value of collaboration is not only in collecting all of those amazing different thoughts from very different life experiences and different perspectives, but the real value of collaboration is that we're doing it together so that the team feels a sense of cohesion.
It feels like when you're done, you haven't just shown up and gone, "Ta-da! Here's this amazing new idea. You've actually done it with your teammates." Another really interesting mind shift that I've had to go through is thinking that we need to present just one concept in the realm of innovation and not three. This is very difficult because a lot of times, whether it's a client or other teams or management, they're going to want to see a whole bunch of ideas. But as designers and highly creative people you know that being able to get to one concept is always going to be the better way to present something. So even though we can create things, whether it's a PowerPoint deck, we do something very quickly with generative AI and Firefly, or we do that movie, like I just did in Adobe Express, instead of having three different things to show people, or instead of trying to combine them into some kind of a Frankenstein presentation where all of the ideas are getting jumbled around, we really need to be able to shift to just presenting one idea, and that is our best idea. And in the realm of AI-powered innovation, that is a big shift. For us, it would look something like this. We come up with an interesting tagline. Who thought their next lightweight workout jacket would be 100% made out of recycled ocean plastic? Well, we did. Planet safe, name of the company, leads directly to planetary repair. That is exactly the message that I want. Coupled with the movie that we made and some of the other imagery, this would be enough to get the idea across quickly.
And just remember, when you're presenting to other people within the realm of trying to do innovation very quickly, it's always helpful if you make other people think it was their idea just as much or more than yours. That is a key skill. When we're working together across the globe within small groups or remotely, being able to have people feel like they're bought in and that they're part of the solution is incredibly important to moving your innovative ideas forward through your organization. So next time, try that out.
So we've talked about the nature of innovation. We've talked about the need for all of us to find ways to leap ahead, both personally and professionally. But once we're doing that great work on-demand consistently, we've got to find a way to stay ahead. The pace of business and what we're required to do is just too great to not find that rhythm to be able to keep doing this every day. One of the best ways we found to do that is by involving other people.
You really have to get your entire team and as much of your organization as you can, comfortable with the idea that you're going to be pushing. You're going to be trying new things. You're going to be experimenting and being curious. That's going to bring with it a need for you to be able to validate concepts that you bring to other people.
The best way that we found to validate concepts early is by using Microsoft Copilot to be able to generate some objective questions that you can go ask people early. So no matter what stage you're in, whether you're creating a working prototype, or you're just telling a story, or showing mood boards, it doesn't matter. Getting some questions to ask people that are objective enough that they turn into some data points is incredibly important. You can start by saying, "Hey, give us five objective questions to help validate this concept." And in the case of this project that we've been working through, the sustainable garment, this is what Copilot generates. Things that help us understand whether the consumer or the customer in this case even cares about this category, how they might react to it. Once we have some answers like that, we can start to figure out how can we do more research. What are the things can Copilot help us with, competitive landscape, product market fit, even some marketing blurbs that we can try out on people to see how it lands.
We also have learned that we can't use data to try to justify something. Yes, data is important, and, yes, data is going to help us to make some of the good decisions that we need to make. But we'd like to try to use data to help to persuade people to understand that there's something here to pay attention to. Ordinarily, most of our data ends up in Excel. But we're starting to think that just showing regular Excel sheets may not be as convincing or compelling as you need them to be. And so with new products like Adobe Firefly, we can take data and move it into a form that is really more compelling, more interesting, and more clear in some cases. In this case of the sustainable garment project, I had an idea that I wanted to combine the data that we had gathered by talking to people early with the notion of something very visually stimulate, something that would really make people take notice.
Very easily in Firefly, I can say, take something that is data and overlay it onto the garment itself to attract interest. Make it bright and colorful to attract attention. And when Firefly did this experiment for me, there's something in the upper right corner that really caught my eye, the notion that data was overlaid on the garment. So with one picture, one image, whether it's in a movie or in a slide, I can really capture people's attention and start to hone in on the important part, which is I need to tell the story. I need to get a message across very quickly and the data to substantiate that there really is something here. So still within Firefly, I can start to add some text. I export this right away and, of course, take it into PowerPoint where I can use Microsoft Copilot again to help me craft some language, to help me tell a better story so I can be more convincing with the data that I have that there really is something here.
So given that, we can go back to try to attract some sponsorship early, meaning somebody in the organization that is either an executive or a very influential person who given enough information and some data, can help us to try to move this idea forward within the group. This is critically important. No matter how great your idea is, it's going to go nowhere without executive sponsorship. That's just the way things work. So the earlier we do that, the better. And pro tip, do not ask for budget. Do not ask for headcount. Just ask that your potential sponsor would be that person that you can go back to once you have enough data and you've proved that there really is something here. You're just asking that they would be interested enough to help you move this idea forward at the right time. That's been incredibly successful for us.
The next part of staying ahead is challenging yourself daily on both a personal and a professional level.
One of the best ways to do this is to just look around, is to pick your head up, out of your to-do list and out of your backlog and just look around at everything that's happening.
Turns out that Adobe Stock is a great way for-- I do this myself.
For this project I'm working on, I can just type in a few terms that pertain to that that will maybe illuminate something I hadn't looked at before or bring some imagery to mind that will spark a new idea. In this case, I can just type in recycled ocean plastics and I'll get a bunch of images that I hadn't seen before. And as I scroll around, there's one in particular that makes me think about the symbol for recycle. And should we be using that in some of our advertising or in the way that we present this idea? Good or bad, this is a new idea I wouldn't have had without using something like stock to help me look through thousands or even tens of thousands of images to get new ideas.
One of the other really important things for us is to try to stay curious. We all get busy, and we all get locked into the things that we're supposed to deliver. But that natural curiosity is what's going to lead us to something that ultimately will be the most important discovery of all is that we're learning. We're trying new things, and we're just not complacent. We're just not ready to just rest on whatever answers have been given to us or whatever's worked in the past. That curiosity is what helps all of us move forward.
And finally, in the Garage, we experiment continuously. I think you'll find being able to just set up small experiments to just try things is the best way to not only learn whether something has merit, but to also show other people that you're willing to try, that you're not just going to pick one plan, stick to it, and see what happens. It's this constant experimentation that really helps to show you what works and what doesn't.
And finally, AI-powered innovation is something that we do all the time that you can easily do with all the tools you have at your disposal.
But trust me, it's never ever, ever about the technology.
It's really not.
It's always about the people side of the equation.
And it's easy to know why. It's because despite having the most amazing tools on the planet available to us at any time.
It's always the people and their creativity that do all the work. We're the ones that unlock these amazing new innovations and breakthroughs. It's your creativity that fuels all of this.
So try some of these things, let us know what you think, and thank you very much.
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