On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Shapiro. Steve is the author of a new book called Invisible Solutions. He spent a number of decades speaking and writing and working with corporations all around the idea of innovation. And how companies can reframe and relook at problems to get better results. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services, that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Shapiro. Stephen is a innovation instigator, hall of fame speaker, author of six books including the most recent one that I wanted to have him on the show to talk about called Invisible Solutions. So Stephen, welcome to show. Stephen Shapiro: Hey Brian. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Actually, we got connected, I was interviewing Thomas Wedellsborg a few weeks ago about his new book, and we serendipitously started talking about an example that you talk about all the time. This idea of how do you reframe problems. And we want to start there and give a little bit of background on how you got into this innovation space. Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So, I started off life and I guess I still am a bit of a nerd. I loved math and physics and all that stuff. Growing up, I was in the math club, went to college, majored as an engineer, left university, went to work for Accenture, and I was doing a lot of engineering work. And in fact, in the early nineties, I was actually involved with something called Business Process Reengineering, which was basically efficiency work. We would optimize businesses. And one day discovered that the more we optimize the company's processes, the more they would downsize the workforce. And I had just had this existential meltdown in. And took a leave of absence, reinvented myself. And in 1995, 1996 timeframe, I decided to focus on growth and innovation. Wasn't a hot topic that far back, but that's what I put my hat on and I've been loving it ever since. That's all I've been doing for 25 years.Brian Ardinger: You've had the great opportunity to see the evolution of innovation specifically in a corporate environment and how companies look at innovation, how they treat it, how they execute on it. What are some of the things that you are seeing that people are getting wrong about innovation? Stephen Shapiro: Well, it's been interesting, like you said, having been in for 25 years, I've seen the evolution. It started off as basically R & D. And then it started sort of in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, it started to gain some traction in terms of it being a companywide, an enterprise wide endeavor, rather than just sort of this little group. But I think the thing which I've seen most organizations get wrong is they collapse innovation with creativity. And they believe that quantity of ideas will drive value for the organization. And from my experience, you might get there eventually, but it's an extremely expensive and slow way to go about it. So that to me is the biggest mistake is a focus on ideas and quantity rather than focus on questions, opportunities, and solutions that drive the greatest level of value. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that's an interesting topic because you talk to corporations that are spinning up innovation labs, and they're putting maybe 5 or 10 ideas in a year, hoping that one of those five or 10 will end up being Uber or whatever the next thing is. And