On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is the author of the new book, The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food.  Vaughn and I talk about his well-researched account of how some of the world's top chefs and their teams approach culinary innovation and what it means for innovation teams of all kinds. Let's get started. 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. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 are talking to Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management, previously worked at Google in California has a Harvard PhD and he's author of a new book called The Uncertainty Mindset:  Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. Welcome to the show, Vaughn.Vaughn Tan: Fantastic. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to talk about this topic of innovation in the culinary space. Restaurants have been around forever. And when you think of innovation, you don't always think restaurants and culinary space. And so I wanted to dig into this particular topic. Maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about your eclectic background. Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. I'm from Singapore originally. And so I guess it's kind of like a trope that if you're a Singaporean, you have an unhealthy interest in food.  This is more or less true. That kind of only started to show up in my research a little bit later. I think where I got interested in the questions I'm asking in the book, it actually started when I was working at Google. When I was there, one of the most interesting things that I noticed, I was there for about three years, was that the really interesting groups that came up with really innovative ideas we're the ones that weren't sort of organized the way management, conventional wisdom, would say you should organize the innovation group. They were the ones that bubbled up from the ground up. People found each other. The goals were kind of like amorphis and  shifting a lot. The themes that eventually showed up in the book.I first noticed in an inchoate way, when I was working at Google.  When I went back to get my PhD, I was interested in finding out more about how organizations could do something like what I saw at Google. Create this environment in which people and teams could self create projects that resulted in innovation. And when I was doing the research, everyone who tries to do like a research project for a PhD, you have to chose your setting. You have to choose the site that you will go look at trying to understand more about the phenomenon that you're interested in. A lot of people who study innovation, will study things like a microchip foundary or something like that.I just sort of, I thought initially, maybe I should try something, which is a little bit weird. What I always tell people is there's tons of reasons why restaurants and food R & D are good place to study innovation. The biggest one is that if you study food R & D the cycle time for innovation is very short.So as a researcher, what you see is you see many, many cycles that you can start to see patterns across all those cycles. But actually the true reason, which is not less good, it's just also a good reason for it is that it's just much more fun. You know, studying chefs, being in restaurants, be