Innovation Within provides simple-to-use software for streamlining teaching, learning, and implementing innovation, entrepreneurship, and customer discovery. We sat down with the founder, James O’Connor to learn more about the newest platform upgrade.

Santa Cruz Works: Welcome James. Let’s start with you telling us a little bit about your journey.

James O'Connor: My journey started after I retired from Microsoft, and focused on tow-in surfing. I got pulled into being the interim Chief Technology Officer at a startup Steve Blank had started. After three months, I started developing my own ideas around building a software platform to help entrepreneurs de-risk and validate their startup ideas using a scientific approach to build a business model, then validating it by talking to customers.  The objective? Find out if they really were onto something by using that process to iterate, and to codify a valid business model so they'd be in a better position to raise money, meet a real customer need, and get to know their customers in the process. Steve Blank was mentoring me. As I developed the idea, he offered to give us some seed funding. And so that got us going! Soon after, we started talks with the National Science Foundation (“NSF”). They gave us a research grant to push this idea forward. And then they became our first customer and that got us into existence.

Santa Cruz Works: That's great. The Santa Cruz Works Accelerator has been working with you over the last two years. Some 30 Santa Cruz startups have used your product and loved it. You have a new version of your platform close to launch.  What can you tell us about it? 

James O'Connor: We are calling it v3, although we don't really go by version numbers. It has been a year in the making. We do customer discovery ourselves to learn what they want. Our customers include accelerator programs like Santa Cruz Works, the AlchemistX in the Silicon Valley, as well as dozens of enterprise companies and academic institutions. We gathered ideas from many verticals and customers. This resulted with us updating a lot of the backend infrastructure for faster performance and scalability. We are also completely redoing the user interface with more modern UI elements that didn't exist when we first built the platform.  And we are finally  adding features to the platform that I wanted to build from day one, but our customers never asked for them. Why? Because we have a rule that we don't put features in until our customer discovery proves that it solves a real problem.

Santa Cruz Works: Can you give us examples?

James O'Connor: We started at the beginning – the entry point for using our software – filling out a business model canvas. In our customer discovery, we learned it is kind of a complicated and overwhelming process that results in many hypotheses that never get tested . So we came up with what we call the “Skinny” canvas, a simplified business model canvas that only focuses on three things: who is the customer, what is the problem you solve for them, and what value does it deliver to them . We've had that for a while in the platform and it's been really successful. But what we're finding out is that more and more users, such as Enterprise and peer research environments, want to invent their own canvases. They don't need the standard Alex Osterwalder or the Lean Canvas. So we added Canvas customization: the ability for you to design your own business model canvas with whatever segments you need organized how you see fit. And you can start off with just a few of the segments, and then reveal more as the teams progress. If you start a team with a skinny canvas of just those three boxes, they're much more focused. They know exactly who to talk to and what questions they need to ask. They find out quickly if they are  solving a real problem, and how to develop salient value propositions. Next, they will be prompted to explore revenue streams, and other aspects of the business model. And it emerges.  We provide an emergent business model canvas.

Santa Cruz Works: Wonderful. What about your interview recording module?

James O'Connor: Recording interviews and transcribing them is such a mainstay feature of the platform. We have completely redone the entire module so that you can now bulk upload audio files. Customers often have a folder of interview audio files from sources outside our platform. Point our platform at the folder or cloud storage, and it will upload those in the background, transcribe each one, and create an interview for you. I think that's a really huge feature that's going to make it a lot easier for our users to get through a lot of customer discovery. And bonus, we have a really sophisticated mechanism to allow you to annotate these interviews and surface the insights as evidence for your hypotheses. 

Santa Cruz Works: Tell us about your “insights” functionality.

James O'Connor: For example, if you are an Enterprise using our program over and over for many different projects, you want your researchers or the people doing customer discovery, to surface repeating issues such as customer pain points. Next you need to categorize them in a consistent way so that you can do reporting across the many projects to see how often this particular issue or pain point comes up. We now enable you to easily categorize issues, create new categories, or simply use the standard category set. We revamped this whole module we call the Insights View. It allows you to see all the insights that came from customer discovery and search and  filter through them so you can reflect on them. 

Additionally, the whole app looks cleaner. It has a more modern “light look” including a light and dark mode. 

Santa Cruz Works: For new users, are there guides?

James O'Connor: Our platform is a combination of methodology and workflow. So to use it successfully it’s important to have a good understanding of both. So we are creating in-app Guides that help you understand what to do and why. We've worked hard to make it easy to use. It's kind of like driving a new car. It might be easy to drive a Tesla, but if you've never driven one, you might get stuck. We guide and teach the methodology at the same time. You will never get stuck. 

Santa Cruz Works: You upgraded the infrastructure?

James O'Connor:  Yes, to improve performance and security.  Everything’s just gotten better and faster.  We deployed a new security framework and various new technologies to bring our existing data and workflows into the bleeding edge.  This has actually allowed us to move into the enterprise market.  We did a project last year with a large semiconductor manufacturer. We’re in really good shape there. This year we’re engaged with many more enterprise customers because they see this sweet spot in our platform.

Santa Cruz Works: Thank you for the background information on your upcoming release.  And now for a demo!