Episode #104

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (00:04): Hello. This podcast is care of Speakers Associates, the global speaker bureau representing a select group of the world’s finest thinkers and thought leaders. Founded in 1999, today Speakers Associates operate out of nine offices across seven countries covering the UK, Europe and Middle East. I’m Sean Pillot de Chenecey, author of the Post-Truth Business and Influences and Revolutionaries. In this series, I interview a range of fascinating individuals, proudly represented by the bureau. These change agents and industry experts give an update on their specialist areas of knowledge, and also on their own motivations and viewpoints regarding the future of business. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Ramon Vullings, whose book, whose latest book Not Invented Here has gained amazing applauses. So, Ramon welcome.

Ramon Vullings (01:01): Thank you very much, Sean.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (01:03): Ramon, tell us, first of all, some of the key points that really, really interest you and that you talk about with your clients.

Ramon Vullings (01:11): One of the main focus is that I help business leaders to go from best to next practices. And in my area of expertise, that normally is that you have next practice is new way of doing a radical new way of doing cuz many companies and organizations are set up in silos and they really wanna reach out. So that’s why my book’s called Not Invented Here: Cross Industry Innovation. And in many cases you see that new ways of working next practices actually come from outside of your sector. And that’s what makes things really interesting to see how in the new times of data, AI, ethics, moral, sustainability, there is so much to learn from other areas, other sectors, other branches. So that’s what I help business leaders to navigate and to define smarter strategies by looking outside.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (02:00): Ramon, we were talking yesterday, and you were, one of the things that really fascinated me were your viewpoints about what I believe you term cross-industry innovation, where you, as you term it, bring the outside in. So perhaps you can just tell me about that.

Ramon Vullings (02:16): Thanks. Yes. Cross industry innovation is about taking concepts from other fields, some kinds, sometimes it looks like unrelated field into your business or the other approaches taking something you are really good at, into a totally new domain or a sector. And there’s a lot of strategic advantage to be made by making these kind of transfers. And that’s what we call cross-industry innovation. And if you work together, it’s in a co-creation. So there are three levels outside in, inside out or partnered.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (02:51): Okay. And in terms of the clients that you have, I mean, they appears to be a fairly glittering list of clients that you work for. So perhaps you could tell us a bit about that, who they are and the sort of things you’ve, you know, you’ve specifically done?

Ramon Vullings (03:03): Yeah. I travel virtually all over the world. And it’s really interesting to see. So companies from banks who are trying to figure out new ways and new products and services going into the future, also seeing upcoming competition to energy companies who are in full-fledged transformation. NASA, I work with the space agency, also AZA and it’s interesting to see how all these industries are absolutely experiencing that there is an influx of knowledge and new business models and new ways to deal with data from areas that they hadn’t, let’s say perceived before many sectors are silo driven. They are best practice optimized, and is my goal to bring business leaders to next practices, new ways of doing, and in many cases, new ways of doing come from other areas.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (04:02): I really love the term that you have, that you used to describe yourself as being an ideaDJ. It’s really, really memorable. It’s fantastic.

Ramon Vullings (04:13): Yup. IdeaDJ my, it’s my sole conviction. I believe strongly that innovations are combinations. And Schopenhauer already said this. You can almost, long time ago that, “alle Innovationen sind kombinationen”. So all innovations are combinations, especially now in digital times, there are new components to play with and to make these kind of combinations. So since, let’s say the internet mobiles and GPS, location and the unlimited amount of data storage capability, we have, it’s fantastic to see the new product services ideas coming out to make new things, new combinations. And actually new combinations that make sense. Cause there are also bad combinations. And I have actually some clients also in the fast moving consumer goods. And if you take, let’s say a can of soda water, and you put a candy bar next to it, you could say that’s a combination, but at the end of the day, that’s selling more sugar to people.

Ramon Vullings (05:16): So that’s not an elegant combination. What I try to help business leader with is to make sure that they make beautiful combinations. Combinations that actually benefit multiple stakeholders, not just shareholders, but multiple stakeholders in the system. And it’s fascinating to see that more and more businesses are open to these, let’s say better ways of doing business. Jim Collins says going from good to great. And I would like to plea that we go from greater, which is also about growth to good, trying to do more good stuff. And whereas the good stuff that’s in the beautiful combinations. And if you, yeah, take a few examples that you have a lot of delivery capacity and many of my larger clients have an enormous logistical network. There are startups with absolutely radical new good ideas to make something better. An example was that Coca-Cola use their infrastructure to distribute medical supplies in Africa using their crates. Cause they already have the logistical capability. If we can combine that with, let’s say simple, simple pharmaceutical, products, then we can actually get more medicine out to more people. So that’s, I think these are already the first steps in making these better kind of combinations.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (06:39): I mean, I think that point about, and that case history Coca-Cola, which is a fantastic one and it’s incredibly inspiring. And I think MBA students around the world are given, this is an example of brand purpose actually being put into action, you know?

Ramon Vullings (06:55): Yeah.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (06:55): There’s a lot of talk about purpose and not much action. It’s fantastic to hear of brands that are really stepping up and doing something practical that has positive impact. Meanwhile, on the, should we say sort of negative side. What about, you know, as we are now early 2020, what do you talk to clients about in terms of what they should be worried about? So what are the things that are impacting corporations and organizations and brands that are of deep concern?

Ramon Vullings (07:26): There are many issues now. We have the ethics in the age of artificial intelligence, which is a big one. A lot of my clients are just working on and currently they’re on the base level of gathering the data they have now figured out that it’s important. So everybody’s collecting all kinds of data without a good strategy behind it. So data lakes and then whatever is created. Just a few of my clients actually, proactively have an ethics board looking, okay, what do we do with that? Even some are triggered I’m from Europe. So we have the GDPR general data and protection legislation. So they do it from a fear based thing. So you can act from two ways. You can act from a dream, a more beautiful world, or you can act from fear. These are the two main drivers and with business leaders, we normally touch upon both things.

Ramon Vullings (08:19): Are you actually shaping towards a dream or are you putting in actions because you have a fear? Whatever it is, legislative or a competition. So, the ethics part in the AI discussion is a big one, managing complexity, many, my clients have a global span of their operations. So it’s leading across borders, cultural differences working with that, that complexity just picks up enormously. So dealing with complexity and you see that many people when they deal with incredible amount of complexity, they resort to very simple ideas and solutions, but sometimes these things are too simple. So you need to have a good match for dealing with that complexity. So that’s the second one and capitalizing on opportunities spending boundaries. So a lot of my clients, that’s why they also come to me and our team, want to reach out beyond their sector, beyond their branch, beyond their industry, because they absolutely feel that they’re in silos even within larger corporations.

Ramon Vullings (09:27): There are many silos. And they want to break those kind of silos internally and also externally new product market combinations. You see all the big players also in tech, virtually all big players now have some kind of music library, some kind of movie library, some kind of services part, you see Microsoft Azure trying to compete pretty successfully, currently with AWS. So it’s interesting to see that many of these major players are becoming the newfound general electrics. General Electric was also famous for just expanding, expanding, expanding in multiple areas and branches cuz they, yeah, they copied their breast best practices from one area to another and then grow their business and also of course, opportunity of scale. So these are interesting flows to see and especially crossing cultures, seeing what’s possible in other areas and countries. It’s yeah.

Ramon Vullings (10:22): It’s great to see many clients trying to figure out new ways to serve also in this case global markets and also trying to find a new way for sustainability. And that’s interesting to see cause a lot of my clients are, yeah, they’ve grown out of a growth paradigm, literally a growth with good and slowly. And it’s interesting to see all the old CEO also, if you have these fireside meetings and the more let’s say, if you have a smaller team had a top 50, the top 150 of a company that the discussion is actually now geared toward, okay, what are we really doing? People plan to profit was nice. But what are we actually doing? And you just mentioned it as well. What is your action? And it’s yeah, it’s great to be part of that conversation currently.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (11:12): I think it’s fascinating, isn’t it? And that point made earlier on about the reasons behind like the motivation for ethical behavior, you know, looking into the authenticity of that action and one can go back to Aristotle or Plato or later to Heidegger or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And that is sort, you know, are you doing the right thing just for doing the right thing sake or you doing the right thing because you don’t wanna get caught out. I mean it’s a fascinating starting point. So tell me, I mean, I know that you travel on a quite extraordinary basis and your client list is incredibly impressive. How did you get started? You know, how did you Ramon get going and what were the, did you have any lucky breaks? Tell me about your background.

Ramon Vullings (11:58): A few, I’m an industrial engineer and sociologist by education. And they’re also in that studies. I met my mentor Hans Kokhuis. Who’s a, yeah, incredible creative geared person. He had written a few books there. We became friends also after my studies and he introduced me into the world of creativity, applied creativity, which later for me, resulted in my own book, Business Creativity to have a more elegant way of solving business issues. There are new creative ways of figuring out what you can do. So that’s for me, let’s say the opening, the entrance into this whole world of business creativity. And now I’ve been focusing the last years, mainly on cross industry innovation and then ideaDJ, in combining ideas from multiple areas. My major lucky break, I would say, came when my book was picked up by the Chief Innovation Officer of NASA and, Omar really, really nice guy also became a friend now a few years ago.

Ramon Vullings (13:05): He picked up my book and he said, this is great. We’re gonna do a conference on this and we’re gonna host it at NASA and I want you to open it and to be the keynote speaker. And there, we got an incredible eclectic group of people together from CNN to Uber to Boeing, to all over the place, even Marvel was there, it was a fantastic conference and which has grown over the years. And, also I got a raving review from NASA, so that every time I get to a client, it’s also beautiful that they say, yeah, it’s great. Ramon was yes at NASA. And now he’s here at company X, Y, or Z, which is great.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (13:45): Fantastic. I say as a good breaks go, getting picked up by the Head of Innovation at NASA is just about as far and as lucky as one could be. That’s fantastic. What about I mean, that obviously was an extraordinary achievement and speaking with that sort of audience and meeting those sort of people obviously led on to some amazing things. What about a, is there a specific achievement that really stands out to you that you, you know, that sort of elevator pitch moment when someone goes right round of all the things that you’ve actually done, this quad extraordinary list, which one do you go? That’s the one I like to talk about?

Ramon Vullings (14:23): The one I really love is the one we did with the police in a Rotterdam. I’m Dutch, and it’s nice. I get to work with large corporations, commercial companies, but also a lot with parts of government, but also with the police force. And they wanted to reduce the number of car break-ins in a certain area in Rotterdam, which is an incredible, interesting case. And, I do, let’s say, 60, 70% of my time, keynote speaking and the rest is consulting. So this was one of those consulting parts. And there we figured out, okay, the police normally puts all kinds of brochures at people’s windows car, car windows, just to warn them, don’t leave any valuables in your car and blah, blah, blah. A lot of people come by and especially with Bluetooth, they just walk past your car and they see something’s there.

Ramon Vullings (15:14): They have these little Bluetooth scanners and there’s a, an iPad or a navigation device there and they hit the window and they steal stuff from your car. So there was a big problem and the police tried it, tried to make prevention a key thing. So they made these beautiful brochures, but no one reads these brochures. Hey, you step into your car. You look at one of the brochures, nicely printed. So people just throw them out. They even threw them on the street. They look like commercials for a bar or disco take or something. So we took a totally different approach. And that’s also looking to another sector like, okay, if you go somewhere, what is the information that you will actually read? And then we came, yeah, to the little detail we just used a little piece of paper.

Ramon Vullings (15:59): We tore it up and we’ve written a small message on the piece of paper, folded it and put it at the people’s car windows. And because it was a handwritten note with a tear paper, people actually started to read it because they thought, oh, there are two emotional responses generally, or someone’s hit your car and they leave the number. Sorry, I attended your car, but had to go, this is my number. We’ll settle it. Or maybe it’s an old friend of yours saying, Hey, I saw your car. Where are you? Give me, let’s have a drink or something, or maybe, the best case is, I saw you, I don’t know your number, but I’m already in love with you. So in any cases there, this little notes triggers an emotional response. Everybody wants to read these little torn paper notes, cuz you know, it’s a personal message.

Ramon Vullings (16:51): And that’s what we created. So taking that actually, especially the love thing. That’s when the achiever police really started to laugh saying this might actually work. So we started to implement that first. We had that with the police officers, we called them change agents. We had them handwritten a few hundred hours with a whole team. We were just writing these things. And then finally, the communications department got involved that it was not official police communication. And then the Chief of Police said, no, no, I really want this project to go. And they finally developed a stamp to make this work and also put a little URL on it. Police Rotterdam slash little note, and finally at the end of this whole project, cause we distributed that in this certain area, they managed to reduce the number of car breakins with 43% and it was radical. And that’s when all other police departments in the Netherlands picked up on this and way more IDs there. So that’s something I’m really yeah. Proud of which really made an impact and also for the yeah. Societal good. So that’s a nice, yeah. And we made the newspaper with that. At least the police made, made the newspaper with that. So that was a beautiful project.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (17:59): Fantastic. It’s actually the great idea. I love the immediacy and the personalization of the handwritten note.

Ramon Vullings (18:06): Yeah. And first we, with the project team, we were just literally writing these things and finally we made a little stamp that you could stamp it and just mark, Hey, this is a Police Rotterdam I saw yes, no valuables in your car and you could just scratch it, which was way easier than writing the whole note and everything.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (18:20): Yeah. Yeah.

Ramon Vullings (18:20): So that was, yeah, it was a beautiful, yeah. Beautiful.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (18:24): Okay. So if that was, let’s say a classic example, a great example of effectively business to consumer. I know that your real specialization is business to business.

Ramon Vullings (18:34): Yep.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (18:34): So again, on that, so key things as you are looking forward or looking ahead through 2020, I know we touched that already, but perhaps just go back a bit and just talk about, you know, the key points that you’ll be talking about over the next few months at various events around the world, about the key issues in business to business, what are the key trends that really interest you?

Ramon Vullings (18:58): Yeah, they have to do with the areas we already touched upon as well in terms of the AI and ethics discussion. So there we see that there is so much movement in different sectors while they’re all using the same kind of technology. So it’s really interesting to look at other areas, what are they already doing there? So that’s a major, major thing that I see and that I’ll be talking about. I’m now in the process of writing my next, next booklet will be the fourth, fourth book called ideaDJ Strategy. It’s how business leaders themselves can cope with combining ideas and dealing with this complexity, looking for these X factor solutions, as I say. So, we’re gonna talk about these XFactor, solutions and these can be driven by various different things, per area, per sector, per business challenge, actually, how you can add something.

Ramon Vullings (19:50): Some organizations can, yeah, create such an X factor by combining their resources. Some others can do that by opening up their data, their APIs to other companies to innovate on a lot of startups are actually living by the fact that there are APIs opened up for them to play with. And they have totally different ways to look at data and to play with the data. And a lot of these companies can learn from that. And also on the mergers and acquisition side. Yeah, that’s where cuz I get to work with a lot of startups as well in terms of new ideas. And many of my corporate clients are deciding, should we invest in this? Should we buy the company? Acquire, hire them, get the people in. And these are the interesting things to see yeah. That that’s gonna shape the new solutions yeah. For the coming years.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (20:40): You mentioned, your fourth book when will that be published?

Ramon Vullings (20:46): Yes, that’s what my publisher and speaker agents, keeps on asking me. So, the book will be out when I think the manuscript is fine, but it will be the manuscript will be finalized in the third quarter of this year. So it will probably be the first quarter of 2021, I think then it will be an old bookshelves and everything.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (21:06): Okay. And will it be the same publisher as for Not Invented Here?

Ramon Vullings (21:10): Yeah, probably. It will be the same. I’m with BIS in Amsterdam, which is great. Cause all my books are out there and they are clearly nicely on the intersection of let’s say business and design and creativity. So that’s, it has a natural place to be there.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (21:26): I have to say it’s a fantastic looking book, a fantastic book to read. Most business books it has to be said are shatteringly dull.

Ramon Vullings (21:35): True.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (21:35): And most business books say exactly the same thing as all other business books. Yours is a classic example of one that is very different to that and really stands out. So for listeners who they obviously cannot see what we’re talking about, perhaps just talk through your approach to this book, you know, and why it is that it looks the way it does and all the rest of it. So

Ramon Vullings (21:56): Yeah, we’re talking now about my current book the Not Invented Here on Cross Industry Innovation. Many business books and indeed, Sean you can actually put the major ideas of a business book in six pages and then you need about 200 pages more with examples and storylines and things. And these are mostly text based books, black and white with some graphs in there. For this book, we took a totally different approach for the Not Invented Here book. So it’s more like Harvard Business Review Professor once said, I love Not Invented Here. It’s like snackable content near Del wire it was. And it’s true. If you open up the book on the right side, in most cases, there is an image, on I’m sorry, on the left side, there’s an image on the right side, there is a content describing. So you can literally open up the book wherever you want and have, let’s say this spread of inspiration, that’s 10 chapters, each chapter ends with a tool.

Ramon Vullings (22:54): Cause I love to give my clients concrete tools to actually do stuff. And if you, but the listeners can see that if you hold the book a little bit sideways, you see a little color, a ladder on the side that you can actually see the different chapters in terms of colors. And if you then browse through that, end of that color, you get a tool available to you, to do it. So that’s what I hand out also in many of my keynotes, a lot of clients also take these books because these are direct tools that people can directly use. And probably, the ideaDJ Strategy book will also be in the same format and the same line. And I’ve actually, elegantly stolen the concept and part of the looks of the book from Austin Kleon, he also has a great book called Steal Like An Artist. So in this case we also stole like an artist, but then a business artist in terms of how to use a business book, which is easy it’s light, it’s small and it’s, yeah. Directly applicable as a tool.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (23:54): Okay. I know you mentioned the other title there. So in terms of your inspiration, so in terms of, the media titles or books as in magazines or elsewhere or podcasts that you listen to, what is it that you are listening to and reading that you find of interest that you think that you like to recommend for the listener?

Ramon Vullings (24:15): Many different things in terms of podcasts? I can definitely, recommend Stratechery by Ben Thompson, which is great it’s strategy and technology combined. And that’s very insightful. I think Ben is one of the better analysts. He lives in Taiwan and it’s fascinating to see his takes also sometimes taking a clear stand, but against popular opinion, which is absolutely fascinating. And he has a very good way of structuring that he has the website and the mailing list you can subscribe to on Stratechery. What else is interesting. I’m I follow quite a few, websites still, also in RSS. So all the way from fast company to wire and everything for more generic news and also tech and get the general trends. And if you look at various business books, I’m now reading, Range from Dave Epstein, which is also fascinating to see how he takes some of the concepts like the 10,000 hour rule, which was made popular, actually came up with, by Dave Epstein.

Ramon Vullings (25:29): But, Malcolm Gladwell made that popular, but it’s brilliant to see also in the preface of the book is that Malcolm Gladwell admits that he was wrong about this. So, you know, it’s only applicable in a few certain cases where the, let’s say, the game rules are clear. So with chess or with tennis, you can apply these things, but in business the 10,000 hour rule makes no sense or in totally other sports. And that’s an interesting way. And then I think it also, shows nicely that also Malcolm Gladwell was capable of learning new things and admitting that he was wrong there, but he did became pretty popular with, with the idea in the book outliners.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (26:11): He did well, oh, you mentioned, Wired magazine now was more that great quote for Manuel Castells that everyone uses that he came out with must be 20 years ago. Now, when he talked about just the explosion of trend data that was being pushed around in the sort of mid nineties, and he came at that great quote, which was, if you’re not confused, you haven’t been paying attention.

Ramon Vullings (26:32): Yeah. yeah.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (26:33): I love that quote. Fantastic. What about, as we begin to sort of finish off in terms of, so do organizations or products or brands that interest you, who are you fans of which companies do you think perhaps really lead by example, and that you are, you know, you may not work with them at all. It may be just a say an organization that you think really get it?

Ramon Vullings (27:01): Multiple, of course. I think it’s a many people’s favorite list at Patagonia it’s on how they deal with their whole, their whole business model and their, also the morals and their ethics. In the Netherlands we have this, let’s say, and it’s kind of an Amazon challenger it’s called Cool Blue. And it’s a, they sell electronics. They’re very good, very good at that. And they have a specific culture, they call that a family and friends culture. And that’s fascinating to see. So I would say in terms of also customer experience is the Dutch variants of Zappos in terms of, really, yeah. You feel the energy, people love to work there and they are growing and growing. So, yeah, that’s an interesting thing. And then, yeah, I’m still amazed how Apple has reinvented itself.

Ramon Vullings (27:53): I would still love to once do something for Apple as well, cause I’ve spoken for, I work with a lot of corporations. I’d love to get a more peak in the kitchen of how Apple operates, cuz they clearly have a different way of organizing themselves. And currently if you look at their growth trajectory, it’s impressive to see what other companies are there. So many also smaller companies that actually amaze me that it doesn’t always need to be big or, corporate. Sometimes you have these little teams or these little companies that say, wow, that’s a fantastic approach. Also how they’ve carved out their own market with a loyal, the loyal followership. Yeah. So many. Another one is Buurtzorg, it’s a Dutch company now, pretty world famous by Rose Book, reinventing organizations, how they’ve made care, go back to the, let’s say to the local communities without the management structure. And that’s an interesting case in a lot of, healthcare organizations but also other car organizations and services are looking at, Hey, how do they do that with a minimal amount of management and giving people as much, autonomy as possible. And that’s a really interesting case, and these are the new formats that we’ll be seeing going forward as well as, yeah, people are literally sick and tired of all administrative burdens. So how can we really optimize, economics of scale without the incredible amount of management layers?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (29:30): Okay. You mentioned that new formats and new ways of doing business when it comes to a conference or convention or Congress or gathering point of view, are there any events you’ve been to, or probably have spoken at, that have really done things differently that have shaken up the conference world?

Ramon Vullings (29:52): Yeah, various. So it’s interesting to see, cuz in many cases I’m a speaker, but sometimes I’m also moderator for events and it was this one event in Germany for a supplier to the car business. And they’re the event team and together with the, this company, we had the top 250 leaders there, global company, they had made three stages on which we had three different views. So the one was the market view. There was an analyst coming to talk about. One was the customer view and the other one was the employee view. And they started with the most important thing, which is the customers. And they just ran a few videos cuz it was going really well with this company. But they interviewed a lot of their clients and they chopped out all the good, they only left the bad.

Ramon Vullings (30:42): So these managers were there and everybody was happy. It was a party. And so people had loose chairs. So you could easily reposition your chair to look at the three different stages they were around, let’s say 30%, angle from each other. And it was incredible to see how people’s faces would become a little bit grim because all these customers were talking about was deliveries, not in time, agreements, not honored poaching of good employees. And they were like, oh, this is really bad. And then, the analyst came saying, yeah, you think you’re doing fine. But look at this competition coming up and who knows what, who else is taking over your market, maybe entrance from other sectors are coming in to supply your goods. And people were like, oh, oh, what’s this. And then finally to top it off, they interviewed everybody who had left the company the last three years, why they left and people don’t leave companies, people leave bosses.

Ramon Vullings (31:40): So, by that time, everybody was in totally was totally down. So we had about 250 people like, oh, I thought I was doing pretty well, but this is really bad. And then the CEO came up and he nicely framed it saying, this is for everybody to learn, to make sure that we keep on our toes because yes, business is going really well, but we need to be ahead of being complacent and being happy with what we’re doing. So we need to make sure that everybody’s sharp again. And that was a fantastic way to open up this conference. And then they had way more things. So for me that was the most, daring and also nicely prepared way of really shaking up a management team, which actually was doing, but also had the feeling they were doing really well.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (32:25): Okay. Well that’s fantastic. Well, Ramon, it’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you and I could, I’m sure very happily talk with you all day, but we’re trying to keep these podcasts as snappy and short as possible to infuse these Speaker Associates listener base. So one of those, so we’ll, I’ll ask you one more question and that is really about if you’re like, well, to cut to the chase, the key takeaway points or insights that you’d like to leave for our listeners. So what do you, you know, what do you really want to get across to the Speakers Associates audience, so they are crystal clear about just why it is that you are the fascinating individual that you are?

Ramon Vullings (33:03): For business leaders. I think it’s important to see that if you talk about new strategies, new ways forward that innovations are combinations. So you don’t have to reinvent or come up with something totally new. You can just combine things and go from ego, the ego to Lego. That’s one thing I say in many of my speeches. So move away your ego for a second and then see that everything is modular and driven by components also in terms of data. So how can you play with that more? So if there would be two main takeaways, seeing that all innovations are combinations and for your strategy is take away your ego out of the equation and look for new kind of combinations. And that can be sustainable. That can be more also ethical, what we can learn from other areas and in this digital time. Yeah, that’s what we clearly need because we cannot stay locked in our own silo of thinking we are best at what we do. There is so much to learn from other places.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (34:05): Ramon Vullings. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Ramon Vullings (34:08): Thank you, Sean.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (34:13): Thank you for listening to The Speakers Show Podcast. Please leave a rating on iTunes. We’d really appreciate it. And also it’d be great if you could subscribe to the podcast itself. You’ll find it also on Google podcasts, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast podcast app. Thank you.