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Lux's Arij Van Berkel on the coming shake up for sustainable innovation
106 Plays1 year ago
Lux's Chief Product Officer Arij Van Berkel joins Anthony, Mike, and Karthik to discuss the year ahead. With interest rates on the rise, funding for start-ups down, and governments rolling out more aggressive innovation policy, the old paradigm of open innovation is increasingly falling by the wayside. Dr. Van Berkel sees a shift to shared innovation, with serious ramifications for everyone trying to scale sustainable technology.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Innovation Matters'
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Innovation Matters. I am your host, Anthony Skiavo, joined by Karthik Subramyan, Mike Coleman,
00:00:18
Speaker
Innovation Matters is the innovation podcast brought to you by Lux Research Incorporated. And we have a guest joining us today. It is Lux Research's very own Chief Product Officer, Ari Van Berkel,
Future of Innovation in 2024
00:00:33
Speaker
Dr. Van Berkel, one of the most Van Berkel people I know. You may have heard him join us on the podcast a couple months ago.
00:00:43
Speaker
to talk about hydrogen hubs in the US. And he's back, back to share his thoughts about the future of innovation, what 2024 has in store for us more generally. And I think this is important because we gave our own predictions on trends and technologies, but
00:01:02
Speaker
One of the big things that we think is coming up is how innovation itself will change and the nature of it. The risks people can take, the activities people will be doing, all of that is gonna be undergoing significant transition here in 2024. So yeah, Ari, how you doing? Doing great, thank you. It's good to be here in 2024.
The Bagel Metaphor for Innovation
00:01:25
Speaker
So everyone whom I haven't talked to, happy new year.
00:01:29
Speaker
It's going to be an interesting year, I think. But we'll get to that in a moment. Yeah. I just finished my bagel. That was a little long running point of contention between myself and Dr. Van Perkel over bagels. What exactly is your objection with them again? I forget. I think the only thing they've got going for them is that they have a hole in it so that the form factor is the only interesting thing about them. That's just not true. The topology is really on point. The Taurus is.
00:01:58
Speaker
First of all, beyond the fact that the topology, like Mike said, is valuable in them itself. That's just not true. There's a lot happening with the way they're made. They've got the syrup in them. They're a little sweet. They're boiled. They've got the thick skin. They're very chewy. It's a very unique whole eating experience there. I think that kind of sums up innovation for 2024. Unique is nice, but it doesn't pay the bills.
00:02:28
Speaker
It has to actually work. And in this case, I expect it to be food, which is doubtful. It is food. All right. But maybe innovation in 2024 will have a hole in its middle, a hole in its beating heart.
00:02:43
Speaker
And that's kind of one of the things that we want to talk about. What is going to be missing from 2024 innovation?
Shift to Medium-Term Innovation Focus
00:02:50
Speaker
But sorry, I'll kick it to ask you an actual question about your job or whatever. What are you expecting on the highest level? What's your big picture outlook on 2024? Where are things headed this year? Yes. To answer that question, let me take you back to the 1990s.
00:03:07
Speaker
which is when I started to get involved for the first time in innovation and R&D and programming R&D and things like that. Also when I was born. Well, yeah, rub it in. So back then, innovation was a lot about optimization. We were just getting out of the big recession of the 1980s.
00:03:32
Speaker
And really, innovation was about making the most of existing assets. And innovation was mostly integrated with business units. So there was precious little corporate innovation, except for the really big corporations. And most innovation was happening in kind of a troubleshooting way, kind of a Six Sigma way in business units. And that changed towards the end of the 1990s when
00:03:59
Speaker
the internet bubble appeared and burst and people realized that this thing called disruption could happen. So we went through probably about 10 years of companies trying to come to terms with disruption and then we went through about 10 years of companies trying to
00:04:19
Speaker
benefits from the start of phenomenon and from the fact that open innovation could be a much more effective way to spending their money on research and on innovation. And I think that pendulum is now swinging back. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Maybe we will get into that. But what you should be watching out for this year is
00:04:43
Speaker
innovation getting much more down to earth, much more focused on the middle of the innovation funnel. It's going to be about getting things done, launching concrete projects and showing value to the business in the medium term rather than in the long term. However, having said that, what's interesting about today is that while the pendulum swings back to
00:05:12
Speaker
showing shorter term results and being a bit more down to earth and a bit less science fiction and a bit more tied to existing assets.
History and Role of Open Innovation
00:05:22
Speaker
While all of that is happening, we still have the two big transitions happening in the background that will truly hit most of the industry, any industry after 1930. So
00:05:37
Speaker
It's about delivering today with existing assets while protecting your ability to maneuver as a company post 1930.
00:05:49
Speaker
2030 2030. Sorry. I'm Dang, you are old. Holy cow. I'm still in the 1930s 20th century Well, I mean it's an apt honestly it's announced comparison because like a lot of these industrial processes Haven't really changed since 1930. You look at Haber Bosch. You look at ammonia We had a component catalysts on last week and that's a that's basically the same process from 1930 to now Well, that's another interesting thing, right? So there's a lot of
00:06:20
Speaker
uh, process development, particularly in the chemical industry that got interrupted by, uh, the automotive industry. So we had, uh, have a wash. We, we've got a feature drops, uh, all of those things. They were based on the premise that we are using coal. I have a voice, maybe less so, but even, even have a horse started with guessifying coal to get to get to the hydrogen.
00:06:46
Speaker
And then the whole oil thing happened. So there's a lot of stuff that happened in the 1920s and 1930s that we may, after a long interruption, get back to and try to continue that line of development. So different branch of research. I want to back up before we get into some of the focus around, you know, you mentioned moving into more the middle of the innovation funnel.
00:07:12
Speaker
Can we talk a little bit about open innovation? Because I think people have this idea of open innovation, which is like it's working with people outside your company or whatever. Like there's good ideas outside your company and you need to work with them.
00:07:25
Speaker
But I think in corporate practice, it's actually more specific. It kind of represents a pretty specific set of activities. And it's really early-stage startup scouting, early-stage startup venturing, and also early-stage academic work. So I guess, how do you define what open innovation really is and what specifically goes into it? And I ask this because I want to understand what role those
00:07:51
Speaker
approaches are gonna have in the next couple years as this pendulum is swinging back. Open innovation of course has a very formal definition and you can look it up and all that but I think for today's discussion it's important to differentiate between open innovation and shared innovation.
Open vs Shared Innovation
00:08:10
Speaker
So when we were setting up the first open innovation clusters in the Netherlands, we're talking 2006, 2007 now, the one question we got from companies when we were trying to persuade them to join the cluster and to invest in the cluster.
00:08:26
Speaker
right, spend money. The one question we got is, what's the multiplier? So the business case was simply, I go back to my board and I explained to my board, if we put a million dollars into this cluster, then we get $10 million worth of R&D in return. We got access to $10 million worth of R&D. So the multiplier is 10.
00:08:47
Speaker
Even though that's not the formal definition of open innovation, I think in many cases open innovation is regarded, is used as a lever. It helps you to get more, to do more interesting and exciting and risky stuff because you're pooling money with many others and in many cases with startups, with people not even from your industry, with venture capital for example.
00:09:09
Speaker
And that allows you to try more, which is why it's good for the early stage, at a lower expenditure. So you reduce the risk and you get to see more different experiments, essentially. Shared innovation is very different. Shared innovation is something that, for example, the semicon industry excels at. Shared innovation is a joint roadmap where you team up with your value chain to create a desired innovation for the entire value chain.
00:09:38
Speaker
So this is how you make more flow happen, for example, right? You team up with everyone because you know, you need better equipment to produce the next generation of semiconductors because everything's going to be smaller. You need that new equipment developed. It's a huge development risk. But if, if you share the entire innovation within.
00:09:56
Speaker
the value chain. And then you get innovation clusters around the likes of iMac in Belgium, for example. And those kind of shared innovations also reduce risk, but they reduce market risk, they don't reduce expenditure, they reduce the risk of introducing your product. But that kind of innovation is very difficult to achieve, because the prerequisite is that you agree on the roadmap. And trust me, you can you can spend years talking about the roadmap before agreeing on it. One of the things because we've talked about
00:10:25
Speaker
You know, I wrote a paper some years ago comparing the use of digital tools in the pharmaceutical industry, which is I think also an industry that does this kind of shared innovation. And I compared that to the chemicals industry. And I basically asked the question, why doesn't the chemicals industry do this type of collaborative innovation on certain challenging problems? Like, for example, coming up with a corrosion model that can predict the long term corrosion
00:10:52
Speaker
performance of codings. And one of the things I just got to, the answers I got to, was just that R&D spending occupies a much smaller share of the total expenditures. It's relatively feasible to just do your own R&D. It's 2% or 3% of revenues. Whereas in pharma, that type of R&D expenditure is way, way higher. 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% for some companies.
00:11:18
Speaker
overwhelmingly what they're doing. And the cost of bringing a product to market is overwhelmingly in that R&D sector. So it makes sense to reduce those costs. I think that's one element. There's another element for the chemical industry, which is they used to, I think it's changing a little bit, but they used to adhere to a completely different paradigm, a paradigm that doesn't lend itself to shared innovation.
00:11:46
Speaker
And the paradigm was we'll produce bulk chemicals or bulk plastics to be used in any and all applications. Right. So we, we develop a new material once and it gets used in so many places that we can afford to scale it up really quickly. But of course, if you're injecting your products as it were in every value chain.
00:12:11
Speaker
then shared innovation becomes really difficult because that implies that you don't have a shared roadmap with every value chain. So if that's your paradigm, you're on your own. You cannot, you just cannot get it organized. Well, then I mean, I guess the context, are we going to see a shift to more of this shared innovation model in, you know, energy or chemicals or industrials?
00:12:38
Speaker
you know, in these sectors, especially something like steel, you know, where on the one hand, steel goes into everything, right? Um, on the other, it seems like it's a fit for, and we already see some of these, these shared innovation models happening. Some of the, like, nor skydro, you know, hybrid type, large, these are large scale consortia projects that happen, you know, among the steel makers with these long-term timeframes. So how are you seeing this type of model? You know, is this type of model going to come to these, these companies? What's going to change?
00:13:07
Speaker
to make that happen or not? So I hope it does, because it's much needed to accelerate for both the transition to a circular economy and the transition to a net zero carbon emission economy. Based on my experience, it takes between five and eight years to set up successful shared innovation. So it takes a long run to do it. And that's, again, because you need to agree on our roadmap and all that.
00:13:36
Speaker
In this particular case, you need to get parties that don't usually collaborate together. So you need to build the networks, you need to build the trust in the network and all that. It might go faster because there's there's a government pushing for it now, which which tends to accelerate things. Yeah, I mean, in the semiconductor industry has sort of worked or worked for for a while with ITRS in particular, because Intel just told everybody what to do. Exactly. If you haven't, maybe the government plays that role, but it's
00:14:04
Speaker
If you have one dominant player, it also helps. But that's not quite the case in Materials or Energy. I think it will take between 8 and 5 and 8 years.
00:14:19
Speaker
which neatly aligns to that 2030 deadline. But isn't the 2030 deadline more for getting things done as opposed to setting up our long-term R&D program? What kind of technologies do you think are going to be developed by this type of approach? I think you're right. Ideally, there should be less shared innovation still waiting to happen by 2030.
00:14:48
Speaker
and more already on the shelf, ready to scale. But I just don't really see that in the cards right now. I think open innovation will diminish because of the financial, the economic situation. And it will take a while for shared innovation to ramp up, depending on government action. So the EU's ambition, for example, to provide 40% of raw materials
00:15:18
Speaker
not from import, right, from its own area, that could really accelerate things because that would create that one powerful player, in this case the European Commission, that would gather all the parties around the table and create one incentive for all the parties to collaborate.
00:15:40
Speaker
maybe, you know, a slightly tangential and off topic, but I was just thinking about the pendulum swinging back. And it just got me wondering, you know, we have had several discussions about nuclear fusion, how we like or don't like nuclear fusion, and what are the challenges and things like that. So very, very long term focus projects. Do you think this pendulum is also swinging back maybe because confidence in long term innovation is low?
00:16:08
Speaker
Maybe I'm thinking about this incorrectly, but what got me thinking was, I think there's this realization that, oh, we need to get things done right now so that we have a platform to do something better in the future. So let's just focus on whatever works right now and not think about those kinds of things. I don't think confidence in long-term innovation is low, but I do think companies now have to work harder to earn their innovation budget.
00:16:36
Speaker
So the budget is low and the priority should be growing the company first or growing revenue so that you get to spend a little bit more on innovation. So there's a drive towards shorter term.
Impact of Rising Interest Rates on VC Funding
00:16:54
Speaker
And for example, Fusion is a good example because we saw massive amounts of venture capital go into Fusion.
00:17:04
Speaker
I think that will be much harder to accomplish in the current economic conditions with a higher interest rate. If you're getting minus 1% interest on your bank accounts, you might as well try and do something world changing with your money and maybe get like a 1 million times multiplier on your money. But if you're getting a decent 4% or 5%
00:17:31
Speaker
you might still want to get a one million times multiplier, but you might also be tempted to just stick to your money in the bank account and watch it grow. So it's getting harder and we saw that there's a working paper by the University of Chicago. So this is not yet peer reviewed, but it's a working paper that got published, I think about a month ago, an econometrist analysis that showed that for every one percent point
00:18:01
Speaker
increase in interest rate, there's a drop of about 30% in VC funding. So if you compound that, we're looking at a drop of about between 60 and 70%, depending on where you are in VC funding. And that tracks, and that's happening over the course of three years, according to the study.
00:18:29
Speaker
That tracks pretty well with what we're seeing out there right now. So startup funding is getting, I wouldn't say scarce because in reality we're back to say 2017 levels.
00:18:41
Speaker
So still plenty of startup funding, but it's definitely a lot less than two years ago. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the venture capital side and the startup funding side. I think that's important. There's an interesting report from CTVC. Maybe I'll even drop the link in the description of this podcast. I don't know. Basically looking at climate tech funding and VC funding for
00:19:06
Speaker
In general and one of the things they highlighted first of all we see funding in 2023 down 30% from 2022 so Remains to be seen, you know, if we get to that 60 to 70 Point, you know, there's obviously some sort of lagging there's lagging effects I don't think you'd expect to see that that took that total decline as quickly right as six months
00:19:32
Speaker
But what's interesting, Ari, is that deal size was down a lot, you know, 30 to 40%. Deal count was only down about 3%. So it seems like roughly the same number of startups are getting funded, right? But later stage activity, so basically startups getting these large CD, even sometimes series E rounds,
00:20:01
Speaker
you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, two hundreds of millions of dollars, pushing them, you know, into that almost, you know, mid-sized company, large company in some cases operating privately range. It seems like that type of capital has really been the hardest hit.
00:20:18
Speaker
And so I'm curious as to how you think that sort of impacts the overall space going forward and what that means for the corporate players.
Corporate R&D's New Role
00:20:27
Speaker
Because as you kind of talked about, the role of VC or the role of open innovation is to provide this large multiplier.
00:20:35
Speaker
It can be very cheap if you're a corporate venture capital, you put in a million dollars or a couple of million dollars in an early stage round, you're a minority investor, and you get access to theoretically a very valuable startup. It's high risk, but if it works, it works. You've gotten a huge multiplier on your money because you benefit from this company existing. But it seems like that part is maybe not being affected as much. That part is maybe still operating.
00:21:02
Speaker
And it's really the mega startup rounds that are going away. So how do those mega startup rounds fit in your framework? And what does it mean that companies aren't going to be able to raise $200 million on private markets? How are you thinking about this? So it means that it puts corporations in a better position, actually. I think corporate R&D or
00:21:27
Speaker
Uh, it may turn out to be more, uh, R and D tied to the business units or R D and I tied to the business unit is in a more in a position of power today than it was two or five years ago, because the likelihood of getting disrupted by a startup is less because it's not getting the mega rounds. And at the same time, it it's.
00:21:52
Speaker
Slightly easier now, even though budgets are down a little bit, but not nearly as much as VC budgets, but budgets are down a little bit, but it's getting easier to argue for some risky investments, some scale ups, right? Because innovation has to deliver. So let's focus on a couple of bigger projects that can actually deliver revenue in the near term.
00:22:19
Speaker
And at the same time, the reward for taking risk in the general economy is lower than it was before. Again, before, if the risk-free interest rate is something like minus 1%, and your company return on investment is something like 8%, then the reward for taking risk is 9% more return. Now, if the risk-free interest rate is about 3%,
00:22:47
Speaker
Company returns are not growing like crazy. They're still about 8%. We're talking about the oil industry. Well, oil industry is a bad example. It probably has grown like crazy in the past year, but most companies are still at a similar return on investment. So the difference between risk-free and investing in a company, the reward for taking risk is a bit lower, which means that it gets easier to defend risky projects within a company as well.
00:23:18
Speaker
You can be satisfied with pitching a little bit less return on investment, but still a good project. R&D in companies is in a better position compared to startups now. And startups will need to work more with companies to scale their business because that's the only way they can get the kind of money they need to build larger production facilities, for example. So we'll need
00:23:45
Speaker
We'll probably see more joint ventures or acquisitions maybe of startup companies, which is more affordable for large corporations now and which is required for the startups to really scale their manufacturing capacity. It gets harder for them to scale independently.
00:24:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I was kind of interested as we're sort of getting into talking about that question in near term wins, like it's a little bit of a different, you know, there is this question around sort of where the next generation of innovations going to come from and these shared innovation opportunities that are hopefully going to get set up over the next sort of five to eight years.
00:24:31
Speaker
And I think that is, you know, that is kind of analogous to like the pharmaceutical industry model where a lot of that shared innovation is basically kind of on pre-competitive stuff. But there's also, I think the need for, I mean, especially given how pressing the targets are around climate and around circular economy, there's the need to deploy and today, as you've been explaining, and that also has to be collaborative too in a lot of
00:24:58
Speaker
in a lot of these areas, right? You have to, we saw it with the hydrogen hubs we talked about with you a few months ago, right? It's not, it's kind of hard for, you know, ExxonMobil or for, you know, for Dow Chemical or for, you know, Dominion Energy or whomever to go out and do one of these.
00:25:17
Speaker
to do these sort of transformations on their own, right? The deployment is, because it's a system transition, the deployment is going to involve, I think, a lot more collaboration and a lot more cross-industry
00:25:33
Speaker
partnerships and relationships, I think, than just launching the next generation of your conventional product will. So how do you think about, is that a similar model, kind of as with the hydrogen hubs we talked about, there kind of is an innovation element and a deployment element to these or they're
00:25:55
Speaker
or do the relations do, in many of these cases, the partnerships that are formed on the deployment side look differently and are sort of based differently than these shared innovation centers? Yeah, I think so. It is another form of shared innovation, if you like. You could also call it standard setting, right? So that will also be entering into an era where
00:26:23
Speaker
good old boring negotiation about standards is going to probably become really important. So that's another angle that you need to be mindful of. When we're talking about hydrogen, when we're talking about recycling, how do you know what's going, what the feedstock of your recycling plant is?
00:26:46
Speaker
you probably need some sort of standards defined there. I could very well see an American association of the recycling industry emerge, setting standards to characterize the quality of waste streams or the content of waste streams with the minds to certain, let's say, pyrolysis or gas fire type installations.
00:27:15
Speaker
That's one way to create, to align the value chain. Another way to align the value chain I think will hugely be government orchestrated really is to make sure that decisions along the value chain are taken in a reasonable order. So if you're starting to produce a lot of hydrogen, someone else should also invest in something that uses a lot of hydrogen. And I think that kind of coordination
00:27:44
Speaker
will likely happen through government intervention. What does this mean for the people, right? Like we've had this ecosystem, which has built up over the last decade, which I think funnels a lot of people into startups, right? You know, you look at MIT as an institution, they do a lot of work with corporations, right? They do a lot of work, you know, sort of direct tech transfer, but obviously they have a very, very strong startup ecosystem.
00:28:12
Speaker
in America, that's, you know, there's this, there's this big focus culturally as well as sort of structurally in a lot of ways on startups. And so I guess I'm just curious, you know, both for the people on the corporate side, you know, for whom open innovation, they need to figure out to shift that more towards the shared innovation model.
00:28:32
Speaker
as well as for the individuals in the ecosystems in academia or in the startup ecosystem, what does this mean, especially in the context of sustainable technologies?
00:28:48
Speaker
you know, are we going to have these MIT tech transfer offices, not to single them out there, they do a great job. But like, are they going to be pushing people to found startups when they should be doing something else? Like, what's what's going to happen over the next couple of years with the individuals there? And what should they be doing? There's one other aspect there, which is startups have also always been a method to manage your portfolio. So if if if you if you have
00:29:17
Speaker
As said, one good example is Shell, for example, let people retire with a couple of patents in their backpack. So essentially they gave the technology that they could no longer use a chance to still scale by sending it out of the company
00:29:41
Speaker
with a couple of experienced people who could try and make something out of it again. So that's how some of the startups got created. And it's been a relatively well-used tool for companies to manage their portfolio of skills and competences and IP in their RD and IAM departments. So one thing that might happen
00:30:08
Speaker
I think it's too early to say, but one thing that might happen is in the course of portfolio management, there might be a bigger demand for young professionals fresh out of university by corporate R&D because corporate R&D needs different skill sets. They need electrochemists, for example, rather than petrochemists. And at the same time, relatively experienced people will get the final track in their career will be
00:30:38
Speaker
um, working on their favorite innovation in an independent fashion, uh, being well taken care of by a retirement plan and getting pushed out and trying stuff over there, which is a very different type of startup. And so that could be a shift. I'm not too sure if, if that's likely to occur, but I've seen it happen before. So, uh, yeah, watch out for that and let's see what happens.
00:31:06
Speaker
And then, of course, there's a big wave of retirement happening at companies anyway. So I'm not so worried about fresh graduates from universities that they'll find plenty of seats to fill in in both corporations and startups. So one sort of the last thing I was interested to ask about Aria's and, you know,
00:31:26
Speaker
Since you keep trying to take us back to the 1930s, let's run with it and look at, because I think it's apt because the 1930s was kind of around when in the US, and I think following that globally, we saw the first really big
00:31:47
Speaker
increases in productivity and really big you know sort of Anthony was alluding to was around that time a lot of these big transformations of you know the oil industry coming into its own you know automotive industry along with that electrification and mechanization of a lot of industrial processes right and it drove this big
00:32:10
Speaker
big increase in productivity and growth through the middle part of the 20th century, which has not been sustained since the 1980s or so. What are these transitions going to mean for the overall
00:32:32
Speaker
overall economic growth and opportunity, right? And I'm thinking of this because we just saw, you know, Sheridan the luck slack the other day from one of our colleagues, this paper from Goldman Sachs, which is arguing that climate as well as AI is driving this into the beginning of a new supercycle, which is going to drive that sort of growth and productivity that maybe we saw coming out of the, you know, maybe to the degree that we haven't seen since the middle of the 20th century.
00:33:02
Speaker
But what do you see that sort of meaning for the macroeconomic outlook, these big transitions? Yeah.
AI and Circular Economy's Potential
00:33:07
Speaker
So I can see that for AI, because AI, I think, has the potential to drive productivity once again. The energy and materials transition, I think energy is just a chore that has to be done. We figured out that we put the energy
00:33:32
Speaker
the whole energy system on a somewhat inconvenient basis. And we need to redo it, essentially. Unless we prefer really warm summers. And winters. I haven't been able to skate for at least five years over here in the Netherlands. On ice on the canals. Changing that will maybe make energy slightly cheaper. But that's yet to be seen.
00:34:02
Speaker
but it will prevent a lot of damage from climate change. So it's profitable, but it's profitable in the loss avoidance sense, which doesn't grow the economy, it just prevents shrinking of the economy. AI can boost productivity, and I think the other really interesting thing to watch is the circular economy, because it can boost material productivity. And I think that's another limiting factor that is
00:34:31
Speaker
Today, not quite as limiting as labor productivity, because we can see that there's a labor shortage nearly everywhere in every developed economy. But it is a real limit and people worry about it. People make calculations saying, oh, if every car starts to become electric, how much lithium is needed and do we actually have it? So I think for the circular economy, really keeping track of material productivity
00:35:00
Speaker
the amount of money you make by circulating an ounce of material or whatever your preferred unit is. That's really something to watch and that is more so than in the 1930s is a real limit at this point in the economy in certain cases. Unless we go and get some material from the moon of course which is another topic, another
00:35:26
Speaker
You can circulate ounces of other materials and make a lot of money if you want. But I think that's not what a lot of these companies are going to be moving into, except for maybe some of the pharma players or some of the tobacco players.
Cultural Differences in Bagel Preparation
00:35:38
Speaker
But look, I think that's about all we have time for. Ari, I just want to thank you for coming on again, for sharing your thoughts. It's great to check back in with you. And I'm sure we'll do it again.
00:35:50
Speaker
in another couple of months. So, cheers. Thanks for having me. I'll gladly share a bagel with you if I have to get on the podcast here. Yeah. You have to come to America to do that, because honestly, I've been to Amsterdam, I've had the bagels, and they're so bad. See? They're terrible, man. Yeah. I told you. I think that's more of an issue with Dutch people, their ability to make good bagels than it is an issue with the category itself.
00:36:18
Speaker
Innovation Matters is a production of Lux Research, the leading sustainable innovation research and advisory firm. You can follow this podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want more, check out www.luxresearchinc.com slash blog for all the latest news, opinions, and articles.