Cracking the Code on the Innovation Formula and Service with Elisa Jagerson, CEO Emeritus of FutureBrand Speck
Elisa Jagerson is an internationally recognized leader at the intersection of technology innovation and brand design. Most recently as CEO of FutureBrand Speck, she pioneered Experience Engineering, a 'next generation design thinking’ methodology credited with infusing reliability into the innovation process. Both Fortune 500s and startups turned to Elisa and her teams of brand, product, environment and service designers in order to generate ‘future proof’ growth. These innovations generated billions in revenue, and now sit inside our pockets, bodies, homes, hospitals, cars, and data centers. Elisa sold Speck Design to FutureBrand (NYSE: IPG), where she served on the global leadership team through 2019.
Elisa is currently an active board member, author and coach. She lectures at Stanford University and speaks regularly at innovation summits such as CES, SXSW, DENT and TNW, advancing more rigorous paradigms for innovation and growth. She is currently writing a book exploring decision-making in innovative environments titled, “How do you know?”
Joe Strong (BT): Let’s start with your time at Princeton, where you majored in Anthropology and African American Studies whilst being a National Champion, All-Ivy League Rower. These experiences may not seem like a traditional path to your current career, so how have they supported you in your professional life and your journey to this current position?
Elisa Jagerson (EJ): Anthropology has ended up being something I have come back to through a circuitous route. In the world of design ethnography, deep empathy and all the skills I learned through anthropology have been quite relevant, tangible skills. I’m currently writing a book on a key moment in the design process and am calling back on my anthropology learnings from ~20 years ago.
African-American Studies was a concentration, which for me, worked with anthropology. I was interested in urban environments and the justice issues which play within them. The anthropology skills I applied to do my thesis, particularly as a white woman, are relevant to what I'm doing now: listening, learning, and absorbing. Passion and skills were developed in both concentrations which have lasted a lifetime.
BT: How has rowing impacted your career?
EJ: Rowing is a very special thing because you’re fundamentally a team player as it’s a team sport. All my best friends from Princeton are rowers. If you do the name game with people who went to Princeton at a similar time as I did, I’d always say “well if they didn’t row, I didn’t know them”. It was a deeply connecting experience, and I loved the rowing but I also loved the team. One of the most amazing things is that all of my kids are rowing right now. I have a 16, 15 and 13-year-old and the 16 year-old dreams of rowing for Princeton, as she should! It was a privilege being on a team with women who were both passionate and athletic.
BT: Moving on from that slightly, prior to your work at FutureBrand Speck, you founded a data management company – PartsRiver Inc. – did you ever foresee it becoming the industry lead by the time it was sold in 2014?
EJ: I never had a particularly sophisticated plan for my career beyond what I was doing at any given time. My entire career has been focused on what’s happening now and we’ll see where it goes. Right out of university, I was working with nonprofits on affordable housing and justice issues. In business school, I then founded PartsRiver. My dad was a truck parts distributor growing up, so I had a strange window into a world with not a lot going on at the time. It was a fascinating time to bring new ideas and possibilities to that industry.
However, I never really had a plan; it was no means a strategic move to go into the parts distribution industry. One of the things I learned was that when you’re young, one of the paths to get a great deal of responsibility early on in your career is through working at a nonprofit, founding something, or moving overseas. If you use the traditional path, you have to work your way up the ladder. I had the chance to become CEO when I was 28 and have been ever since because I either founded the company or I had the opportunity to lead. I had teams of 50+ people and million dollar budgets, because who else could work for $16,000 a year? If you have kids, a family or a mortgage, you can’t do those kinds of things. So if you’re young, willing to think outside the box a bit and live on macaroni and cheese, you can actually get quite a bit of exposure on leadership opportunities.
BT: You joined FutureBrand Speck as CEO in 2009 and purchased them to consolidate three innovation firms 2 years later. What led you to making this big step early on in your tenure with the company and how did it benefit the company in the long-term?
EJ: In 2009, I joined what then was “Speck Designs,” which focused on making physical products. We had the wisdom that comes from making things, but in the industry, there was a divide between the folks who had the expertise on where the entrepreneurial moment might be and the folks who made solutions. I envisioned a company that was world class at both and could ask the question of what we should build whilst answering how we should build it, with nothing being left in translation. This brought together a user insights firm and a mechanical design company with adding digital as the third piece. Then the solution could manifest in both the digital and physical world. Really it was the sophistication in identifying the right problem as the breakthrough for our growth. I didn’t come from the design industry, and I was fundamentally a businessperson, but I fell in love with the design space. At that point in my career I felt you could work in Silicon Valley with either very smart people or high integrity people; I couldn’t seem to find them in the same pool. I will say that in the design industry, I found these creative, intuitive, high-integrity geniuses.
BT: In those 10 years, the company has driven innovations with Google, Apple, Samsung, Tesla and many other leading companies. Could you expand on the specifics of these developments if possible?
EJ: At the beginning, Google or Apple would come to us to make what they envisioned. Increasingly, they would come to us to ask what to build. This moved the creative process forwards, allowing us to look at strategy, opportunity and manifesting a brand through new product innovation. That was the breakthrough. Buying the company was a non-traditional entrepreneurial act. In Silicon Valley, we are trained not to put all out chips in and use other people’s money. I did the opposite. After having investors in my first company, I wanted to do this opportunity alone. I capitalised it in part with an SBA Loan, which to be eligible for under current regulations, you have to put up your house, no matter how much equity or the loan-to-value ratio.
It was terrifying. I bought the company, put the other two together and then had the opportunity to sell to FutureBrand. We were the first to put into place the idea that new product innovation could be the manifestation of your brand vision, shifting your brand through new products as well as branding devices. My desire for doing this came from my desire to drive social impact. Underneath all of this, it was a wonderful partnership between all these companies, but I had a desire to crack the code on the innovation formula, to make the process ever more reliable. The innovation industry is still in its infancy or adolescence, full of sticky-notes. There’s not a reliable process to create innovation, which I would define as change that creates value. If there is no value, it is just change.
Every company wants innovation. Most Fortune 500 companies have it as a strategic priority or core value, but no one quite knows how to get it reliably. This is where anthropology pays off. I spent time reverse engineering our failures and looking industrywide to see what occurs when innovation is successful. We redefined our process to make the output increasingly reliable. My standard was being able to feel confident in solving the problems of non-profits in developing countries, few resources, and scarce dollars. That was a high bar I didn’t believe anyone in the industry should take on, but I wanted to be good enough to do that.
BT: We’ve touched upon it a little bit, but a lot of your work has been based out of San Francisco and the Bay Area. How important is the proximity to Silicon Valley in terms of innovation and collaboration?
EJ: We are headquartered in Palo Alto, the epicentre of Silicon Valley, and well over half of our clients are Silicon Valley-based. It keeps us fresh on the most cutting-edge technology. When we envision what could be built and how to build it, we have the benefit of all that is out there and all that’s been imagined. We get to be kids in candy stores here in terms of working with the most cutting-edge technology. I have an area of passion which is the infrastructure of the economy, kind of the boring part! It’s very fun to have one foot in with the most cutting-edge technology, which is sometimes 10, 20, 30 years ahead of some areas and bridge the gap with the plumbing of the economy. Bridging them in a way that was appropriate, and executable was a great passion of mine. Without being in the centre of it we would have been a very different company.
BT: In the past few years, you’ve also taken up a number of roles as an advisor or board member for a number of research and non-profit institutes. What made you step further into this world and how does your data management background support that?
EJ: After feeling somewhat successful enough in my efforts to build a more dependable innovation process, I wanted to make good on my commitments to take that into an act of service. After spending 2 years on the global leadership team at FutureBrand, I decided to complete a year of service and I am now working on what I would call the infrastructural issues of our society. I looked at all the pain symptoms of the world and questioned what’s underneath all that and the root cause of these issues. I landed on democracy and legal reform, specifically in the areas of gender and racial justice. They have become my areas of passion, and I am working on them full time for at least a year whilst writing a book on the innovation process.
BT: It’s clear whilst you’re speaking about these issues that you are very passionate. It almost sounds like you want to keep one foot in that world when your year of service has passed, just to be able to stick with this a little bit longer.
EJ: Absolutely, I’ve always had a commitment to be on the board of something local, something national and something international. So, I have always been on three or more boards throughout my career and I am now just doing it full time. I expect that I’ll never stop doing something local, something national and something international. I do expect it will continue to take up a higher portion of my time. I will say that being on boards for profit and non-profit is a very rewarding career stage activity, because you’re so efficient with your time. Every hour that I spend is fruitful, and I’m getting to leverage my experience very efficiently as I give advice, support, or do research on behalf of another CEO. It’s incredibly rewarding.
BT: You have also become a lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. How has that change of pace impacted your day-to-day work, and does it feel fulfilling supporting the next generation of business leaders?
EJ: Wildly fulfilling! You are the future. I have been so inspired by your generation in the past 3.5 years. I am so unbelievably excited in what your generation will envision and manifest, and if I get to in any way share some of my experiences so that process is easier for you, I’m thrilled. The one downside of becoming CEO so young was that I learned from the hot stove by touching it over and over. There is some efficiency in that you won’t touch it again in that same way however, it would have been awfully life to have a mentor or experienced person who said, “Hey, don’t touch the hot stove.” There’s some efficiency in working for or with experienced people and so I missed that in many ways. I had some incredible mentors, and when I did have them, it was a blessing so at this point of my career I’m happy to be of service to anyone who will carry the ball down the field.
BT: Moreover, you are now CEO Emeritus of FutureBrand Speck instead of just CEO, how much of a difference is there for you between these titles?
EJ: Dramatic, I am out of the day-to-day operations. The company is under the remarkably impressive leadership of Michael Sprauve. I’ve moved into an advisory role, which takes much less time. Michael shoulders the burden of all of the hard work that CEOs do. It’s a dramatically different relationship, but the company is still differentiated based on expertise around our ability to understand the drivers of users. It’s through those expertise that drive the accuracy of our design process and that whole vision I had and manifested with Michael is still in play.
BT: Within the business space, when it’s all said and done, how would you like to be remembered?
EJ: I want to move some big dials. I think I’m just beginning my career really now, so I want to be remembered as someone who never stopped fighting for justice. Justice manifests in all sorts of ways, and I drank the Kool-Aid on business early on. A thriving economy and thriving business community is one of the platforms that enable justice when done well. I am passionate about participating and shifting the landscape so it's inclusive, empowering and provides everyone with a platform to fulfill their dreams. We aren’t there; we’re nowhere near there, but I would like to be remembered as someone who inched us slightly further forwards.