We use cookies on this site to enhance your experience.
By selecting “Accept” and continuing to use this website, you consent to the use of cookies.
EMTM Silicon Valley Residency: Day Three
April 8, 2020
Print | PDF
The second day of the residency sent the EMTM cohort to Palo Alto, first to take a class in capturing design insights with Dr. Michael Barry of the Stanford d. school before seeing how those kinds of insights are utilized at Google.
The lesson with Prof. Barry had the learners dive deep into the question: Are insights more valuable than solutions? To find an answer, teams workshopped ways to capture insights from data as a way to establish need-finding – the process of protecting against unintended consequences in decision making.
“Everyone wants to be innovative – but what does that mean? To us, innovation is the creation of something new and because all learning is new, innovation becomes a function of learning new ways to learn, says Barry.”
After class, the cohort enjoyed a tour of the Stanford d. school. A building dedicated to cultivating the innovative ideas, products and processes of Stanford graduate students from every faculty.
EMTM Learner Joe Rossi expressed his learning from Stanford: “I’m coming back with knowledge squeezed into my brain and this will ultimately evolve my approach within the workplace. We travelled as a group, sat in a room as a group, but I left feeling individually stoked and primed to put the lessons and insights into practice.”
The group returned to the classroom for lunch with Sanjay Krishnan, former Googler and current VP, Product at Apex.Ai, a company developing uniformly acceptable software that supporting autonomous vehicles. While sharing his journey of innovation in his career, his advice to the group was to keep talking to one another; to other companies that you admire, to people doing what you’re doing, and doing it better than you. “The world of technology is constantly changing and we may not realize how transformative an idea is until we talk about it with others. Looking back a decade from now, we might see the coming decade as remarkable for autonomous driving as the previous decade has been for smartphones…not ever automaker today will survive the next decade” stated Sanjay in closing.
After our session with Sanjay, it was off to visit one of the most established centres of innovation and data management in the world – Google. Upon arriving at the sprawling Google campus in Palo Alto, the cohort was greeted by Sara Davis, Senior Program Manager who shared her history of leading tech-focused teams at AOL, K12 and now, Google.
Be sure to read Day One and Day Two articles from the EMTM Residency: