Why business innovation is more critical than ever

Innovation Leader CEO and CO-Founder Scott Kirsner joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss why business innovation is more critical than ever.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. I want to read a quote to you as I enter our next guest. Quote, "Zoom is not the future of working from home. It's like a prison where movement from one conversation to another is almost impossible." Can I get an amen on that because the author of that quote, the person who said that is joining us now.

Scott Kirsner is the CEO and co-founder of Innovation Leader. Thank you for pointing out what we talked about last week, Zoom fatigue. Nothing against Zoom, but what you're talking about is the innovation economy and looking, I would say, for the next disruptors. So who are they?

SCOTT KIRSNER: Well, I mean, I feel like we've all felt like laboratory mice for the last year, as we've been pulled into Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and trying to figure out how do we do our jobs in this new context. So at Innovation Leader, like, we mainly look at big companies and how R&D and innovation happens inside these big companies. But obviously, a lot of that is impacted and sometimes derailed by what's happening in the startup ecosystem.

So there's two kinds of interesting companies that I think are worth tracking at this particular moment. And one of them are a set of companies that are thinking, we need some kind of virtual office space on our desktop or on our laptop. Zoom and Microsoft Teams and some of the other technologies are great for discrete meetings, where you're getting people together and you have an agenda. But offices are about so much more than just meetings. You walk around the hallways, you bump into colleagues, you can have a cluster of conversations with one people going on over here and another group over there.

So there are startups like Sofia is one of them. It's a spinout from Harvard and originally started at the Harvard Innovation Lab that kind of creates a video game-like environment, where you can hang out all day if you want or a couple hours at a time, and people can actually walk up to you at the coffee bar or at the virtual foosball table and strike up a conversation or potentially play a quick game with you, which brings some fun back to the workplace. We forget that offices sometimes used to be fun.

There's another interesting one in the office arena called VirBELA that similarly feels like a video game kind of environment that you can roam around. VirBELA actually feels like you've got an entire campus. So you can have meetings outdoors at a table. You can have meetings in a conference room. You can go to big events and expos in VirBELA. It's a San Diego-based company.

And then there's a whole other category of companies that have started to explode that are all about hosting conferences or hosting trade shows online. And some of those have been raising crazy amounts of venture capital money. They're all mostly still private companies like Hopin, Swapcard, Remo, that are really saying, you don't want to do a conference in Zoom, right?

SEANA SMITH: Yeah.

SCOTT KIRSNER: They're trying to provide new environments for that.

SEANA SMITH: Well, Scott, it sounds like a lot of this has been because of the pandemic in terms of when we were trying to identify the next big thing. Is there anything or any trend that we saw before the pandemic that you still think is a big name to watch and maybe doesn't have to do with working from home or this new virtual environment, that role that we are all in at least right now?

SCOTT KIRSNER: Well, I mean, one of the things that was happening before the pandemic, Amazon and e-commerce was already a pretty significant tsunami before the pandemic. And it's gotten more global and even bigger throughout the pandemic. One of the things people didn't focus on that much was that warehouses that hold all that merchandise and move it through the supply chain to your front door are getting much, much more automated.

So, Amazon had bought a company called Kiva Systems a few years ago for almost a billion dollars. And that was their solution to bringing robots and automation to their warehouses. But now there's a whole new wave of companies. One of them is called Berkshire Grey, and they just announced that they're going to go public through one of these SPAC transactions.

But Berkshire Grey is just one of the companies that's saying, hey, Amazon has their solution. We're going to create a solution for everybody else that's selling groceries online, that's selling drugstore items online, that's selling furniture online, and help them--

ADAM SHAPIRO: Hey, Scott.

SCOTT KIRSNER: --make the warehouses more efficient.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Scott, we only have about 45 seconds. Very quickly, this whole work from home phenomenon, not tomorrow, not next year, but eventually, regulators, tax entities, cities, they're going to start looking at this and say-- unions are going to say no more. Is anybody addressing that issue in the companies that we've just been talking about?

SCOTT KIRSNER: Well, I've not seen anybody addressing that complexity of the future of work from home. But there may be some startup opportunities and some innovation opportunities there. I also think-- I do think that we've seen a huge dispersion of people. And I've talked to a lot of companies where they acknowledge people have moved to other states and other cities. And they are not going to be able to commute back to the office. And so, all of those rules about where do you pay your taxes, they're going to get a lot of scrutiny.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Not only that, but on your federal taxes, you can deduct a portion of the required work from home space. The pandemic has opened up a Pandora's box. We'll address that next time with you. Thank you so much for joining us. Scott Kirsner is the CEO and co-founder of Innovation Leader.