Published: Dec. 14, 2023

Stefani H  0:07  
Welcome to another episode of Creative Distillation. Your hosts Jeff and Brad from the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business, discuss entrepreneurship research while enjoying fine craft beverages. There's a sweet twist to this episode as Brad and Jeff are joined by Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University Trent Williams for a tasting of frozen treats from Sweet Cow, a Colorado based ice cream chain, trying to make a better world in addition to amazing ice cream. Vegan ice cream, sorbet or regular ol straight up ice cream, which will be the favorite? Stay tuned for this revelation, as well as a wider ranging discussion about trends recent research, extensive academic career, and his focus on new venture emergence and innovation. Enjoy and cheers!

Jeff York  1:05  
Welcome to Creative distillation where we distill entrepreneurship research into actionable insights. I am your co host, Jeff York. I'm still the research director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship manage not to get fired so far. And I'm joined as always by my co.

Brad  1:22  
I am Brad Warner. I work at the Deming center with Jeff, I am an entrepreneur. But Jeff, you have some exciting news.

Jeff York  1:28  
I do. Yeah, your title has changed. I'm trying a new flavor of yerba monta today. You're referring to no honey don't recommend the peach way. Okay, we have a peach theme going on. About

Brad  1:39  
the peach, the palisade peach. So I love palisade peaches. Sweet cow really enjoyed the guests that we have coming up, oh, we got all kinds of items. But to get going, I really want to talk about your professional life change.

Jeff York  1:52  
I have a professional life today. So tell us tell our listeners what's going on. I'm the Associate Dean for strategic initiatives. Okay, so we have no longer the division chair for social responsibility and sustainability. Nor am I the division chair for organizational leadership and information analytics. So I have to list I've consolidated titles now.

Brad  2:14  
That which is awesome, meaning less work more money. I totally get it.

Jeff York  2:18  
I don't think it's gonna be less work. i Yeah. Okay. So it's a different kind of work, right? That's a yes. Okay. So it depends on what you mean by work. Like, so. If work is managing people, it is definitely less work. I am, I have loved my time as a division chair. The people I've worked with have been lovely. But I went into academia. So well, not primarily but but big reason I went back and I did not want to manage people ever, ever again. And I do not enjoy managing people. I do not enjoy telling people that they're doing something wrong or that they need to change what they do. I just don't like having authority over people. Like I just does not my thing. And that's basically what you do as the division chair you. Well, I mean, okay, on the flip side, you get to hire great people sometimes. And you get to tell people, you're doing a great job, help them promote sometimes, but usually you're dealing with problems. And thankfully, we don't have a lot, but we have some as any school does. And so, not being a division chair, instead, being the associated infrastructure initiatives is really exciting, because we have a new dean, Dr. Vijay country, who's joining us from Indiana University.

Brad  3:31  
Yeah, hopefully, we will get him here. Well, I

Jeff York  3:33  
hope so he said he was gonna do it. But we'll see. And I'll probably have this title right up until the point we record.

Brad  3:41  
Well, here's the thing. Oh, this

Jeff York  3:43  
is what Jeff actually.

Brad  3:46  
So so the role has changed from managing people to thinking about strategy from the parking lot of a phish concert?

Jeff York  3:52  
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, mostly from the parking lot of a phish concert. I know you so well, well, so I wish I could just go to phish concert parking lots and think about this, that'd be really great. But my actual job is to gather input from all of our stakeholders across a broad array of strategic initiatives, you're gonna how do we improve student outcomes? How do we actually improve our research standing and productivity? And at the same time, how do we improve our relationships with our community members and stakeholders? And so if you think about those three pillars of any good school strategy, and if you think about like the culture as sort of the underlying what makes those things happen, how people treat each other how they collaborate, my job is to figure out the arrows that go both ways between those pillars. And so yeah, so I don't think that's going to be less work.

Brad  4:47  
You don't tease me, right? Yeah, no, no. And I think truthfully, as my friend, the university is lucky to have you in that position. I'm really, I'm really thrilled there. But when I think about entrepreneurship, and how fast We would try to make those changes in the real world versus do you have 1012 years to do this?

Jeff York  5:04  
Are you ever done this in a corporate setting? I mean, oh my god, like it moves like a mono. Yeah. And I mean, I think we're actually I mean, I dare I say, Yeah, I'll go and say, I think that I think that the elite school is faster moving on some of these things, and most corporations are

Brad  5:20  
gonna find out, well, we're gonna find out, let's mark the day and we should do a check in every year. Yeah, I

Jeff York  5:25  
don't have much choice. Well, I generally have two years. So

Brad  5:28  
that's right. Because then you have to take a year off

Jeff York  5:31  
sabbatical, to go, you know, recuperate by going to fish party. That's what you do on sabbatical, right? You just go to a fish Park. actually goes to the concert, you stay on the parking lot. And tailgate. Yeah, no. So no, really, I asked. They asked me to do it for a three year appointment. I wanted to do it for two years. But the time horizon for which we're planning is 2035. So the idea is we start now we move really fast. By 2025. We hope to have an actual clear plan in place with key performance indicators, tactics, goals, and all the stuff we have to have. So and then I will, and then I will go on sabbatical. So

Brad  6:10  
by 2035, we'll have two other Dean's or two Dean's in the future, they will not even remember, whatever. What do you think we'll see? We'll see.

Jeff York  6:20  
Yeah, so so. So our guests coming in? Is your person which is awesome. We're really excited to be able to get him here because last time he was on via zoom, I think it was at the height of lockdown, as I recall. So Dr. Trent Williams is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and strategy. Got that right. Is that what your new title is? I believe so. Yeah. Cool. Good to know. Thank you for joining us.

Trent Williams  6:43  
We are great to be back. And great to be in person. Absolutely.

Jeff York  6:47  
So we were gonna do this episode and a bunch of places that will remain nameless. And none of them would call us back. So you can see the creative distillation brand just moving ahead here in Boulder. We are powerful. We are powerful. It's funny places that sell alcohol all call us back immediately, when we tried to go for the night because Trent is not a drinker. And Brad told us he wasn't going to drink because he's getting ready to teach a class. That's what he said. And I was like, Yeah, and I just came in on a flight I had to get I had to get up at like four this morning to go on a flight so I wasn't planning to drink. So we do have some other things to sample. And we're actually going to visit these guys at some point in the future. So we got some local ice cream as a a Colorado ice cream company called Sweet cow. I don't know that much about them. They were founded in 2010. They say their mission is to make the best ice cream in the world and the cleanest ice cream parlor you've ever seen. I think they're doing pretty well. We're gonna find out that we're gonna taste some ice creams. What I do know about them is a bunch of my son's friends have worked there. And actually a couple of professors, kids I know of work there. And everybody says they are amazing at working with teen employees. And I definitely saw that during the pandemic where they stuck with a bunch of kids and really helped them work through some hard times. I think it's an amazing company. If you're in Colorado, they're all over the place. We went to the one in North Boulder, but there's some all around Denver, there's some in Boulder, and they were so funny. We went in there to buy an ice cream and why did you do it here we were like we were rejected by five other places on our way here. Of course

Brad  8:19  
we'd let you by the way anytime my family comes into town, Jeff, this is like our first stop

Jeff York  8:25  
this week. Great. They love it. All right, so we have two vegan ice creams here. I think we'll start with the vegan ones and work our way up. So we're gonna do a little little taste sampling of sweet cows. We also I brought up a thorough thing so I'm so happy to see my friends today and because you know what your associate dean you have this massive budget you can afford to go buy ice cream and peaches for your friends. We have some palisade peaches. I don't really know. I just know that palisade peaches come from the western slope of Colorado. It's harvest time I always associate with elk hunting season because that's why I usually buy them so yeah, fall in Colorado. palisade peaches, sweet cow ice cream. What do we try first? flight away we got one other

Brad  9:05  
use for palisade peaches is take cut up your peaches, put them in a bottle, pour a bottle of bourbon in there and close it up for two weeks. It is incredible.

Jeff York  9:15  
What bourbon would you recommend

Brad  9:16  
you can do? Pretty much anything I would do like a bullets or something even at that level and that doesn't have to be very expensive. The outcome is your pappy This is not a pappy. Coffee.

Jeff York  9:27  
So here's what we got. Here's what we got. We got vegan strawberry banana, golden Oreo. That's one flavor. I think that's got one. Yeah. Okay. We've got vegan chocolate chip, chocolate Vegan Chocolate Chocolate Chip. We have key lime sorbet. And then we have Trump's pick which was what was this? Raspberry chocolate raspberry check, which we have first.

Trent Williams  9:47  
I asked man, let's I want to try this. The vegan what was it?

Jeff York  9:51  
Vegan strawberry banana golden Oreo. So while Trent's getting that up, we got some serving dishes here. Brad, what are you what are you excited about? Uh, you know, we're sort of in the midst of a new season here. What are you excited about? So

Brad  10:04  
here's I actually was, we were speaking of this before we started recording, some prior students working to make solar delivery more efficient and scalable, through the Department of Energy, just won the National Solar prize. Wow. So

Jeff York  10:17  
are there multiple winners of the National Solar prize? Really, there's one, one and Cheers, guys. They won this. So I'm sorry. They

Brad  10:27  
won the solar solar prize given by the Department of Energy good. And I have people all the time asking about funding. And we were just talking that it's not about the funding, it's about getting some customers doing something that really is groundbreaking. And the funding will come to you. And that's exactly what's happening with this team. And it's really, really exciting for them. And it's, it's great for our environments.

Jeff York  10:48  
That is really cool. So winning that money. What do you think is worth more in that price? Is it the cash? Or the legitimacy? They gave them that prize? I mean, a lot of federal prizes. Yeah. The cash is great. Of course, we'll take it, but that's really the legitimation Oh, yeah. 100%. Oh, yeah. To show theory is right.

Trent Williams  11:07  
That's right. Well, yeah, you get that legitimate, especially around these complex things where it's its impact. And it's, well, if we look at this full cycle, is it actually doing what it says it does? When you have those big institutional actors say, Hey, you're onto something, especially if it's a newer innovation, then that's phenomenal. Yeah. And

Brad  11:24  
it's patented. Now. They're actually going into their first power plants in Hawaii in January. So do beyond just modeling. They're doing actual real pilot testing now.

Jeff York  11:34  
what is the actual technology like what

Brad  11:36  
it allows a, a constant output of solar power from a large panel array. So if you think of many, many acres of solar panels, and if you think about cloud, kind of randomly coming through, it's able to manipulate the grid and the power output in a way that the output is exactly the same, depending on whatever's happening with water.

Jeff York  11:58  
Decrease intermittency and the need for the grid to adjust. That's right. That's right. All right. Cool. Okay, so what do you guys think of vegan strawberry banana Gordon? actually pretty good. How would you know it was vegan?

Brad  12:12  
I would not have known it was alright,

Jeff York  12:13  
we would not know it was

Trent Williams  12:15  
I like I like I like a slightly ice or ice cream as opposed to custard type thing, personally, and so I kind of liked that. Well, it's not everybody's that's what you like, let's do.

Brad  12:25  
Let's do would you order this? Would you actually go back and order? I

Trent Williams  12:27  
would. Yeah,

Jeff York  12:28  
I would get it. Yeah. I get that. Do pina colada a lot there. They do a bunch of boozy ice creams, too. All right. Let's try this key lime. All right. So

Trent Williams  12:38  
while you're doing that, I have a question about, you know, we were talking before about how students find ideas that are solving bigger problems than just for fellow students. So I'm curious, how did they, you know, come to find this as a problem. I mean, it's pretty significant. So

Brad  12:54  
the founder was a computer scientist, and had an internship at Enron and ran into some very interesting scientists through his internship, which kind of was the genesis of his idea.

Trent Williams  13:07  
I'm interesting. This one is amazing. It's really good. As

Jeff York  13:11  
someone from the South who just came back from Tennessee, I feel like I'm an authority on concerns. I just had amazing banana pudding yesterday. That was really good. Oh, yeah. So it was cute. And you know what this Keyline needs? It needs like graham cracker Bits and like a graham cracker.

Trent Williams  13:26  
Yeah, then it's like in a pie.

Jeff York  13:27  
But it's got that like calm, sharp,

Trent Williams  13:29  
tart. Man.

Brad  13:30  
That's good as the guy that lived in Key Largo for a long time. This is awesome.

Jeff York  13:35  
It's my number one ice cream so far. It's pretty different feel

Brad  13:39  
like ice cream though?

Trent Williams  13:40  
It's a sorbet. Yeah, it's a sorbet. So it's a little ice or ice. But it's

Jeff York  13:44  
alright. Well, it's we got let's alright, we also have the Pelosi peach sample that

Trent Williams  13:51  
you finish this first. Alright, well, yeah,

Jeff York  13:53  
we got finished. At first. These pieces are great. Dude. That's really what is it that makes these speeches better? Like this one could be ripened a little bit more, but like, I don't know what it is. I think they're just like way sweet.

Brad  14:04  
I don't know either.

Trent Williams  14:06  
Like sweet, but they're firm too. As opposed to like, squishy. I don't like squishy.

Brad  14:11  
I think palisade pitches, like famous. Yeah,

Jeff York  14:14  
I think it's because like, I don't know, we should go find somebody on the western slope that actually knows what they're talking about. But I think it's because on the western slope, they have this long warming period where these things are coming right from the fall whereas I think in the south beaches are generally like ripe in the summer. And I think it's good as a drier climate. They hold more of the sugars. I don't know that's great. Totally trying to pontificate like I know what I'm talking about here. And I have no idea

Brad  14:38  
I say palisade peaches and bourbon works.

Jeff York  14:41  
Alright, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna do that with some of these peaches. We'll do try that and then we can we can sample that with a future in a future episode.

Trent Williams  14:49  
All right, here's the raspberry chocolate

Jeff York  14:50  
raspberry chocolate.

Trent Williams  14:52  
Okay, and this is an ice cream. So this is like the real deal. Totally different high tax dairy, milk base. Ice Cream.

Brad  15:00  
This is a first for creative distillation having ice cream.

Jeff York  15:03  
We're having an ice cream social, I believe is what you would call. That's the thing and prove it right. Yeah.

Trent Williams  15:08  
And that's one of the things that BYU sponsors is really an ice cream social.

Jeff York  15:12  
I thought Provo was basically if you take Boulder, and you put it through like a looking glass, and instead of dispensaries you have ice cream parlors. That's Provo really you replace all the dispensaries and breweries pretty much with ice cream.

Trent Williams  15:27  
Well, and I'm discovering something new. And my my kids, my kids said that I had to mention this. And now here it came up naturally. But they're all of these soda shops where they do how they do that, like massive varieties of of sodas. And so there's, you know, Fizz, so delicious, all these different brands, and it's cool to be driving down the street. And there's this line going all the way around and down down the street. And it's like, what are they waiting for? And it's, yeah, so they have all these different flavors and these mixes and that's amazing. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. So listeners

Jeff York  15:57  
have figured out Okay, so this market is not that keen on drinking tons of beer or dispensaries, which I don't think you can even have in Utah. Still entrepreneurs have figured out how can we capitalize on the market that happens in these other mountain towns and do this in a way that appeals to our local culture?

Trent Williams  16:12  
Yeah, absolutely. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So it's kind of it's kind of interesting. And, you know, I grew up out there. And so I as a kid, I remember thinking, yeah, what could we do socially? Right. Like, you know, if you're going on a casual date with somebody that's, like, 10 kids? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Cuz then you have your own your own in house social experience. Right. Which, yeah, but it's kind of one of those things where it's, it provides social interaction, but then also, you know, people like trying different beverages. Talking about it. But

Jeff York  16:43  
yeah, I'm totally into like drawing. I used to be in a bluegrass band. Right. And me and my, my fiddler, Molly, we would always go like, anytime we would go on a road trip, we'd be like, we're gonna go try interesting beverages. And, you know, like, Brad, we were very responsible. So we didn't want to drink before he performed, you know, and so

Trent Williams  17:04  
very responsive. Yeah. Now, while

Jeff York  17:06  
we were performing on the other hand, so actually, we would go find, like, all kinds of cool sodas and drinks and stuff like that. And now I'm on stage

Brad  17:15  
in Los Angeles, Jeff, can you Oh, yeah. That was

Jeff York  17:17  
awesome. Did you hear we did this thing with Shawn Hyatt and not in had real suit and real bottles. He's like the leading distributor of sodas in the United States. And we were in like this 50s Cafe Reconstructor. And we're talking just looking at me, Sean and this guy start talking about soda. He's like, dude, if you got gathered like the two leading authorities on soda, and the entire United it was it was amazing. That was so funny. I'm gonna say the actual real ice cream is my least favorite so far. The Raspberry chocolate chip. I mean, it was good, but it's not nearly as good as the key lime. I don't think it was as good as the vegan one. So

Brad  17:56  
I'm gonna go exactly opposite. I thought the others were good. I would order the raspberry chocolate chip.

Jeff York  18:01  
Really? Do you just like the real milk? Yeah, the

Brad  18:06  
more fat the better.

Jeff York  18:09  
Looking like a true Chicago. I so I'm gonna rank them. I like the first one. The vegan strawberry banana. Golden Oreo. All right. Got from Emory. That was that

Trent Williams  18:21  
was a big one.

Jeff York  18:22  
Well, you guys, that's

Trent Williams  18:23  
my favorite. I think t because I like kind of banana cream pie kind of things. And that was approaching that a little bit than I did like the key lime. Second. I would

Jeff York  18:31  
say Key Lime is number two for me. All right. Well, long story short, if you're in Colorado, are in the area. Really? The Front Range? I don't know that it'd be on the front range. There we go. All right. Well, so we should talk about research. Trent. Last time we had you on there was the high the pandemic. And one thing I've always really loved about your research we met Gosh, I don't even know. I mean, it's been a while. Like, I think I met you when you were a doctoral student. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's where we first met super old. But yeah, we're students together. No, I was a what was? What

Trent Williams  19:01  
are we doing? So yeah, you are my you're my assigned mentor. One of the joyful features of being a mentor is you get to read bad work by a doctoral student. That is true. And not only did he have to do that, but I sent him an updated draft, like, three or four days before the conference. And he said, Oh, that's great. Because I had actually been, no, no, you said I had actually been proactive. And I had already read the previous one. And then you read the new one. Did I? Yeah. So I was, uh, you know, impressed by your willingness to just give me five minutes. And then more than that, and then you've continued to be supportive. I was doing some weird stuff at the time, it was seen as really weird. And how what role could entrepreneurship play as a vehicle when there's a crisis was kind of the question and people were like, oh, crises, I mean, those are so narrow and then lo and behold, this COVID thing happened and all of a sudden people are like, actually make sense. Yeah, maybe these things and that's

Jeff York  19:58  
when we reached out to you because was just like we were doing our little zoom podcasting. And I was like, gosh, who do I know that actually talks about? And everybody, including us was all we were all talking about. I think Gaiman wrote something in that conversation about entrepreneurial pivots under COVID-19. And you know, something about entrepreneurship, folks, I think almost to a fault. I say almost we're going to talk a little bit about this, I think it's some of the work Trent's gonna talk about, is we tend to like bolster each other up with clear eyes. And in even if we know something's pretty bad, we tend to look at how can you change this to make it good? We tend not to say like, Okay, this is just, you know, a bad thing.

Brad  20:38  
In my class. Yeah.

Jeff York  20:40  
So I've been in your class, and I've actually been a judge in your class quite a bit. And I've actually been far more critical of some of your students, and you were on occasion, just as you've been a mine. And I guess what I'm trying to say is, we were all trying to cast COVID-19 as some kind of opportunity. And think about, oh, what's the good thing that can come out of this? I gotta tell you guys, I'm not convinced a whole lot. Great came. Now looking back, I remember we did something where people were like, it was good thing. But we were trying to we were trying to talk about entrepreneurs, we're pivoting into it. And I was like, well, whose research thinks about entrepreneurship and time of crises? And literally, it was you indeed, no. Is anybody else like if people picked up this topic and start to run with it more? Because I don't I don't know the literature as well as you do. Yeah.

Trent Williams  21:24  
I mean, people have for sure. And then I see a lot of papers as a reviewer, I'm sure that are coming through. And yeah, trying to look at well, this notion, you know, last time we talked about, kind of the culmination of the work Dean and I did that stemmed from my dissertation work was this concept of spontaneous venturing. Right, which turns out, you know, disaster sociologists for years, many of whom came from Colorado, right? acknowledged this phenomenon, you know, since like the 1900s, early 1900s, and are saying, Wow, every time there's a big crisis, so called victims emerge to help themselves and others because they are on the ground, and they know exactly what to do, where to go.

Jeff York  22:05  
That kind of goes back to some of high IQ stuff to like, I mean, back to what I think of as the economic roots of entrepreneurship, the idea that like the person on the ground, the person closest to the problem actually probably knows a better solution, right? And is going to create one Oh, Alan nerd out for justice like me curious here. What do you think about this to Brad So so as recently asked to write something, and I'm not trying to plug in my work, because who knows, maybe I'll read this thing. But we were asked her, I was asked to write something written with Ted Waldron over at Texas Tech. And to write Wharton, about there was a critique of some of our work that was saying, hey, when entrepreneurship, as a field has this huge problem? Don't get me ready for it. The big problem is, it borrows too much from other literature streams. And therefore it cannot be its own field. And we got create pure new theory seriously. Yeah. And so it's just interesting, you're commenting on that, Trent, you think that's a problem? I tend to find it a very odd critique of a field of entrepreneurship, right? You look to stern.

Brad  23:10  
That bothers me, because I look at entrepreneurship is taking all of these experiences, and how do you how do they weave together? And what is the connective tissue? And how do you move it forward? So I actually think that if, if, if these are academics, entrepreneurial, academics, critiquing this, I actually think they're in the rock field. Well,

Jeff York  23:27  
it's interesting, because it's like, you think like, is it really a whole lot nuisance? Like, you know, Plato and Aristotle? I mean, like, in social science, I mean, we're not talking about physics here, nor medicine or biology. I mean, we're talking about social science. So the idea that you're going to come up with like, completely new theories. And if you don't, then somehow the field is lacking? Well, okay. So first of all, it seems like an odd burden to put on people. I don't know of any field in social science that somehow exists devoid of theories from other fields. I mean, if it does, that's certainly not economics. I don't know. I mean, not economics. I mean, no. And then, if you actually want entrepreneurship research to be useful for some buddy somewhere, which, you know, we often fail to meet that bar on this podcast, but every now we try and every now and then we do meet that bar, I think and have some actionable insights and some interesting things. Why would you not want people to use things from

Brad  24:31  
other theories? Well, first of all, we evolve as a species what it's like it to me, this actually makes no sense. And entrepreneurial boundaries are pushed by many things, new technology, new ways of thinking, new definitions of what families are and what business is, how businesses are delivered. And if you stay in the thinking of those two folks, you want to name them. It's a forum

Jeff York  24:57  
in this in this journal Oh, well as strategic organization journal I not what we'll post it in the in the link the podcast for people to revolt. And we'll post the link to the whole forum. There's several papers that are talking about this. That was just interesting, like Trent was talking about how, you know, sociologists were aware of this phenomenon. By the reasoning of this debate we were having like so from our perspective, we would say entrepreneurship is by definition a borderland. It's a field that actually gets its richness, and its usefulness by bringing together theories from different fields to apply them to the creation of new products, markets and services. And beyond that, actually looking at the societal impact. And one more,

Brad  25:38  
I think it's a way of creative thinking.

Jeff York  25:41  
Well, right. So so it's strange to us to not think entrepreneurially while doing entrepreneurship research, yeah, exactly. Sure. People would say I was a compound. Well,

Brad  25:50  
I actually, I would love to have said it was a cop out. But actually, it's not.

Trent Williams  25:55  
On I think, you know, this might sound overly simplistic, but one of the things I often start in my classes is, what is an idea? Right? And my definition is, it's nothing more or less than a new combination of, of old, older, previous ideas, right? And it's not just my definition, I was drawn from other people who have commented on it. And it's, so for me, it's that combinatorial effect. And it's like, well, what is unique about entrepreneurship? Well, why why might somebody recognize the value at these intersections where somebody else doesn't, or, and so trying to figure out, even generically, that phenomenon, and so for me to pretend that them research in disaster, sociology does not exist. And you know, that I'm the first to, you know, I mean, it's just, it's kind of lazy. And it's also failing to acknowledge all of these contributions. And then the same goes for other fields. So psychology, sociology, economics, you look at kind of the three main mother sciences. And I think to me, in speaking back to all of those, it's, well, we value those deep, narrow explorations that you're doing in those spaces. And but who's able to bridge between all of those? Well, it's often entrepreneurs. And then I think from a research angle, it's the same kind of concept. Can you see connections in sociology, literature on this topic? And then, you know, markets in economics on that? I mean, I know you've recently published some work on that as well, right, these kind of moral market concepts, and whatnot. And that to me, it's like it just isn't enlivening. Not

Jeff York  27:24  
a problem. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, I'm sorry to bring it. I didn't mean it. I think it goes

Brad  27:28  
to a bigger problem, though. And I think it's what is the definition of entrepreneurship. And when you look at a university, our offices, Jeff happened to be in the business school. Right, but I think we transcend the business school. And well, yeah, but I think that there's a group of people that think of entrepreneurship is just related to business. It's much bigger than that. I don't

Jeff York  27:47  
know. It's a strange thing. Like you think of it as turf or something, right? Like, we got to make this thing. And then we've got to own it and keep people out. And I get it. Like, that's how we kind of maintain all social sciences, we, we learn to speak a secret language, and then we talk to each other, and then other people can't get and it's in journals behind paywalls and all this stuff. And you know, I mean, because they get rid of all that. And as a friend of mine said, Yeah, but what are we going to do for money? Like, okay, I guess we're also entrepreneurs. I don't know, I'm sorry to take us on a tangent, Trent. Just always, always really respect your perspective. And it was top of mine, because we just published this thing. And I don't often talk about my own work on the podcast, but this really disturbed me clap them and treat. I was like, Wow, it really catches on. I don't know, to me, it would take away the promise and the beauty of the field, I just like, we're gonna put up barriers and we're gonna, you know, somehow generate Well, first of all, I don't think it's possible like to generate these original theories, like I mean, worthy. Because, like, some original theories and entrepreneurship, brick Lodge, clearly derived will not be Strauss and Ted Baker be the first person to tell ya actuation you know, Sarah's will be the first person tell you is derived from herb Simon's work and him as their mentor. There's the big, I mean, what are the other big ones? Opportunity discovery? I mean, that's to me is

Trent Williams  29:11  
session. There's,

Jeff York  29:12  
I mean, there's so much there. I mean, now, Jay, and Jay and Sharon are building on, like, philosophy to talk about that. So that's not an original idea. I mean, I don't think any anyway, these are like the big ideas in quotes. So

Brad  29:27  
my suggestion is, forget it, go out, buy a Porsche, you'll be fine.

Jeff York  29:33  
You'll know that I'm an Associate Dean. You know, by several Porsches. It's still a sandwich next time. I'll bring you a Porsche. Yeah, be nice. Alright, so Well, if

Trent Williams  29:44  
I could just say one last thing, I just think it spurs from that comment about Jane and Sharon, and kind of what they're doing on that. And it's like, well, of course I mean, that's everything we are doing is building on great efforts from those before us. So you know, you have Socrates who's laying out philosophical arguments around ethics around all of these different things, and what is what is beautiful, what is valuable? How is knowledge created? And then eventually we move toward, we actually need to experiment with some of these things. And you know, Socrates says, Let's observe, that's great. And then we'll let's actually experiment, and on and on and on. And then slowly, you know, fields emerged to go narrower and deeper. And yet, it's still valuable to take step back, and how does this cross across domains. But so I think, if we start to argue for our, only our narrow field, then I think we're kind of missing the reality that there's contributions across lots of different spaces. And that I think, is what entrepreneurs do exceptionally well, because they come in and they're, like, I'm confused by why all these things are segmented. Like, can't you see that these fit perfectly? To

Jeff York  30:50  
me they do. And then some other people start to believe that and that's all things, so called The Science of the artificial, right. I like that as an idea of I like the idea of like, you know, what we're teaching and what we do and entrepreneurship, we understand how human artifacts come into existence. Like literally, unfortunately, everything we're surrounded by. Because we're not in nature, right. Yeah. Anyway, so it's a bit of a sorry, hopefully, it's a better tangent than Dungeons and Dragons, though. I think we can talk about those topics.

Brad  31:22  
It's a great segue into trends paper.

Jeff York  31:24  
Why that's right. Thanks, man. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wait a sec. All right.

Brad  31:30  
All right. So talk to us about what you're working on, or what you have. Yeah. So

Trent Williams  31:34  
I wanted to talk about a couple papers that are just coming out in the Journal of Business venturing. And so one came out in January. And this is called progress without a venture individual benefits of post disruption. entrepreneuring. And then another one that's also in the Journal of Business venturing, you know, adapting a collective will in a way during a civil war, the persistence of an entrepreneurial ecosystem as an architecture of hope. Yeah, so

Brad  32:00  
those titles are not getting me to buy the.

Trent Williams  32:04  
So yeah, so as we were just talking about the

Jeff York  32:06  
critical wood, you just got a civil war of hope. I'm

Brad  32:10  
just thinking, Where are they going to put that at my bookstore shelf? Where does this even fit

Jeff York  32:14  
to be? Read is like exactly one title.

Trent Williams  32:19  
If the so that's okay. I still remember last time you said, I was gonna ask you the practical implications. But the final chapter is says, So what? Who cares? So thank you for bringing that up. So I'm gonna clean to that no matter what happens? No, but anyway, but let me take a step back. So you know, a few years ago, couple of collaborators, so Saratoga and she's in Sweden, and then Ramsay fatawa. He's currently out at in Ontario, but at the time, he was in Lebanon, he's from Lebanon. And so I became really interested in trying to understand could entrepreneurship have any beneficial role for this massive refugee crisis going on? And, you know, there was kind of a perhaps I don't know, well, there wasn't really a low, but maybe our attention got diverted. But now it's back front and center with many Ukrainian refugees. And then, you know, issues happening in the United States where people from many different countries are searching for a better life. And so, but at this time, this was primarily due to the civil war in Syria, and then other conflicts in Iraq, just people fleeing, like from work. Yeah, exactly. And so unfortunately, we're gonna be entering I believe that decade of refugees, yeah, entry of refugees, right.

Jeff York  33:35  
climate change and sea level rise and storms and everything else and water shortages.

Trent Williams  33:39  
Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. Unfortunately, all the trends do not suggest that this is slowing, it's going the other way. And rapidly growing. Even as I would go through rounds a review, I go back to the UN's website, and oh, wow, I need to increase the number of refugees, another 10 million or whatnot. You know, I mean, it's not like another 200. So anyway, but I became really curious about could entrepreneurship be a vehicle to help with this process. So helping with both host countries to receive and provide opportunities for refugees, and then also helping the refugees themselves to adapt to the new location, and to have some immediate professional opportunities. And so this paper that is based in the Swedish context, we started out, because my my collaborators are at orgran, she had some influence and role with some of the government actors who were trying to create courses for entrepreneurs for predominantly Syrian Iraqi refugees to actually learn about how this works in Sweden. So you had government backing, you had all these resources. And then you had people who'd self selected into this refugee. So it's like, what could possibly go wrong, right? I mean, every everybody wants is, you know, and this is kind of the question. Sometimes people say like, Oh, if only I had money, it's like, well, this is a case where money did not solve the issue. There was has plenty of funding usually doesn't. Yeah. And so you know, as we started investigating this and following these individuals over a period of time, many, many of them did nothing. And we were really curious why. So initially, I thought, Well, this was, I guess, a failure. And so what? We ended up looking at it slightly differently and realizing, well, what did they gain? And so first of all, when you're a new person in a new country, and you're coming from a context that I might see, I, Trent Williams, my see is chaotic. If I was to go to Iraq and see how people are running businesses, it would make no sense to me. But for them, it absolutely made sense. They knew how to operate and entrepreneurial venture, they knew how to find financing in that context, in that context, and then they show up in Sweden, where everything is super egalitarian, like just follow the rules, but it's like, well, what are the rules? You know, am I going to be in jail? Am I going to be doing all of these different kinds of things, if I get if I get it wrong, all the same terms that they had understood, being successful entrepreneurs in their home countries, actually served as an impediment to being successful in Sweden, because it was all just different. And so what we did find, though, was, and this is why we use this term entrepreneurial, which quite simply is just engaging in the entrepreneurship process, in some way, shape, or form. In reality, kind of similar to what we do with our students at universities, many of my students at Indiana where it was previously didn't go on to start businesses, but they learned a lot about business, about vetting ideas about interacting and going to learn how to solve problems. And that's a huge part of kind of what we found, where it's like, well, they did find some tools to adapt, it just did not deliver on this really huge promise, which was it'll change the refugees lives, and it will renew Sweden's economy. The takeaway

Brad  36:50  
in there Trent, though, that from your, from your findings, if you were to go and redo these programs, or re restructure them, what would you have done differently?

Trent Williams  36:59  
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think for one, you know, as Jeff kind of just reacted to this, like, wow, that's a that's a huge goal. And it is, but dialing back some of the expectations, and then also trying to be clear around. Yeah, so what's what's in scope, given where you're at? So one analogy we were using early on, in the paper, was this notion of rock climbing where you know, when you're an expert rock climber, yeah, you can make it look really easy. You know, it does, yeah,

Brad  37:28  
right up the mountain.

Trent Williams  37:28  
So I just finished watching. I'd followed the career of Alex Honnold for five years. So you sit there and watch him climb El Capitan. And you're like, Well, I'm sure I could do that. Like, I'm kind of athletic, and you know, why not? Right, like he's holding on just fine and up. And then I just imagine, if I were to show up and stand at the base of El Capitan, and look up, I'd be like, Bartek Are you kidding me? Like this is not a claimable wall. And so I think that that's kind of what happened is individuals, they see successful entrepreneurs in Sweden, they were successful. You from a distance, you see people scampering up the mountain, and then you show up and look up the wall and you realize, well, I'm expecting a rope, I'm expecting a foothold, I'm expecting these things. And so I think, really trying to specify, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on language has a lot of emphasis on learning the laws, but it's more like understanding how things actually work here. And I think if there was an emphasis on that, instead of more traditional kind of, well, let's do some ideation. Well, let's, it's, it's no, hold on, like, how does it work here. So accelerate that process, which ended up coming as an output of, you know, just engaging in the process as a whole. So

Jeff York  38:42  
it's more so I think what you're saying, I mean, yeah, paraphrase back to you see, if I'm getting it, focusing more on teaching would be entrepreneurs, how they operate in a different societal, institutional, and cultural context will be at least as important, if not even more important than teaching them the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, especially if you're talking about assimilating a refugee population, a diaspora coming into Sweden, which is relatively a rather homogeny homogenous country. Yeah, I think by most standards, as well as very wealthy, so is no, absolutely.

Trent Williams  39:24  
I mean, there's an actual insight for policymakers. Well, and here's the second thing, you know, a practical example from my own experience. You know, when I left Indiana, I made my way to BYU Marriott. Yeah, I found that there were just different processes. I found this every time I switch any organization. And so what I found useful actually was to say, okay, when it comes to this expectation, here's what I'm currently doing. Now. Could you translate that in like BYU Marriot language? And, and that was actually really helpful? Because they would say, oh, yeah, okay. I understand now because they now understood what I was expecting. And then they could say, oh, Oh, yeah, 99% of that is similar, this 1% is different, but it's important difference. And so I think that's a big part of it is trying to acknowledge, what did they had known previously was valuable was impactful. And I think even something as simple as, so how would you get financing? If they explained it and said, Oh, that's interesting. So what's common among that is, there's a network of financers. And you had somewhat informal mechanisms for getting that funding here. It's just slightly more formalized. But we still have an informal element that's like this. And so you're finding, I think that that helps people to not get totally discouraged, because what ended up happening is a lot of analogies. Yeah. And a lot of them would would say, well, it's totally different. And if and if things are completely different, diametrically opposed. Yeah, there's not a lot of space for progress there. But if it's okay, so I'm, like, 60% of the way there. And now I should go learn these things, then that that's a little

Brad  40:59  
different takeaway, though. So my takeaway is that we have very creative problem solvers in their native land. And they, they get dropped off in this alien world. And they actually don't understand the problems. That's true. Right. So how do you solve for something you don't know what needs to be solved? Yeah,

Jeff York  41:18  
yeah. It's like our, it's like sending our undergrads to go solve problems for Google. Yes. Right. Right. Like, that's why they come up with you guys. Were talking to us earlier, this idea of like, ideas to solve problems for other undergrad. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's kind of like write what you know, but is an entrepreneurship you got write what you know, that actually will lie. So

Brad  41:40  
if you trap someone in a place where they can't understand the language that they actually have, no, they have no center to understand what the problems are happening around them. If they're standing in the middle of it, they may not even recognize it. How would you ever expect them to be successful? Right?

Trent Williams  41:56  
Yeah, no, it's it's very difficult. And then you add on layers of things, like your real human trauma that has experienced for some, but not for others, you know, so a lot of the research I've done as well as on this psychological resilience, which is, according to clinical psychologist is the absence really of PTSD symptoms. And I think often, when we see individuals experiencing something that's difficult, and especially, you know, would be massively significant. So if somebody walks up to me and says, Oh, yeah, like these people died, I saw it happen, et cetera, et cetera. In my context, that would be highly unusual. But that was not all that unusual for these people. And so I think what's, what's the general challenge when we go about trying to help people and so this is kind of the takeaway for the host country, and those trying to resource and fund is we make some assumptions on people's life experiences based on what we can or cannot tolerate. And it's just really not the way it works. It's like, well, what do they say? What are their needs? You know, where are they at? Like, but if we just walk up to them and say, You are traumatized. So now we're going to do some psychological intervention? Well, there's research on that this is that that that might cause someone who was not traumatized to become traumatized, right.

Brad  43:11  
You just told me, though, Trent, that if you follow up in 10 years, that the people that self identified as entrepreneurs, that you'll look, if the immigration flow continues, they will actually develop enterprises within their community, I think

Trent Williams  43:24  
you're probably right. And so that that's another great takeaway, which is, you know, what was the timeline, you know, that we were expecting. And so with such massive translation that needed to occur, you know, even four or five years of data collection,

Brad  43:38  
it was right not understand the problem, from the day they left to where they are today,

Trent Williams  43:43  
because they have that, you know, kind of tying to what Jeff was saying earlier, we, they have that creative ability to integrate ideas from different domains, they just need to better understand their new domain. And, you know, many of them that acknowledged as well, they said, Look, you know, we were realizing that this is going to be a long term process, and maybe it's my kids who are going to be the most successful from these efforts. But their efforts of actually going out and testing some of their nascent ideas about what does this context mean? So many ways, that's the beginning step of the entrepreneurship process for them is, I'm actually going to have an idea about how things occur in my context, and I'm gonna go test it and get feedback and then get a lot of negative feedback. But what if they had just kind of stayed at home instead, and kind of interacted with their own group of people who had come, and that that's when I think they really got stagnant. And the last thing I will say about this particular situation is some of the most successful were people who had not benefited at all in the previous context. So especially women, and so many of the women were just so thrilled that they could finally were empowered to do something. Yeah. And so they they were very eager, not only to potentially launch a business, but everything just involved and working on it was highly empowering and motivating and yet also was difficult for their partners, spouses, because that was breaking some norms and expectations. And so that's just going to take time.

Brad  45:13  
And then the other thing is I think that I mean, very, very long term study. But we could look at generational impact of immigrants coming to the United States in the early 1900s. And how their families have grown out and actually start studying these folks now and seeing what happens. I'm sure there'd be absolutely,

Trent Williams  45:27  
absolutely.

Jeff York  45:28  
So that paper is out now. Correct. It's progress without adventure, individual benefits of post disruption entrepreneurial? Yep. Do you have another paper that's in the works? Not? Well, should be out by the time you guys

Brad  45:42  
explain to me what in the works means and this time delay? Can you Sure. So

Jeff York  45:48  
you submit a paper to a journal best case scenario, it comes back three months later, with like about 15 pages of complaints about how bad the paper is, and invite you to resubmit it, that's best case scenario. So you usually take about you, that's the good news. That's, that's the best, best possible outcome. So then you spend around three months, hopefully, you do it in three months, you try to do it faster, but you never do. At least I don't. And you send it back to the journal and they hold it for another three months, and then they'll send it back. Best case scenario, they'll come back with about 10 pages of complaints. And then you'll go through the process, then you go back with that. And then around the third, fourth round, sometimes fifth, sixth one, case seven, the journal finally says, Okay, we like your paper. But this is why these things take like two and a half, three years to get published.

Brad  46:42  
How long have you been working on submission? Boy, just the process of collaboration

Trent Williams  46:45  
yet from collecting data in 2017 2018? And then yeah, sometimes, you know, with with both the papers that I mentioned, went multiple rounds at journals, and then got rejected. So start again,

Brad  46:58  
so you guys pick the craziest thing.

Jeff York  47:03  
So yeah, we're lazy people.

Trent Williams  47:08  
Negative feedback. So this

Jeff York  47:10  
paper is under review. Looks like it's what we call a conditional acceptance, basically, before the final, the final thing, it was printed. I don't know.

Brad  47:20  
When you say this out loud. It does sound stupid. Okay.

Jeff York  47:24  
we all we all agree, it's just we can't figure out anything better. So so you get what's called conditional acceptance, which says, Alright, read your paper, we will conditionally accept upon you doing these things. And that's usually like, because over the courses you're trying to satisfy for different people usually, so the paper invariably gets longer and longer. And then it comes back and says, Now cut five pages out. And which you always like cursing the editor and kicking things. And then you get done. Oh, my God, so much better for taking those find me almost Anything's better by taking five. We're talking about 30 page document. So anyway, train as this one. I think it's really interesting. But we'll have you back on to talk about when it's out. But just real quick to talk about, like this idea you had of what was the term

Trent Williams  48:10  
kind of an ecosystem of hope. That's kind of what I'm calling it. So so this is really cool idea. So quick snapshot of this, we started collecting data in a country that we have to call not by its real name, so we call it the Dariya. And so yeah, I know, you're in the middle of a civil war. So there were some individuals who were in the capital town well, while the regime was out, chasing down dissidents, if you want to call them that, that's what I mean, I'll just use the regime's turn, I guess. And this, there was an attention paid to people in the Capitol. And so these young people said, Hey, we could create Silicon Valley of Bavaria. And I was sitting there like, really? And so we started tracking this group of individuals. How did you do your research? So yeah, he's in context. So my Lebanese co author, Ramsay, batalla, he, he had some friends who were interacting interfacing with this. But they're Yeah, they lived in Bavaria. Correct. And, and so he, he and I had started collecting some data there in Lebanon. And he said, Well, hey, what about this? And so I was intrigued. And it was funny. One of our interviewing tactics was to say, hey, this American just doesn't even believe that you're doing this. And they said, Oh, my gosh, well, let me tell them and so it was a very good interview tool, like you just And so anyway, I don't believe you're right. And so so we tracked this group over about six years. So they went from saying, Well, we're gonna build an ecosystem that's going to produce the Uber of that area, the Uber Eats of that area, the fill in the blank of that area, and they really copies though. So what they were trying to do, yeah, they were trying to replicate some of these business models. And it was all anchored in digital technologies, because they said, Hey, our country's in shambles. But it's not like we're saying we need to build a Tesla factory, because we cannot do that. But what could we do that's hosted perhaps somewhere else in a different country on their servers and We can create these things. So that was the, the, the hypothesis they had. And so they, you know, they they followed pretty strictly the structure that they had interpreted of being the Silicon Valley structure. They said, We don't want any entrepreneurs like we don't want someone, you know, doing a fruit stand on the side of the road that's not an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs high growth, VC backed funded. Yeah, they were very exclusive. And it's really interesting reading some of these quotes, because many of them were like, I mean, they were total novices. They said, Yeah, I didn't even know about this until like yesterday. You know, and I found other students, right. So anyway, long story short, as this kind of ongoing war started to happen, and in a quick sidebar, I suppose you know, in war contexts, entrepreneurship actually happens quite a bit, because you have very few employed opportunities.

Jeff York  50:49  
And there's so much uncertainty. Yeah, just trying to figure out what resources. Exactly.

Trent Williams  50:54  
So one of your only options is to be an entrepreneur. And so on the one hand, you have entrepreneurship is really one of your only option. On the other hand, it's missing all the things that are theories say you need to launch a business, there's no institutional support, no system, nothing, nothing. Anyway, so when the regime turned, it's, you know, I have Sauron back to the capital, it began kidnapping people, they just be swept off the street disappear, murdering people in prison, I mean, just horrific stuff. And so they first move things just into hiding, and even some fellow barons were like, Why are you guys doing this entrepreneurship thing, our whole world is falling apart. But what they realized is that they had started to generate a sense of hope. And this collective my will to struggle is kind of what we call it were powerful, it's very powerful. It's like I can't actually do something, but because this regime is so oppressive, but achieving a little secret meeting here, and one guy talks about giving a presentation, where there were artillery rounds going off outside of his hotel room, and he's just casually setting up his easel and you know, those kinds of things. And so then, as it moved into the long term, kind of the opposite of what they had started out where it's very narrow entrepreneurship, it became No, hey, you leaving that area to go to Germany to get to get your education that helps entrepreneurship in Bavaria, you know, you, I'm moving to Canada, and, you know, start opening up a blog post that talks about this. So it just became this vast community that was all aligned around still, this notion of entrepreneurship. And so it went from narrow has to be high growth, too, could be just about anything, because all that matters is your part of our struggle. And so as I kept reading the data over and over this most common threads was hope. And so there's some research on this that talks about collective hope in an organization and especially if you're struggling, but this was collective hope in loosely organized, collective. So that's why I kind of said, Oh, they've created an ecosystem of hope, where you could belong to it. And even though your life is horrible, you could reinterpret whatever activities you were doing, as being part of moving forward. And actually, I had just randomly picked up Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning, which I had read before, as as an undergraduate. And I thought, this is exactly what he was trying to do in the concentration camp was a no, I'm not digging a trench, I'm moving myself forward. But then he looked around and saw people who were literally miserable and dying. And so anyway, it was fascinating to me, I really think my editor Charlene ziet, spa on on this particular project, because she was the one that invited us to go and explore how entrepreneurship in this war context where you have really almost no hope for long term success like this. This is an ongoing conflict, it's not over. And here's where it can serve as a psychological vehicle. For people involved, I'm

Brad  53:51  
actually thinking, so ecosystem of hope is a great term. I'm going to actually, I think it's awesome. I think that Ukraine, when this is all over, is going to be an entrepreneurial miracle. I really, I really think it's going to be an incredible, I'd love to actually go and work there and help them. What you're talking about is putting my head in Ukraine and how, because I think that the culture is there that doesn't need kind of this catalyst to light. Yeah. And so I'd love to talk to you 10 years to see how that looks. That'd be pretty

Trent Williams  54:20  
cool. That's cool. It's

Jeff York  54:21  
actually interesting, because this, this whole conversation kind of points to how sometimes the measures we want to throw on entrepreneurship, number of ventures started funds, raised, successful exits, all those things. I mean, yeah, okay. They're important sometimes, but they kind of missed the point. In some ways. It's societal, not necessarily about that, which means our whole field has a long way to go.

Trent Williams  54:45  
Yeah, well, I'm just human. Like, it's the end of the day, like it's, it's human life and living and thriving, where possible, I mean, surviving and hopefully thriving, and it's, you know, whatever we are doing for our work. I mean, there are of course, These metrics, but you just zoom out. It's like, we have lives. And we're humans and that that alone matters and should matter, you know, and

Jeff York  55:10  
kind of the crisis in higher ed in this country. But that's probably a note for another time.

Trent Williams  55:15  
Yeah. Just take care of this crisis in higher ed.

Jeff York  55:18  
Maybe by next year associate Dean's on the case everything will get solved. All right. Well, our guest Dr. Trent Williams from BYU, thanks for joining us transcripts, we'll see you in person. And also want to mention our ice cream sampling from Sweet cow. Check them out at sweet cow.com

Brad  55:35  
It was great to sit down with you guys. Yeah, this is

Jeff York  55:38  
brand go teacher class after definitely not drinking any. I might actually not drink something else before I go. Yes, totally, completely, only fired by ice cream. So once again on Jeff York, research director for the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. And

Brad  55:52  
I am Brad Warner. I'm an entrepreneur, lucky to work at the University of Colorado and I appreciate you. I feel

Jeff York  55:57  
the same way. Write to us, subscribe, do all the podcast stuff. It really does help us out we'd really appreciate thanks again for joining us today.

Stefani H  56:07  
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Creative Distillation. Recorded at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. Learn more about Sweet Cow ice cream and order merch at sweetcow.com. Learn more about Trent Williams on his faculty page at marriott.byu.edu. We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. Email us at CDpodcast@colorado.edu. And please be sure to subscribe to Creative distillation wherever you get your podcasts. The Creative Distillation podcast is made possible by the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business. For more information, please visit deming.colorado.edu. That's D-E-M-ING and click the Creative Distillation link. Creative Distillation is produced by Joel Davis at Analog Digital Arts. Our theme music is "Whiskey Before Breakfast" performed by your humble host, Brad and Jeff. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here for another episode of Creative Distillation.

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