In Conversation With Ivan Heredia: The Next Generation of Innovator
Ivan Heredia is a marketing and growth leader who helps CEOs and companies make the right bets to drive growth and stay meaningfully relevant with audiences as markets and generations shift.
Jackson Hatfield, Made by Many’s latest addition to its Gen Z roster, sat down with Ivan to discuss how AI and generative tech are redefining the practice of innovation in its entirety.
It’s safe to say that you're someone with pretty extensive experience in building for youth audiences. Gen Z are a demographic whose culture moves at rapid speeds, and in the age of AI, this means you have both your newest tech and your newest audiences resisting traditional timelines. What effect is this having on innovators?
Well, with your question you inherently acknowledge that the pace of innovation is accelerating astronomically; we're seeing that, and we're living that. We can't avoid it. But what's equally fascinating to me is understanding audiences’ tolerance for hesitation. AI didn't make Gen Z impatient, I don't think. It's just removed all of the excuses. I think we're going to see more extremes and less middle ground. We'll see an increase in self-made millionaires, but we'll also see a lot of failures. People trying to do that stuff and failing — at least, not meeting their goals and expectations — and so it's going to require a lot of resilience. It [AI] will elevate the need for judgment, critical thinking, and taste. AI can help facilitate the critical thinking by providing context on what's out there, but critical thinking is human. Taste is 100% human. Sure, maybe AI can serve as a sidekick, and you can feed it what your own tastes are, but the origins of taste comes from human nature.
So, if Gen Z is the first generation that treats AI as a collaborator, what might this mean for the future practice of innovation?
Gen Z is not a monolith, but broadly they're less precious about who made something or how it was made. They care about whether the outcome is good. Whether AI was involved is usually, so far, immaterial. For innovation teams, that means obsess over outcomes: what problem does this solve, and is it worth people's time? Use that as the north star (and Gen Alpha will likely lean even further in this direction).
What are the signals that an organisation needs to reinvent its innovation process beyond just iterating existing products?
Without a doubt, there's tons of signals when you need to start making changes. If your head's down in the work, you're not really seeing what's out there, but you have to be a little bit of both: heads down, but also doing the reality check of what's happening in the world. If those are not aligned — the internal, with what you're seeing out there as the trends, notonly within your industry but adjacent indicators outside of your category — then there's an opportunity to modernise. Reverse engineer that and think: how does the team look and is it designed to adequately address the needs of the customer in a timely, delightful, engaging way?
That’s an interesting take. If the barriers to entry are, like you say, beginning to erode as a consequence of AI tools, then a lot of what innovation is for is suddenly thrown into question. If everyone can build their own digital products, what does that mean for innovation teams in how they approach consumer needs?
I think there are going to be a lot more businesses that are going to be created. There'll be a lot more competition because the access will be democratised, right? These tools allow you to iterate and prototype and experiment and test at a pace – and a scale – which we've not really seen before. AI is going to compress experimentation. It's going to really shorten that sprint, to use project management terms. Significantly. But it’s not going to replace conviction.
What effect might this have on traditional innovation cycles — particularly, what is worth keeping, and what is not?
I think something we should certainly keep is problem framing. At the end of the day, that is what innovation does. It solves a problem; there's no innovation without a problem that we're trying to solve. I do think, also, that there will always be a place for human research. The emotional, cultural insights that go beyond surveys. Face-to-face ethnographic research in the home, I don't think that can be replaced. As far as what we could potentially abandon with these innovation cycles, I think long validation loops — spinning the wheels — simply won’t survive. In the same vein, I spent a number of years at Disney and back then it was all about polishing something and making it perfect. I think we should abandon investing in polish before belief. You have to have strong conviction. I don’t think you can replace conviction.
What you're saying about the collapse of processes feels particularly relevant. How would you say the relationship between Horizon 1 and Horizon 3 innovation is changing in light of this?
I think there will always be value in the exercise of looking 3 to 5 years out. Customer centricity is baked in, inspiration is baked in, trending data is obviously baked in, and this thinking happens inside Horizon 1 Inside those constraints, but like forecasting with precision, that doesn't really matter, in my opinion. I think AI just forces those conversations to happen faster, compressing those sprints, to pressure test the hypothesis faster, to build those prototypes faster. I think there will always be value to Horizon 3. It just might look a little fuzzier, with a few more options, but, fundamentally, it's got inspiration in it. It must be backed by what the customer view is,the customer pain points are, and if it can be this, I don’t think it’ll ever be obsolete — even in the age of AI.
These are pretty ambitious changes you're implying businesses will need to make to survive in this new world. How would you encourage other leaders to bring their own organisations with them on these journeys, and to navigate this uncharted territory?
This is something that’s been a red thread in my career, and it was certainly still the case pre-AI. I think collaboration should be fundamental in every leader's DNA. You don't convince the business with logic alone, you’ve got to have those relationships. You do need that logic as a baseline, but it’s through narrative, through prototypes and proof, that people understand innovation.
There's often a fear of innovation, a friction, where people view it as replacing them or making them irrelevant. I think what's more important is to create that psychological safety so that your stakeholders, your team, your peers at the table understand how innovation amplifies the core strengths of what the company already does well, and that is at the heart of bringing people along on these journeys. In my experience, it always has been, and I suspect this will stay true in the Age of AI.
While we’re talking about these paradigm shifts, it’s starting to seem as though AI can do much of what many entry-level roles would spend their first 5 years learning. What ground-level, essential knowledge and instincts do you think might get lost along the way?
Well, we might lose the basics, but the basics will always matter. I think danger lies in skipping through the consequences. Junior roles teach accountability through failure — failing is how you learn. So how do you design the organisation in this new era to allow junior folks to be accountable, to know the basics, even though those are tasks that are now automated or handled by AI? These are micro-failures, right? We're not talking about losing your job, but failure through experimentation, through A/B testing. You can call that failure, but really it’s learning. Removing that from the equation can be dangerous, and cost companies significantly over time.
I think orgs need to figure out how to plug learning into their culture at an elemental level. I don’t have a silver bullet, but I’d prioritise a few consistent practices: create simulated (and sometimes real) decision environments so junior people can practice making calls and understanding consequences—like rehearsing game situations in sports. Encourage shadowing focused on judgment, not menial tasks. Make strategy visible: unpack how decisions are made and how a strategy is formed, so people can build judgment and taste. Those capabilities, those practices, keep that learning loop open.
And, for a final question, I want to meet you on your turf. What qualities do you think Gen Z brings to innovation?
So much. If I had to boil it down, Gen Z, want to see what's worth building. Something that's based in solving a real problem, that constitutes what’s worth it. And they want to use products that are worth their time, so I think they have strong discernment there. So, for the sake of innovation, build something that's worth building. That’s what I’ve learned from them, at least.
