Episode 61: The Drip by AQUALAB: Realistic Imagination in Product Innovation with Ali Alwattari

About the guest 

Ali Alwattari is a product innovation leader at Kraton Corporation with over three decades of experience in transforming ideas into market-ready solutions. His passion lies in integrating human storytelling into scientific work, accelerating innovation, and tackling complex challenges across industries. Ali’s unique approach to balancing logic with creativity has led to the development of distinctive products and practical breakthroughs, making him a respected voice in product innovation.

Transcript
 

Zachary Cartwright :
What does a golf ball have to do with the invention story behind tooth whitening strips? And how did a contact lens help with formulating an award winning shave gel? Welcome to the Drip where we keep your mind hydrated with some science, music and a mantra. I'm your host, Zachary Cartwright. As a lead food scientist at AQUALAB, I'm always curious about how different scientists approach new product innovations. And my guest today is Ali Alwattari and he has been working in product innovation for over 33 years in a wide range of industries, including consumer goods, biotechnology and energy. While there are so many great books and trainings on how to organize R and D and how to connect business and science, what motivates Ali the most is bringing the human dimension and human story into his scientific work. He says that there are learnable and reliable sources of creativity that consistently reveal out of the box approaches accelerating innovation and increasing the probability of solving the hardest problems that come up in the journey from lab to market. Let's learn about Ali's creative process and some of the products he has worked on in the past.

Zachary Cartwright :
Hi Ali, thank you so much for being here. Can you tell us more about your journey in product innovation and how your diverse experiences across all these different industries has shaped your approach to looking at products and coming up with new product development?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. Really two or three major things there. One of them is when I took the sort of the personal step of taking risk, you know, and working in different industries. So that immediately, although I really enjoyed my primary area, which was consumer products, I was really curious that when you use creativity, when you use science, how do they play out in something that has nothing to do with that, for example, geological structures in oil recovery, for example. And so by doing things like that, it really shaped me because I realized what are the things that travel between industries from a innovation productivity point of view and, and what things don't. So the things that don't are literal things like, hey, here is this ingredient and look how it's useful here. That sometimes works.

Ali Alwattari :
But the more things that work are really things like phenomena. So that really, really helped me a lot in being effective and successful in a lot of industries. So an example is, for example, if you have water, the surface tension of water and how it wets a surface is very important when you're making a detergent to wash a shirt in a consumer product, it's really very important also when you are flooding geological structure to push out and get more oil out of that so that you don't waste all the residual oil underground. So that's kind of one key thing, pushing very heavy on learning what fails and what doesn't by jumping into a lot of industries. The other is each company has such a dramatically different culture in terms of leadership style and decision making and things like that. By really asking to do different projects and having different roles on different teams. That's the second part is really the non technical part of this which is really understanding that we have so much power in how we behave and our behavior and our relationships have even same or greater influence than our technical and creative, you know, ingenuity. So when you put those two together, that's kind of the synopsis of that kind of working those diverse experience is that it's a reusable skill set which is the emotional intelligence, the relationships, the behavior and flexibility in behavior with the understanding what travels across different things and just saying, hey, those are the reusable components.

Ali Alwattari :
So realizing that human reusable component and then that technical and creative reusable component has allowed really me and others too to be really effective if they're willing to trade off a little bit of physical stability for, for learning.

Zachary Cartwright :
And when it comes to scientific work and looking at innovation, why is it important to focus on the human dimension and also the storytelling aspect of the process?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, absolutely. So the human dimension is until, until robots learn how to invent, which they'll probably learn pretty soon anyway, but even if they do, humans have a dominant effect in bringing new things to life. And I think that combined with just really realizing when you have extremely challenging jobs like innovation, where there isn't too many instruction manuals like there might be for other trades or professions, you know, that made me have a lot of empathy first to myself and then I learned, wow, I feel empathy to, to everybody in, in that field. So I think that's a critical one is right now it's human and human things are emotional and you get more better results when you really help to motivate people, listen to their problems and embrace emotion as a motivator rather than disabler. So that's a big one. And the other one is on the storytelling. Innovation has so many moving parts that it is good to break it down and turn it more into a methodology. And that's something I'm very committed to in terms of what I try to teach and practice myself and mentor people.

Ali Alwattari :
But, but what I found especially in mentoring and people who are early in career or maybe people who have not worked in a creative area and are coming into a creative area, like research and development is the stories which show really these functional components of innovation, like how to define a problem, how to do a brainstorming, how to decide on an approach and stick to it and not give up, how to design an experiment, and how to bring things from other areas into their jobs. That seems a much more accelerated way to teach and get people up and running, you know, which is important to businesses and not just important for people development. So those are the kind of the two dimensions of the why it's so purposeful for me to support, you know, human endeavors and that. And also the storytelling is an accelerated method of teaching and learning.

Zachary Cartwright :
You mentioned that in your creative process, you use this idea of realistic imagination. What exactly do you mean by this and how do you use that in your process?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, absolutely. So realistic imagination is really a framework, and it's really the practice of intersecting reasoning and logic with creativity. And so I'll give you an example of that. If you only use one of the components, such as being realistic, you. You might have a project where you measure things and there's a number, and your team says, we need a tire for a car that is 10% more puncture resistant, for example. And so how would you do that? You might find some additives to mix with the rubber and toughen up the rubber a little bit. And there you got a product, but it may not necessarily be a breakthrough product. And so that's where the other dimension, imagination, comes in.

Ali Alwattari :
And you might imagine something kind of unimaginable, which is, what if there was a tire that keeps operating no matter what happens? And that sounds impossible, that's purely imaginary. When you converge the realistic dimension with the imagination, then you come to a different place and you get the concept. For example, like the run flat tires and the run flat tires, really, they have a temporary inflation after puncturing to react to the deflation. Now, you wouldn't get that if you just went entirely realistic. And it probably was an idea on the drawing board for many, many years, as it was only imagination until the right time and the right set of skill sets converged the two things and said, hey, you know what? The opposite of deflation is inflation. And here's a way to do it. And it has nothing to do with rubber. It has to do with some response to the dynamics of what a puncture is.

Ali Alwattari :
So that's kind of how I would bring it to life, you know, in terms of the realistic imagination framework. And remarkably Practical and just, you know, a really wide variety of applications, you.

Zachary Cartwright :
Know, and when it comes to your specific creative process, maybe start to finish, can you briefly walk us through that process and how are you consistently coming up with out of the box ideas as you go through these steps?

Ali Alwattari :
Yes, yes. So there is a first component which is I've had the experience where the projects that I've put on there have been traditional ways to try and address them quickly or with not too much R and D. So generally I've been thankful to receive project where while they're difficult, they are ones where you have a heads up that trying the easy way out is probably not going to work. So that's already one baby step out of the box. But to go a little bit further, the project, it really has kind of four components. One of them is translating things that are not scientific into scientific things. So this might be things that consumers say or customers say where they may say a word like, oh, something feels soft. Well, you can't do much about that in a technology and R and D point of view until you say, okay, what does really soft means? So you have to do a little bit of translation.

Ali Alwattari :
That might mean it's a stretchy material and then it's conformable when you bend it around the surface, that's much more actionable. So there's a translation step. Then there's what I call transformations, which is what is really early in the project where you have the time and space to do a bit of learning and failing is there is something the key element of transformation is called phenomenal. It's phenomenological logic. So this might mean, hey, I have a certain, you know, problem. And then what is the phenomenon that is driving that? So rather, and an example of this might be, hey, I really, I've got a material that is useful for something like, I've got starch and I really like starch. But I need a better material than starch for a certain product like a film or something like that. So phenomenon says, well, what is it that makes it succeed or fail? If the starch fractures, then the phenomenon is really about fracture.

Ali Alwattari :
And when you look at fracture, you come up with hundreds of new possibilities not limited to that. So let's say starch was not the right economics or it was too sensitive to moisture. You then say, hey, I'm not going to give up because I can find something which is another material that is fractures. And so that for that element is, you know, phenomena. I would call it phenomenological, you know, Ideation, which is what's actually happening in the real situation. The other big dimension of this is what I call analogic, which is, where have I seen this thing before? And whenever you say, where have I seen this thing before? And it's an unsolved problem, it's a very, very reliable way to get unobvious solutions. I give you a simple example of that, is that there can be something like rain repellent surfaces. So for example, pretend it's outdoor garment and you want it to be rain repellent and you want to really accelerate the innovation to make a more rain repellent garment.

Ali Alwattari :
And you don't want to develop brand new fibers or spend 20 years doing new, you know, chemistry. So you can look at analogies and say, where have I seen rain being repelled? And you may see something in nature, for example, like a lotus leaf, where there's a certain pattern and water cascades off that surface. And what brings that analogical element to the out of the box thinking is you then go straight to, if I've got a garment, how do I put that pattern on it? And you don't necessarily need to invent things from scratch. For example, in this case, there's a manufacturing process for texturing surfaces. And when you combine that manufacturing process that had not been applied to garments before with the garment, you get a rain repellent garment. And that's like 10 times faster than trying to reinvent the chemistry of that surface. So I think the two pillars to answer your question are really that phenomenological analysis, what's really happening? And then the analogical dimension of it, which is, where have I seen that before? And these are usually things which are in passing thoughts, in teams, but if you do them as a discipline, as a practice, they really are highly repeatable.

Zachary Cartwright :
Yeah, that seems like just such a helpful approach. And I like that you use that example of looking at something in nature and saying, where have I seen this before? And how can we now, you know, using our scientific background, bring that to this specific product? You know, you've, I noticed, you know, you've been doing this for 33 plus years in this field. You've been doing it for quite a while. Are there any specific products or projects that really particularly you're proud of? Maybe. What were those products and what made them special?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you, you know, three examples. One of them is like artificial spider silk. And I'll share that in a second. The second was. So that's, that's one of Them spider silk. Another one is, it sounds a little bit kooky, but it's like the first washable waterproof mascara, which I'll explain why that's, that's interesting in case it isn't automatically interesting. And then the third thing I'm really proud of was I got an opportunity to be on a TV station here in Houston when I was working in the company that makes Rain X, which is water repellent sprays for cars and also windshield wipers for cars.

Ali Alwattari :
And the reason those three come to mind, one of them, spider silk, was one of those projects. It was a startup company where for sure, it seemed impossible. And the reason is you can't really farm spiders. So nobody had been able to make silk the way the cute little silkworm makes silk. So this, I'm proud of this one because we developed a synthetic polymer. And this polymer, it's very hard to turn into a fiber. We made it, it was a powder, and we had to really use very ancient spinning technology. So we rented a 1900s fiber factory in England because that's all we could afford to do and use those machines.

Ali Alwattari :
And we figured a way to, you know, dissolve and process and stretch this new material we had. And we, we made the first ever mile of spider silk. Now, specifically, this didn't automatically create a massive, you know, billion dollar business, but as a, as a creative thing, it, it was really cool because it really brings to life that idea of, you know, a natural analogy, which is, wow, this is a lightweight material that's really strong, but also had to bring in the phenomenological process and logic, logical dimensions, you know, of. Of the realistic imagination to say, well, you know, it's useless if you can't do something with it, with existing things like machines and stuff like that. So that was incredibly, you know, fun and very, very, very challenging. And still, even after all those years, that's still not exactly in the market. There's been a lot of other, you know, companies who worked on it, but it was a very unique and cool example of how to do something really difficult, you know, and the second one is really in that mascara formulation where we brought really a material science team to a company that had only had really traditional artisans to make the cosmetics. And what was really cool there was, I think, seeing something where a little bit of science went a long way.

Ali Alwattari :
So by adding some waterproofing ingredients and some elastic materials, we had identified that, you know, mascara gets really brittle once you put, you paint it on the eyelashes and the water evaporates. And we found a way how do you get rubber into, into those formulations? Which is not easy because they, they're really made of wax and oil and water basically. And that was really something I remember because in the step of, you know, commercializing that, the step needed was to actually test with thousands and thousands of consumers who had had to choose it among a variety of other products and said, yeah, we love this, it looks great. And then after 24 hours, it's still not smearing on my skin and stuff like that. So that was kind of a nice contrast to something more space age, like spider silk. And then the third one, I think was just really my passion of communicating science in really down to earth ways and making it what it really is, which is a way of bringing things to life for all of us, for ordinary people, for specialized people, people, for everyone. And that was incredibly fun to have like just 60 seconds to explain it on the Houston TV channel, which is they would, they just had a little segment called how does you know, stuff work? And had to explain in 60 seconds why silicone can, you know, dry on a glassy surface and repel, you know, water. So those three kind of really stand out.

Ali Alwattari :
And then I would say other than the human side of 33 years seeming a long time in innovation world, 33 years is really, you've, you've, you've practiced, you know, a few hundred projects. So really you need millions of projects to really know, you know, to get all the dimensions of it. So, so I still feel like a beginner, you know.

Zachary Cartwright :
Yeah, there's always more to learn. And I've only been in the industry maybe five or six years and I think of all the different types of projects I've already seen and I don't know, it's really exciting just to see what people come up with and the ways that they approach it. And I'm glad we could get you longer than 60 seconds to really dive into some of these things today. I just wanted to bring this back to our introductory questions and just get your insights there. One of them was what does a golf ball have to do with the invention story behind tooth whitening strips? What can you tell us about that?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, so I love that one because a, it's funny. But the second one is because it's a great way to explain that, you know, phenomenological, you know, ideation, you know, Zachary. So what happened is really the whitening strips had to use very low cost materials like plastic and put onto them, you know, the chemistry, like a gel that really brightens up your teeth. So, you know, you're making potentially hundreds of millions of these and putting them in boxes as a, as a product. So the gel doesn't really just stay on a surface. So if you put it on a flat piece of plastic film and sell that and people put it on their teeth will kind of like slip off the teeth. So it had to kind of have a grip. So there was a lot of engineers and scientists, you know, related to this, trying, you know, proposing some fairly complex ideas in processing, whatever, and there wasn't enough really time.

Ali Alwattari :
This product really had to go to the market. So a few of us got together and we said, wait a minute, what if we're thinking about this wrong way? What is really important about making, making the gel sit on the plastic? And we said, you know, the phenomenon, back to the phenomenon idea. The phenomenon is having a storage surface area on a surface. And then where else do we see that? So it's kind of the phenomenon and the analogy. So he said, you know, mud seems to really collect on golf balls and what's the deal there? So he said, you know, what is in common between the golf ball and the whitening strip is dimples. So if we can put dimples on that plastic, we got something. And that ended up being, hey, there's a way to dimple plastic in the manufacturing process. And you know, lo and behold, the gel stayed on that surface way better or at least long enough to not be embarrassing with consumers.

Ali Alwattari :
You know, so that's kind of the connection there. And it's. I like it just because it's a simple way to explain what this phenomenon mean. Phenomena means it's not what the plastic is made of, it's more something else about it. A descriptive phenomenon.

Zachary Cartwright :
Yeah, that's just such a great example and I'm glad you could tell us about it. And the other one we had was how did a contact lens help with formulating an award winning shave gel? What can you tell us there?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, that one's really fun. So I was in a shave gel chemistry team and basically the evolution, you may, or everybody kind of knows this, but razors have got more and more sophisticated and example is the way they're designed. The metal, they're made of, but also the number of blades. So what happened was, as in the business, there was a need to say, well, what happens when you use these more advanced razors and even though they give you a cleaner shave and take away closer hair to the surface of your skin, when you look At a video of people shaving, they're crossing the cheeks and face potentially hundreds of times, which is hundreds and hundreds of really miniature, you know, not incisions, but very close calls basically with blades. And the lubrication of the existing gels just wasn't really enough to keep up with these new razors. So, you know, I was in a team where we really had to come up with a way to say we can't make a new lubrication molecule. So the molecules in there already are like these slippery, you know, kind of polymers, but they're also very sticky polymers. So if you put too many of them, you stop getting lubrication, you start getting adhesion instead.

Ali Alwattari :
So we said, what, where else? You know, what's the, the phenomenon is slippery when wet. So we started to search what is slippery when wet and then is also FDA approved. And a very short list of things came up from all that, you know, impossible scope of things, which was the material that is on the. To keep soft contact lenses in their packaging solution when they're shipped. And also when they're inserted and removed from consumers, you know, eyes, they use a much shorter material, not as sticky. It's a smaller kind of a polymer that is kind of, it's called a hydrogel. And hydrogels had not been used in shaving because it's not necessarily obvious that's what you would use because they had a 30, 40 year history of just regular lubricants. But the market opportunity or challenge of this better shaving, you know, razors led to this need for that lubrication.

Ali Alwattari :
And we identified the company who made the contact lens kind of coating, you know, polymers, these more lubricious material that are feel great and are not sticky. And we said, you know, can you make some for us? And they're like, yeah, we don't, you know, you're not competing with the medical companies, so. Sure. And that allowed us to take something which looked like a five year project and do it in one year. So that's kind of that story also. Again, the phenomenon of slipperiness, like the phenomenon of dimpling and then the analogies, you know, so sometimes the analogy is nature, like the lotus leaf, and sometimes the analogy is an unrelated industry like contact lenses and shaving.

Zachary Cartwright :
I think to somebody starting off in product innovation and product development, connecting all of these dots may seem really overwhelming. And you know, walking through this process. So what advice would you give to somebody just starting in product innovation who wants to accelerate their, their creativity and problem solving skills?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, definitely. I think giving them some framework that is a little bit simpler. So this one I described earlier, Zach, where it's really just, there's a simplified version of this which is translate what the business or consumer or that fuzzy words into more technical words. Then transformations means you try out some really very different approaches. So like in the case of cosmetics, so, you know, we tried making it much more waterproof. We tried making it much more elastic really early on, so that that transformation and test driving. And then the third is this sort of accessing ideas, not just from the thin air, but really referring and really learning, saying, hey, what are the analogous industries that I'm in? You know, what are food ingredients that could be usable in cosmetics? What are some of those things? So first of all, breaking into those two or three things that I think are learnable anchors, as it were, that's the, I think something very, very valuable that isn't normally done. The other is there's incredibly good expertise out there in also learning the product development process, which is not really inherently creative, but it's really the more organized component of, well, what do you do at the beginning, middle and end of the product development? So studying a few case studies from people within your company or from a project management R and D type of expert, and just saying, hey, what kind of things typically happen? What are those milest along the way that you do? So then you have kind of a way to be organized, but then you also have these anchors of two or three principles and then you can practice.

Ali Alwattari :
So that third element is, you know, some principles, some organization and then practicing. And it helps to have a few kind of small projects where you're not necessarily the main person on them, but maybe you're, you're apprenticing with someone or you're, you're assisting someone who's doing a major, you know, project. So it really practice, practice, practice, kind of like, you know, medicine. So, so those components. And then there's a fourth component really, which is, I think just the expectation and the attitude, which is just being pretty, you know, humble about things and being patient and then really focusing on listening and learning, but also also knowing how to ask, you know, questions and just diving in there. So, so kind of combining a little bit of structure with the willingness to and kind of the courage to ask, to be involved in some things that may not be in your immediate job description, you know, and looking ahead maybe.

Zachary Cartwright :
To the next five or 10 years, how do you see the role of innovation really evolving, especially when you look.

Ali Alwattari :
At the food industry Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. Of course it's always difficult to look forward, but the way I look forward is really looking at trends that are occurring. So I think one of them is really a trend in R and D which I think would not only affect the food industry, but also other industries, which is, there's so much excellent, you know, organization of knowledge these days, not just with tech. I mean, of course there's technology, there's AI, but also people, you know, networks, really human connections, you know, like professional and other networks where you can really accelerate learning. So I, I think if you look at the next five or 10 years, food scientists might go to a conference that is on medical materials or cosmetic materials. It's more likely that things like that will happen because you may have depleted the amount of immediate creative possibilities in one certain area of the work, whether it's in measurement methods, whether it's in material science. So I think that's one major thing I see acceleration by adjacency. I think that's becoming more, more common.

Ali Alwattari :
And I think the other thing that I'm seeing is that there's, I think some kind of folklore that you always have to, hey, look at this cool thing that I came up with. What are all the things we can use it for? That's beautiful and it will always be there. But I think that's being slowly enriched by this other momentum or trend which is really much more understanding, you know, what is an actual, you know, need and then using the need to really go find the solutions, you know. So for example, maybe in the last 20 or 30 years the idea of like, oh, here's some low fat cheese, for example, it's very good and what is the technology to make cheese taste good but can still have much less, you know, fat material in it that is emerging to I think more sophisticated knowledge of the customer and consumer. So the consumer and customer may be trending towards, hey, I care about my well being. So suddenly it may not just be, hey, low fat cheese is the only thing we got to offer you from well being. It might be, wow, we figured out how to stabilize these vitamins that are, have never been put into cheese, into cheese, for example, things like that. So I think it's really those trends that cross industries that I see them affecting things like food industry.

Ali Alwattari :
And then I think the going from just literal things like fat, protein, mineral going to more broad scope such as what does nutritional well being really mean? So it may not be just you're making this cool new product that's healthy for you. It may be that it only really works great if you do this other stuff like drinking water, for example. So I think just extrapolating from the many industries I've worked in, those are kind of some pivots that I would see continuing. It's getting much more specific and much less sort of pushing technology. Instead the technology being pulled by the much more high quality description of what people really need or what they're interested in, rather than just generically unsolved problems, much more moving towards unmet needs.

Zachary Cartwright :
And I think the point that you made about as innovation evolves, really pulling from other, excuse me, pulling from other industries is so vital. And I see this so much in my own role as a food scientist. My background is in food science, but now I work with pharmaceuticals and cannabis and cosmetics. And even our own sensors here at AQUALAB were originally designed to measure water potential in soil. And then we realized that there was a need in the food industry. And then the pharmaceutical industry realized that they could really benefit from looking at water activity. And, and so it's just really interesting how some of these things may exist in one very specific field or originally developed for one use. But like you said, thinking about where has this been used before, what other industries tackle a similar problem really helps for these solutions to spread and help other scientists.

Zachary Cartwright :
So I, I think that's so vital and, and I'm glad that you brought up those examples. Are there any books or, or trainings or maybe experiences, conferences, anything like that that you think would be helpful to any of our listeners if they're trying to shape their mindset and be more innovative themselves? What resources do you recommend?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, absolutely. I'm working on trying to organize things like realistic imagination to be kind of like things which are motivational and give some structure. But I think there are ones that I learned from Zachary that I would share is there's a set that I would just share that influenced me a lot. One was like the Clayton Christensen, the late Clayton Christensen, who was a Harvard professor who wrote the book on disruptive innovation. It's a really, really good one because it says you kind of want to disrupt and create things that are new to the world, but you don't necessarily want to disrupt people's lives. You just want to give them creative new things that make their life better. So it's a really good grounding disruptive innovation. Also, the companies that are design companies that, you know, design things like cell phone and furniture and things like that, they're really ahead of the pack in terms of creative processes and how to do high quality ideation.

Ali Alwattari :
I think that's very, very important because there's a lot of sort of just draining people's minds versus actually targeted ideation, which is, you know, energizing instead of draining. And Ideo is a great company where they've done, really pioneered certain approaches like the deep dive where they say, you know what, we're not going to try to do everything. We're just going to say, here's opportunity A, here's opportunity B. Let's look at all the different ways you could approach that sort of sequential divergence. And that's a really great. They have actually trainings now for other industries. So that's a great one. A third book that really influenced me is one by Guy Kawasaki, who was part of, I think, the original founding of Apple.

Ali Alwattari :
It's called Rules for Revolutionaries. And it's a really good thing in terms of it captures. You've got to figure out your behavior as well as your brains and your imagination when you do developing new products. So that offers some real ways of what do you do with that first prototype? What else do you have to learn to make fuzzy stuff much clearer? So that's a good one. And then just being an MIT grad, I think one of the first books I read was about other graduates who didn't even have any job experience. They immediately started companies and they just spent three or four decades just keep starting new companies. So that book is by Dr. Roberts and it's called Entrepreneurs in High Technology.

Ali Alwattari :
So that kind of gives inventors and creative people an idea that they don't all have to be business people, but when you do have a business focus, it helps in that preliminary anchor of translating. So before you start to ideate translating into a much more specific, you know, objectives. So those four really kind of come to mind as books, but I think also more and more people with industry experience who like communication. So, like what we're doing today realize, oh, you know what, this is too important to the world to not try to, you know, share some of that and help grow other people as well, so that they, you know, maybe in the in, they can become contributors on the innovation front and kind of really accelerate that apprenticeship, you know, dimension. And really for me, a key motivator is professionalizing innovation. So why shouldn't it be like being a great plumber? Why shouldn't it be like being a great weather, you know, forecaster? It's a profession too. And even though it's glamorized it's really a very emotionally challenging profession when you need some help in that process of trying and learning and failing and then getting back up and doing it again the next day, you know?

Zachary Cartwright :
Yeah, and I appreciate that. And I think being able to talk about resources like this, I always talk with scientists who are looking for new resources or training materials, and we'll definitely make sure to list those things in our podcast description so people can find them easily. And switching gears a little bit when you're not innovating, when you're not working on a new product, what is some of the music that you like to listen to? What music did you bring with you today to share?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, the one I would. I don't have a recording of it, but I think Coldplay really influences me because they kind of operate at the intersection of emotion and spirituality and then just being down to earth, all those three things at the same time. So the one that I really like is the one which is the most imitated one. They've allowed a lot of people to make cover versions of Viva La Vida, which I love the whole album, but also that song really resonates a lot with me.

Zachary Cartwright :
And what mantra did you bring with you? Do you have a quote or saying, something that you maybe say to yourself to stay motivated?

Ali Alwattari :
Yeah, I say to myself, having realized that, you know, I was doing really good in class, even when I was like four years old, I realized, okay, I have intellectual intelligence. I learned to value that not at the highest level, but at the second level. So my mantra is really one of my mantras is soul first and brain second, which is do what is in the heart, do what is in the greater good, do what is selfless, and then your intelligence is a way to help that rather than just try to outsmart everything and be a wise guy. So basically, that's soul first, brain second.

Zachary Cartwright :
I love it. That's great. Well, thank you so much for bringing that mantra and discussing your music and, of course, all of this approach to innovation. I think it's so important in speaking with you, somebody that has so much experience and trying to spread this knowledge, I think is really important moving forward. So, Ali, we really appreciate your time. I appreciate your time for you to be here. Thank you.

Ali Alwattari :
Thank you so much for the opportunity. Zachary. Take care.

Zachary Cartwright :
Today's episode is sponsored by AQUALAB. In this episode, we discussed approaching new product innovations. Did you know that many product development and R and D challenges can be predicted and overcome early in the development process using moisture sorption, isotherms if your product has any physical transitions or moisture migration you're trying to avoid, or if it's susceptible to microbial growth or maybe you're just trying to slow down unwanted chemical reactions like lipid oxidation, then isotherm data collected and analyzed correctly can help your team to accelerate formulation processes by knowing which formulations are more likely to have the shelf life, safety, and quality that you're looking for. Turning isotherm data into these types of solutions is possible using the Moisture Analysis Toolkit software and a link to learn more is in the podcast Description this week, the song that I can't get out of my head that I'm recommending is called Ease My Mind by Chris Lake. Chris Lake once again proves why he's a staple in the house music scene with this song. The track effortlessly blends hypnotic baselines with an airy, melodic vocal, creating a perfect balance between groove and tranquility. Its pulsating rhythm keeps the energy flowing, while the subtle synth layers add an ethereal touch, making it both dance floor ready and also ideal for late night wind downs. Ease My Mind is a testament to Lake's ability to craft tracks that resonate deeply while keeping the vibe undeniably fresh.

Zachary Cartwright :
A must listen for house music lovers to end this episode, here is another mantra. Maybe you can even say this one out loud. Here we go. This episode's mantra is My strength is greater than my struggle. I'll say it three times and feel free to join me. Here we go. My strength is greater than my struggle. My strength is greater than my struggle.

Zachary Cartwright :
My strength is greater than my struggle. As you keep this mantra in mind, I also challenge you to think about what's the hardest thing you've had to go through and how do you motivate yourself through times of struggle. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. My name is Zachary Cartwright and this has been another episode of the Drip, brought to you by Aqua Lab. Stay hydrated and see you next time.