In the July 2025 episode of SpencerHall's Radical Thoughts on Innovation, Dr. Donald Riker joins hosts Maya Barber and Jon Hall for a compelling conversation about the nature of creativity, innovation, and product development. With decades of experience spanning roles at Procter & Gamble, Chattem (now Sanofi Consumer Products), and as founder of OnPoint Advisors, Dr. Riker shares how his background in biomedical science and neuroscience shaped his approach to R&D. He emphasizes the importance of retrospection—drawing from past knowledge and life experiences—to drive breakthrough thinking, illustrated through his Hourglass Innovation Model. Rather than chasing trends, Riker believes innovation stems from synthesizing personal experiences into new ideas and applying those in collaborative, diverse environments.

Rethinking Innovation

Throughout the discussion, Dr. Riker highlights real-world examples of overlooked or underutilized concepts that led to meaningful innovation. He recounts his work with phenindamine, a long-forgotten antihistamine rediscovered for its potential as a non-sedating treatment, and his efforts to evolve the Icy Hot brand by introducing a wire-free TENS device. Both stories reinforce his belief that great ideas often lie in the gaps—hidden in plain sight—and that success depends on the ability to connect historical insight with present-day needs. He also offers candid insights into how innovation is shaped by business realities, such as budgeting, brand alignment, and market timing.

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Riker concludes with advice for emerging innovators working in risk-averse environments: understand your organization’s culture, find a mentor, and be fluent in adapting and permutating your experiences to uncover adjacent opportunities. He encourages pushing for ideas that offer true superiority over the competition, even if they begin as "leftovers." His message is clear—bold, forward-thinking innovation comes not just from trends or data, but from the courage to connect past, present, and personal experience into actionable change.

Whether you're a product leader, startup founder, or curious strategist, this interview provides practical frameworks and memorable lessons from one of the most experienced voices in the field.

Podcast Title: Radical Thoughts on Innovation

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Guests: Dr. Donald Riker, Maya Barber (Host), Jon Hall (Co-host)

Maya Barber: Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series of Radical Thoughts on Innovation. I'm Maya Barber, and I'm here with my co-host Jon Hall, and our special guest, Don Riker. Don, can you start off by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your career and what inspired you to get into product research and development?

Dr. Riker: Sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on this fascinating topic. I was trained originally as a biomedical scientist. I received my PhD at Cornell in neurobiology and won a three-year NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Yale School of Medicine in neuroscience.

After that training, I joined Richardson-Vicks, which was acquired by Procter & Gamble in 1985, as an associate director managing clinical development of cough and cold products like NyQuil, for example. I did that for 12 years, both in Connecticut and in Cincinnati.

During that period, we had a very productive run. We collaborated with academic physicians in infectious diseases to better understand the common cold and viral diseases, which resulted in many still widely cited publications in the medical literature. Surprisingly, the biggest one has been cited by 950 other papers—an extremely high total. That paper was about sinusitis in the common cold, and I believe it was one of the major contributors to reducing the use of antibiotics by practicing physicians.

After 20 years at P&G, I became Vice President of R&D and Chief Scientific Officer at Chattem, now Sanofi Consumer Products, and directed all product development and other technical functions across multiple consumer categories. Five years after that, I went independent as the founder and president of OnPoint Advisors, a consumer healthcare consultancy, which I'm still active in.

Jon Hall: That's great. I know you're one of our longest-tenured members of our brain trust, always coming up with great ideas. I'm curious—how do you typically find inspiration for those forward-thinking ideas? And how do you stay informed about emerging trends and things that could impact your field?

Dr. Riker: That’s a good question, Jon. My flip answer is—I don’t necessarily. But that’s not to say I don’t read financial news and medical summaries. I do. But my belief—and my experience, as you’ll see—is that inspiration isn’t always trend-related.

It’s about having an acute awareness of new technologies, yes, but it’s often based on retrospection.

To make that point, let me give you three quotes. The first is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

What’s past is prologue."

— Shakespeare

A couple of hundred years later, one of the great minds in medical research, Louis Pasteur, in the 1800s, sharpened that idea when he said:

Chance favors only the prepared mind."

— Louis Pasteur

Interestingly, I'm fairly fluent in French, and the word only is often left out in English translations.

The third, and I think the most interesting and want to repeat here, is by Albert Szent-Györgyi, probably not widely known, one of the brilliant minds in science who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1937.

Listen to this:

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought."

— Albert Szent-Györgyi

I'll say that once again because it really hits the ball out of the park. I mean, discovery is seeing what everybody else really has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.

And that to me captures what I'm about to present, which is my Hourglass Innovation Model. So, let me just speak over the slide to the slide.

My concept of innovation starts with life experiences. Every individual has obviously a unique set of life experiences and those life experiences create individual knowledge base as you can tell in this slide that gets sort of funneled down. And when asked to create a new idea or concept it's important that to realize that the synthetic point where the two triangles meet is an individual's creative what I call coefficient but their creative natural innate capabilities are to to synthesize the information they've experienced over a lifetime.

And so when you talk about trends or other external awarenesses those would contribute to your life experience and then eventually to your knowledge base. So each individual has in my mind has a very creative capability and when a group of people are put into a room each with different life experiences say in SpencerHall's transform process which Jon's very familiar with obviously you can amplify that.

So, moving on next to your next question, Jon. I think that's what I wanted to say here.

Jon Hall: Okay, that's great. That's helpful.

Maya Barber: So, speaking about experiences, was there a specific experience or moment in your career that inspired or altered your approach with creativity and innovation in R&D?

Dr. Riker: That's a very good question, and I've actually picked out an example. I'll tell you why that's interesting in a second. Innovation to me first requires, as I just said, a real understanding of the current status quo in whatever the area of development you're working in. That's where the knowledge base is reinforced and updated.

I want to make this point several times here. I think in my experience innovative ideas can be leftovers.

In an area, a field, they can be overlooked ideas or concepts they can be hidden from view as Albert Szent-Györgyi so eloquently articulated.

So retrofitting can be the basis of innovation particularly in product development and consumer product development in particular.

Think taxis and Ubers. Think say postal mail and FedEx, Coke and Red Bull, tennis and pickle ball, bookstores and Amazon. As you can see in these examples, they all were based on very well-known, very understood systems in which new thinking and new technology completely changed that channel of business, let's call it. I want to take one specific case of mine and we'll come back later and look at another one somewhat in parallel. This is the case of a drug called phenindamine, a very obscure, hardly marketed antihistamine that was probably created after the Second World War or thereabouts. When the FDA created a monograph system to police what ingredients could be sold without an approval process, but because they were in a monograph. That process started in 1972. Phenindamine was included in their list of approved antihistamines. No one knew it was there, so it was overlooked. 13 years later, in around 1985, a brand named Seldane was developed and understood to be the world's first non-sedating antihistamine.

The benefit of no sedation of allergy drugs and antihistamines was thought to be huge, and it really suddenly got everybody in the pharma industry interested in the concept. So I was tasked with seeing whether there were ways to jump into this for the Nyquil business and move it into allergy from colds. And because of my life experience and knowledge base, I remembered that when the monograph was created, no one knew or cared about sedation or non sedation. The concept had never really been tested, but yet there it was pre-approved. And so I sold that to management. We actually had a sedation testing lab in house at our Connecticut facility and we ran it through there and we got fairly positive results compared to standard antihistamines. At that point the company dropped everything and suddenly we were doing major clinical trials, but unfortunately, that is where the story ends. Clinical trials couldn't replicate the in vivo findings, so the project was dropped and then everyone I think knows now that that whole category spawned new drugs like Allegra. But the point for this discussion is that the process I used fit exactly the model I was talking about that is, having that awareness of trends, having the awareness of the past and present and being able to look through there to come up with the next Uber or the next Amazon.

So, that's all I'll say here. Jon, do you have another question?

Jon Hall: I mean, one of the things I'm interested in is, I mean, obviously there's sort of this intense pressure for, innovating rapidly. And I'm just curious, how do you balance finding and nurturing creative ideas with that push to ensure this practical feasibility and business viability for the projects? How do you manage through that?

Dr. Riker: That's a very important practical and tactical issue for anyone, and I'll speak to the people who are in the industry or in the business or any business. My answer is the business is going to do that for you. And I think you would agree Jon that any new concept has to be floated up through the brand, or up through the R&D management system or wherever in the organization and the business will make an ultimate decision on the practicality and the wisdom of the concept that's floated. And that depends largely on things like the unmet needs of the consumer that buy those products. It depends on financial cost, budgeting, the margins, the margin mix of the brand and all of those things. So my answer is projects will always be sorted, not necessarily by you. I mean when you and I were working on Prilosec in the very early days we had to make a presentation in front of the CEO of Procter and sell the idea that Prilosec was a technically superior product.

That will be sorted in my experience, and I think your experience too. Brand support always comes first. So let me give you a second example in my personal experience that is somewhat quite parallel to the first one.

When I was with Chattem running R&D we owned the Icy Hot brand which I think most people will know is a topical analgesic brand.

In 2005, I advanced the idea that an adjacency to that category may be an important addition to the brand. And that adjacency was these small medical devices called TENS devices that are portable and worn on the back mostly for low back pain. And many consumers considered them to be superior relief to rub-on chemicals and patches.

And the senior management agreed that it was worth testing, and we quickly formed an R&D team that was composed of my people but also a medical device partner company in the area where we were located. And we developed those prototypes.

And then the marketing department really eventually figured out with senior management that the margins of medical devices were way out of whack with traditional consumer products in tubes or bottles and the margin mix there would be not something that would necessarily be accreative to the brand. So the project was dropped. Two years later though, both my device partner and I had left our employers independently and we decided to revive the project independent of anyone so we invested our own money, I'd say in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and time, and staff from my partner's company. We built a tremendously well-designed device totally de novo. We used Australian designers and product device manufacturers. They did a great job. The device I think was very Apple-like, very Steve Jobs-like, had no wires, had a single button on it, was controlled by a remote control, and eventually an iPhone app.

That product was licensed by Bayer, launched into the mass retail market in the United States and unfortunately at the same time they were making other deals for consumer brands and reprioritized the spending after the launch was done to those brands and then gave us the rights back. Then we relaunched the product in 2016 under the Wi-Touch Pro brand which is still available on my partner's website called Hollywog.com. Both of these examples I gave did not result in major economic rewards. But again, what I wanted to emphasize in these two examples, because you asked: "What was my experience as an R&D guy supporting marketing and the brand." I think those were very new innovative ideas to grow a brand that otherwise wouldn't have been seen.

Jon Hall: You've touched on finding ideas that I think are overlooked and finding ways to repurpose that technology. I'm curious if you've had situations where you've had to challenge or reject the widely held assumptions from a product development standpoint. And if so, what happened when you were dealing with push back against something versus unearthing something.

Dr. Riker: Well, I've gotten my favorite challenges list and I think you'll see what I'm driving at here. One of the things in R&D typically we all feel as R&D people is every three years we get recycled ideas from the latest assistant brand manager and that's exacerbated typically by a lack of corporate memory or archives.

So often brands don't really have historical archives to dwell on, to know what ideas have been looked at in prior years. So the way to push back on that is we either explain that we just did that, or we have data on that, or something like that to answer your question. There's also the "not-invented here syndrome", which is somewhat similar to outside ideas from experts, other folks, or consulting companies which are rejected, and then we have to push back on that in the obvious ways.

Sometimes there's things like unrealistic timelines. We have to push back as R&D people on those, or the cost of doing clinical trials would be another example. Sometimes parity claims are advanced that really don't have any superiority or reason to be.

My favorite one is a much more subtle one, and I vaguely sort of touched on it. In the 12 years when we were fully invested in doing clinical research — let's call it applied research, we were researching the actual indications for which the products are sold. And that is an attempt to find new leverage points in the disease process, or new ways of matching ingredients and formulas to new claims, for example. And by investing in upset stomach, colds, allergy, nasal problems, or whatever it can lead to new insights. When Richardson-Vicks and P&G started out merging their capabilities this was an incredibly productive set of years. Most OTC companies companies don't make those investments. Sometimes startups do, as you'd expect, right? Backed by private equity or not, they do that. So, I think that's a pretty full answer. It depends on how forceful you do that as an R&D person working with your marketing partners.

Maya Barber: Great. So, Don, when it comes to consumer insights, how has that evolved in your work over the years? And how do you think organizations can use them differently to have big breakthroughs?

Dr. Riker: I guess, as I think about it, I just thought of this myself because Jon and I partnered on this. So, let me speak to that first. Prilosec was a huge step forward from antacids to treat reflux and heartburn.

And Jon and I were on an advance team representing P&G marketing, consumer research and R&D and the consumer input we got particularly from focus groups were extraordinary. In fact, some of the people behind the glass in the focus group said, "This is the strongest focus group we've ever seen." One participant actually said he'd buy a gun if they took his medicine away.

Having said that, that's maybe an extraordinary example of what I've experienced. But the result of typical qualative research can often lead to incremental change. And that's why I think and I want to sort of plug this is SpencerHall's Transforum to me is a glowing example of ganging together creative individuals who seek less obvious innovation by digging deeper. This is a force multiplier by accumulating the experience across intellectually diverse participants to uncover new concepts.

Conventional consumer research, I think Jon knows better than I, but I think is best at identifying needs gaps both in the brand lineup and consumer wants and claims and product concepts. But what I call "saltatory innovation" which means leaps forward in knowledge are much harder to attain.

Jon Hall: Yeah. I think there's a tendency to think the consumer will come up with the answer for you and they don't.

Dr. Riker: Exactly.

Jon Hall: And they don't. I mean exactly it's really that the accumulated knowledge to take those insights and ask, "How can we bring an inventive solution to that." I think that's the key, but I think a lot of companies do say, "I expect to get the answer from the consumer" or "I get the idea from the consumer" and that just leads to incremental thinking.

Dr. Riker: I agree and that's been I think part of our experience. I mean it's a glowing example of what this real saltatory jump in a product can mean to the consumers and it's so obvious.

Jon Hall: I know we're running out of time so let me ask you one last question as you think back on your body of work what advice would you give to innovators who are really trying to push boundaries but are in that sort of risk averse culture. I mean, how can they, really effectively advocate for their ideas and drive that change they're looking for?

Dr. Riker: Yeah, very, very, very important. Particularly for younger people who are starting their careers out whether it's in marketing, finance, or R&D, whatever.

My first advice I'll say to those folks is the very first thing to do is understand the playing field you're on, which means understanding the corporate culture inside the company and outside the company and understand what and how it operates. That's number one. And to accelerate that learning, my strong advice is get a mentor, often a senior manager in your vertical. Then the next thing I would say is understand the brand's goals, their commercial and competitive goals, and then as my innovation model illustrates synthesize then permutate all your experiences particularly, on the job, in your career and your company, and make sure that you're very very fluid in that permutation and then just as I've emphasized here look for adjacencies, go to other parallel categories on the shelf, or wherever, and look for those hidden leftovers, that things people have have not taken advantage of. Always look for superiority versus your competitive set. And lastly, then forge an actionable concept and raise the flag to management.

Jon Hall: That's great.

Maya Barber: Love it. Well, thank you, Don, for coming on today's episode and thank you guys all for tuning in. Stay tuned for next month's episode of Radical Thoughts on Innovation.

Dr. Riker: Thank you.

Dr. Riker is a proven innovator having identified, recommended and initiated new product development in the consumer healthcare industry as a senior corporate manager of technology, an entrepreneur and an investor. Dr. Riker invites inquiries on working together to accelerate product innovation.

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