Lorraine Marchand has spent three decades helping organizations innovate in environments where failure carries real consequences. In this episode, she shares the frameworks, stories, and hard-won lessons from her time at IBM Watson Health and beyond — starting with the summer her father handed her a stopwatch and a problem to solve at a diner.
The Sugar Cube That Started It All
“At the age of 12, I learned that problem solving was fun. It was really safe to experiment, and it turned out to be lucrative, because we earned some revenue and royalties from our sugar cube.”
Lorraine’s innovation journey began with her father — a serial inventor who challenged his kids to identify and solve real problems. One summer, he took Lorraine and her brother to the Hot Shops Cafeteria in the Baltimore-Washington area with stopwatches, graph paper, and 3-color pens. Their assignment: figure out what was slowing down table turnover. After three days of observation and interviews with waitresses, busboys, and the manager, they discovered that sugar packets were the culprit — granules spilling over the table and floor during cleanup. Their solution, the Sugar Cube, was prototyped, sold to the manager, and eventually adopted across the chain — which later became the Marriott Corporation. The lesson stuck: innovation starts with observing problems close to the core, not chasing abstract ideas in a vacuum.
Inside IBM Watson Health: Customer Co-Creation Over Engineering Brilliance
“We have fallen in love with our solution. And we have not done our true problem-solving dissection and customer research to make sure that we’re solving a problem that a customer wants to pay us to solve.” Continue reading BONUS: Why 98% of Innovation Fails Before It Reaches a Single Customer With Lorraine Marchand
