Sally Dominguez | The Inventor’s Mindset, Scaling Innovation, Singularity University
Sally Dominguez

Inventors have an interesting way of looking at the problems of the world and business.

So what is their mindset, and who can show us what it looks like?

Sally Dominguez is an inventor, architect, journalist, and educator with a real passion for innovation. She is currently the Program Director for Innovation Strategy and Design at Singularity University, an impressive entity organization in Silicon Valley. She was a judge on the New Inventors TV show on ABC for six years & co-hosted Australia’s Greatest Inventions in 2018. She was also a judge at the Car of the Year show, co-host on the Next Billion Cars podcast, and host over at Creative Live.

In this episode, John Corcoran is joined by Sally Dominguez to talk about her work as an inventor, the challenges of selling new products, and Sally’s experience at the Singularity University.

In this episode, we also talk about:



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Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

  • How Sally got interested in inventing
  • Sally’s background in architecture helped her inventing career
  • How ideas for the Nest High Chair & Rain Water Hog come about
  • Sally’s thoughts on licensing her Nest High Chair product
  • Challenges of marketing & selling new inventions
  • How Sally ended up in the United States
  • How going through loss & setbacks influenced the work Sally’s does today
  • Sally’s adventurous thinking methodology
  • How people can step out of their comfort zones
  • Sally’s experience being in Singularity University
  • Helping people suffering from PTSD

Resources Mentioned:

Sponsor: Rise25

Today’s episode is sponsored by Rise25 Media, where our mission is to connect you with your best referral partners, clients, and strategic partners. We do this through our done for you business podcast solution and content marketing. 

Along with my business partner Dr. Jeremy Weisz, we have over 18 years of experience with B2B podcasting, which is one of the best things you can do for your business and you personally. 

If you do it right, a podcast is like a “Swiss Army Knife” – it is a tool that accomplishes many things at once. It can and will lead to great ROI, great clients, referrals, strategic partnerships, and more. It is networking and business development; and it is personal and professional development which doubles as content marketing

A podcast is the highest and best use of your time and will save you time by connecting you to higher caliber people to uplevel your network. 

To learn more, go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]

To learn more, book a call with us here

Check out Rise25 to learn more about our done-for-you lead generation and done-for-you podcast services. 

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Episode Transcript

John Corcoran  0:40  

Alright welcome everyone. My guest on this show is Sally Dominguez. She is an inventor and architect, a journalist and educators got a real passion for innovation which I know you will get from this interview. She is currently the program director for innovation strategy and design at Singularity University which is a really impressive entity organization. here in Silicon Valley of San Francisco Bay Area worldwide. She also has been a judge on the new inventors TV show on ABC for six years co hosted Australia’s greatest inventions in 2018, which is her homeland judge the car of the year as well. She’s big car nut, and also co host on the Next Billion Cars Podcast. 

And also we met originally through creative live, she was a host over at creative live. So really interesting background, we’re going to talk a lot about creative thinking and adventurous thinking and all that kind of stuff. 

But first, before we get into this interview, this podcast is brought to you by rise25 Media, which is our where our mission is to help b2b businesses to build better relationships. And we do this by helping b2b business owners and get more clients referral partners and strategic partners through done for your podcast and done for you content marketing, and we’re doing that you know, in so many different ways, but it’s not just about marketing. It’s really about relationship building, and connecting with people you want to connect with and we’ve done this for over 20 years through all of us within our company. And I seriously believe that starting a podcast is one of the best things you can do for your business and you personally and if you do it right, it’s so many things in one. It’s business development, networking, client acquisition, referral, marketing, all that kind of stuff. You even get to have amazing conversations with people like I’m about to do with Sally here. So if you want to learn more, go to rise25.com. 

Alright, as I mentioned, my guest is Sally Dominguez and Sally, you know, how did you first get drawn into inventing where you’d like little girl and you’re constantly tinkering you had a little workshop or turns your parents garage into a into a workshop and constantly inventing things? Where did that come from?

Sally Dominguez  2:38  

JOHN, I am not that Tinker. This is an interesting one. Because Because so many inventors and I’ve researched inventors, for so long, so many inventors are super, super hands on and they’re really good at mechanics. I was once asked to do a show where they said oh, if we take a powder blender or something, can you just put the appliance back in two seconds and I went night that’s an engineer. I’m not an engineer. Be at all on the opposite. You know, I think like my brain is just swirling with possibilities all the time. And actually my struggle is in making my working prototype. And that’s why my my inventions have tended to be design wise, really simple, so simple that people like how come that hasn’t been done, but that’s often the case, right? So I wasn’t but my granddad what my granddad was a tinkering inventor. He was, he maintained the textile looms in Sydney. And he had a workshop downstairs with little steam engines and things in it. And every time we’d visit, he would show me all of this incredible stuff that he’d invented that was mechanical. And I’d be looking at it and thinking my mind was just buzzing with all the stuff I wanted to do with it, and kind of couldn’t build it, but I could think of that so I could draw it, and I could talk about it, and then find minions help me build it, because, or a and actually because I couldn’t build I ended up inventing Some manufacturing techniques site. So there’s a bit of use in being ignorant about the tinkering side, you know, if you can’t actually build something that can lead to new discoveries, but I was always a curious kid super curious, but bad at actually building nice things

John Corcoran  4:15  

and your background your training is in architecture, right? So how does your background architecture? How does how have that helped you in in your at least in your inventing career? Because you were inventing a lot of products, right?


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