Duncan Wardle, who spent 30 years at Disney, starting as a coffee boy in London and eventually rising to Head of Innovation and Creativity across Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, left the company in 2017 with a bronze Jiminy Cricket statue marking three decades of service and one central conviction: the question every business reflexively asks is usually the wrong one.
Since leaving Disney, Wardle has operated as an independent innovation consultant and keynote speaker through his firm iD8 & innov8, becoming one of the most-booked speakers on the corporate circuit and teaching innovation masterclasses at Yale, Harvard and other universities.
“If you’d asked ‘how might we make more money?’ we’d have put the gate price up. What does that get you? A three percent gain you’d complain about within a quarter,” Wardle told an audience of hospitality executives at the Mews Unfold conference in Amsterdam. “You don’t get to iterate in a post-pandemic world.”
Instead, his team flipped the question: “How might we solve the biggest consumer pain point?”
His team didn’t look inside the theme park industry for answers. They looked outside and found what Wardle describes as a pharmacy in Tokyo using RFID technology so customers didn’t have to wait in line to pick up prescriptions—and, he says, that observation became the seed of what Disney would call the MagicBand. (A separate account of the MagicBand’s development, documented by product historians, attributes its conception to a Disney executive who spotted a golf tracker wristband in a SkyMall catalog on a flight, but these accounts are not mutually exclusive. Disney has not yet responded to Fortune’s request for comment.)
