Ok. That might be a little far-fetched. But this video depicting the capabilities of robotic technology made me stare in wonder (h/t Marc Andreeson). The technologies coming down the pipeline in industries such as nanotech, biotech, cleantech, robotics, and so on, will eventually filter into the products we use on a daily basis. The world of our grandchildren will surely be a greater departure from our reality than our's was for our grandparents.
Innovate or die! I still remember seeing this sprawled across the cover of an issue of Businessweek magazine in a bookstore in 2003. I generally don't remember magazine cover titles 3 months prior. But this one is pretty scary, right? After reading this title, I went right home and stared at a blank wall for an hour and muttered to myself about new products I could develop. Thankfully, I've staved off the Innovation Reaper that Businessweek warns of, so far...
Many folks have different ideas about how innovation takes place. Generally, it's perceived to be an "aha" moment or epiphany-like moment. As if, one day three years ago, Steve Jobs was digging through his closet for his old Hari Krisna shrouds, when a pile of old records, some photos of he and Wozniak playing freeze tag, and an old rotary phone fell off the shelves into one pile on his foot and he screamed in pain "Aye! ...phone." True story.
Guy Kawasaki recently interviewed Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation. Berkun's innovation resume includes working on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft back in the 90's, as well as writing the best-selling book, The Art of Project Management. What I like about Berkun's points regarding innovation, is the theme that innovation, like many other things, is generally the result of a string of small improvements and consistent effort. In addition, innovation is not just a challenge of conceiving of things never thought of before, but it's just as much a challenge of convincing others of the worth of your ideas or products. Edison knew both of these things. Berkun explains:
Question: How long does it take in the real world—as opposed to the world of retroactive journalism—for an “epiphany” to occur?
Answer: An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occured to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories—Newton getting hit by an apple or people with chocolate and peanut butter colliding in hallways—are just more fun to think about. A movie called “watch Einstein stare at his chalkboard for 90 minutes” wouldn’t go over well with most people.
Answer: Most people want history to explain how we got here, not to teach them how to change the future. To serve that end, popular histories are told in heroic, logical narratives: they made a transistor, which led to the chip, which create the possibility for the PC, and on it goes forever. But of course if you asked William Shockey (transistor) or Steve Wozniak (PC) how obvious their ideas and successes were, you’ll hear very different stories about chaos, uncertainty and feeling the odds were against them.
If we believe things are uncertain for innovators in the present, we have to remember things were just as uncertain for people in the past. That’s a big goal of the book: to use amazing tales of innovation history as tools for those trying to do it now.
Question: Are innovators born or made?
Answer: Both. Take Mozart. Yes, he had an amazing capacity for musical composition, but he also was born in a country at the center of the music world, had a father who was a music teacher, and was forced to practice for hours every day before he started the equivalent of kindergarten. I researched the history of many geniuses and creators and always find a wide range of factors, some under their control and some not, that made their achievements possible.
Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?
Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.
Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?
Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.
Question: Why do innovators face such rejection and negativity?
Answer: It’s human nature—we protect ourselves from change. We like to think we’re progressive, but every wave of innovation has been much slower than we’re told. The telegraph, the telephone, the PC, and the internet all took decades to develop from ideas into things ordinary people used. As a species we’re threatened by change and it takes a long time to convince people to change their behavior, or part with their money.
Question: How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?
Answer: Don’t shoot me, but the answer is we can’t know. Not for certain. That’s where all the fun and misery comes in. Many stupid ideas have been successful and many great ideas have died on the vine and that’s because success hinges on factors outside of our control.
The best bet is to be an experimenter, a tinkerer—to learn to try out ideas cheaply and quickly and to get out there with people instead of fantasizing in ivory towers. Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.
Question: If you were a venture capitalist, what would your investment thesis be?
Answer: Two parts: neither is original, but they borne out by history. One is portfolio. Invest knowing most ventures, even good ones, fail, and distribute risk on some spectrum (e.g. 1/3 very high risk, 1/3 high risk, 1/3 moderate risk). Sometimes seemingly small, low risk/reward innovations have big impacts and it’s a mistake to only make big bets.
The other idea is people: I’d invest in people more than ideas or business plans—though those are important of course. A great entrepreneur who won’t give up and will keep growing and learning is gold. It’s a tiny percentage of entrepreneurs who have any real success the first few times out—3M, Ford, Flickr were all second or third efforts. I’d also give millions of dollars to authors of recent books on innovation with the word Myth in the title. The future is really in their hands.
Question: What are the primary determinants of the speed of adoption of innovation?
Answer: The classic research on the topic is Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, which defines factors that hold up well today. The surprise to us is that they’re all sociological: based on people’s perception of value and their fear of risks—which often has little to do with our view of how amazing a particular technology is. Smarter innovators know this and pay attention from day one to who they are designing for and how to design the website or product in a way that supports their feelings and beliefs.
Question: What’s more important: problem definition or problem solving?
Answer: Problem definition is definitely under-rated, but they’re both important. New ideas often come from asking new questions and being a creative question asker. We fixate on solutions and popular literature focuses on creative people as being solvers, but often the creativity is in reformulating a problem so that it’s easier to solve. Einstein and Edison were notorious problem definers: they defined the problem differently than everyone else and that’s what led to their success.
Question: Why don’t the best ideas win?
Answer: One reason is because the best idea doesn’t exist. Depending on your point of view, there’s a different best idea or best choice for a particular problem. I’m certain that they guys who made telegraphs didn’t think the telephone was all that good an idea, but it ended their livelihood. So many stories of progress gone wrong are about arrogance of perception: what one person thinks is the right path—often the path most profitable to them— isn’t what another, more influential group of people thought.
Question: Is innovation more likely to come from young people or old people? Or is age simply not a factor?
Answer: Innovation is difficult, risky work, and the older you are, the greater the odds you’ll realize this is the case. That explanation works best. Beethoven didn’t write his nineth symphony until late in his life, so we know many creatives stay creative no matter how old they are. But their willingness to endure all the stresses and challenges of bringing an idea to the world diminishes. They understand the costs better from the life experience. The young don’t know what there is to fear, have stronger urges to prove themselves, and have fewer commitments—for example, children and mortgages. These factors that make it easier to try crazy things.
Since making a verbal commitment to myself that I would fill this blog with multimedia (my success ratio on verbal self-commitments like this is about 58%), I am blown away about how easy it has been to have my last three posts involve just that--multimedia. More great fodder for an interesting topic, found in video format...
The video entitled "Clothes Hangers" demonstrates, what I think to be, an amazing, yet wonderfully simple innovation on an ubiquitous, household concept: the closet and hanger. I would love to have this in my home. But, it demonstrates the power of someone taking a common item, asking "what do I not like about this and how could it be better?". I can't speak to whether that was actually the concept development process that designer, Daniel To, went through. But, in my experience, this is often a simplified form of the thought process that people go through when developing simple, but highly effective innovations to existing concepts and products. If you're looking for product ideas, perhaps you can walk around your home or office and ask that question. If you come up with something like this, I'll buy it.
If I explained to you some of the product and invention ideas I've run across in the last year, I'm guessing your reactions to the overwhelming majority of them would be "who would want that?" or "good luck making that." I have had to train myself to refrain from the impulse judgments that run through my mind when people begin explaining their ideas, because the reality is that it's extremely difficult to predict what is going to do well and why. We never turn away a project just because we personally don't think it will find a market.
To emphasize the point, I ran across a list put together by Inventors Digest which lists 264 products created by university or independent inventors. I've listed a few I found interesting. Im sure the creators of the following products met considerable resistance when developing these items.
Believe in your idea or product as long as you feel is necessary.
Google's ever-expanding wings brings us their patent search engine, making an initial patent search a few clicks away. For those who are the kind to sprout forth new ideas with every new activity, challenge, or chore, and also have internet access via a cell phone, you can now run a few quick, initial patent searches to see if anything like your idea is already patented.
