Is the Innovation Reaper Coming for You?!!!

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:   

1. 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.

2. Question: Is progress towards innovation made in a straight line? For example,
   transistor to chip to personal computer to web to MySpace.

   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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.