D.H.Lawrence was an English writer who was born in 1885 and died in 1930. His prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, and literary criticism. His collected works represent an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization.
He is is perhaps best known for his novels - Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. However, Lawrence also wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively short. Here is one I particularly like since my garden is full of humming-birds this year.
Humming-bird by D.H.Lawrence.
I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.
I believe there were no flowers then,
In the world where humming-birds flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of time,
Luckily for us.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Designing the product.
People interact with products on two levels: physical and emotional. The physical part is called “ergonomics” - what feels good to people. Some designers call the emotional level "psychonomics"- what makes people feel good. The baseline of good design is a perfect balance between the two. Form and function are developed together and are intertwined. A design that stands the test of time is done as efficiently as possible and has nothing more than it needs to do the job.
Charles and Ray Eames's molded-plywood chair of the 1940s is a perfect example. The wood was molded into flexible shapes that perfectly conformed to the body and absorbed shock when the sitter moved. Herman Miller's Aeron chair is descended from that Eames chair but it’s more concerned with performance - action, movement, and mobility. Like the Eames chair, the Aeron is pared down mechanically to exactly what's necessary and its cushion uses the least amount of material needed to achieve comfort. That’s the real art and skill of a designer: to achieve elegance in design with the highest degree of efficiency. Ultimately, any well-designed product or experience acknowledges the user. It's that respect for the user that makes a design great. That's true for a table, a chair, a book, a film or a Web site.
Designing a product is not so much about the end product as it’s about the process of use. This is especially true for Web design, which isn’t dealing with an immutable, static object. Instead, the focus is on designing sequential, ongoing activities - creating a series of linked interactions and experiences.
Design guidelines.
- Design from the outside in. Make the customer’s use of the product, not the technology, central to all product development. Ask, “How do our customers want to deal with us?”
- Create an intuitive product. No one has to read a toaster manual.
- Get physical fast. Prototyping provides opportunities for a concept to be visualized. It offers quick feedback from both users and investors. Fast prototyping squeezes time out of the product development cycle.
- Design products that can be produced efficiently using as few parts and as many standard parts as possible. Manufacturing criteria are as important to product success as ergonomics, aesthetics and function. Always keep quality, cost and delivery parameters in mind.
- Create a product improvement roadmap which plans to incorporate changes based on customer interactions.
- Surprise the user. Always build in something extra. Delivering more than the customer buys creates product loyalty and increases the chance of creating a truly “hot” product.
- Don’t delay a release in order to add ten more killer features in another six weeks. Ship it - chances are it’s good enough as it is. You can always improve it later.
Once you’ve figured out who the customer is and incorporated their needs into the design of your product or service, the next step is to make yourself known.
Charles and Ray Eames's molded-plywood chair of the 1940s is a perfect example. The wood was molded into flexible shapes that perfectly conformed to the body and absorbed shock when the sitter moved. Herman Miller's Aeron chair is descended from that Eames chair but it’s more concerned with performance - action, movement, and mobility. Like the Eames chair, the Aeron is pared down mechanically to exactly what's necessary and its cushion uses the least amount of material needed to achieve comfort. That’s the real art and skill of a designer: to achieve elegance in design with the highest degree of efficiency. Ultimately, any well-designed product or experience acknowledges the user. It's that respect for the user that makes a design great. That's true for a table, a chair, a book, a film or a Web site.
Designing a product is not so much about the end product as it’s about the process of use. This is especially true for Web design, which isn’t dealing with an immutable, static object. Instead, the focus is on designing sequential, ongoing activities - creating a series of linked interactions and experiences.
Design guidelines.
- Design from the outside in. Make the customer’s use of the product, not the technology, central to all product development. Ask, “How do our customers want to deal with us?”
- Create an intuitive product. No one has to read a toaster manual.
- Get physical fast. Prototyping provides opportunities for a concept to be visualized. It offers quick feedback from both users and investors. Fast prototyping squeezes time out of the product development cycle.
- Design products that can be produced efficiently using as few parts and as many standard parts as possible. Manufacturing criteria are as important to product success as ergonomics, aesthetics and function. Always keep quality, cost and delivery parameters in mind.
- Create a product improvement roadmap which plans to incorporate changes based on customer interactions.
- Surprise the user. Always build in something extra. Delivering more than the customer buys creates product loyalty and increases the chance of creating a truly “hot” product.
- Don’t delay a release in order to add ten more killer features in another six weeks. Ship it - chances are it’s good enough as it is. You can always improve it later.
Once you’ve figured out who the customer is and incorporated their needs into the design of your product or service, the next step is to make yourself known.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Understand your customer.
San Diego entrepreneur Neil Senturia started out believing that ATCOM/INFO was an Internet kiosk company but it eventually ended up as a software company. According to Senturia, “When you’re trying to sell your product, the first meeting is always with the wrong people, so try to get it over with as quickly as possible. It took us about six-weeks of meetings until we were finally talking to the real customer. We didn’t know who the customer was in the beginning. Then it dawned on us that we weren’t selling to business travelers - we were selling to hotels!”
To succeed in business, focus on finding the right customers and on learning what they want. Then use your skills and resources to surpass their future hopes, not just to meet their present expectations. A new company shouldn’t compete on price because it'll risk going out of business if it does. Instead, it should work to attract customers by offering them more value for the same price they’re already paying. Price takers are “me-too” competitors. Value makers, like Nike, create new categories and new price points. If you don’t have a clear distinctive capability, you’ll always be jostling for position in the middle of the pack.
Thomas Edison's business failures often came because he relied primarily on his own taste and technology-centered logic rather than trying to understand what other people wanted. For example, when he invented the phonograph, he studied both the cylinder and the disc, but made the mistake of selecting the cylinder because of its technological superiority (as the cylinder revolves, each part passes under the stylus at the same speed). He also preferred cylinders because phonographs using cylinders would allow people to make home recordings. Edison didn't anticipate that the phonograph would be used primarily for the distribution of music. He thought of it as a tool that would allow businesspeople to dictate letters onto cylinders that could be mailed to recipients without the need for transcription. Discs, however, had important advantages over cylinders: they were less fragile; took up less space; were easier to store, package and ship; could accommodate longer playing times by increasing the diameter; had a second side that added more capability without adding storage space; and were cheaper and easier to mass produce.
Being first, being best, even being right doesn’t matter. What matters is what customers think. Edison was first and had the best sound quality. But he lost out in the marketplace by pushing the cylinder when customers preferred the more convenient disc. Edison pushed the phonograph as a recording medium when customers were more interested in listening to prerecorded music. When Edison finally did switch to discs, he didn't use famous (and expensive) musicians, but instead hired excellent but lesser-known artists. As a result, he was never able to capture market share from his competition, the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs follow their own internal compasses instead of looking at the consumer’s needs. Potential investors want to see consumer data to support an entrepreneur’s belief that the product will sell. Once they believe the product will sell, they’ll want to examine the company’s business model to see how it plans to make money by doing it.
Whichever business model you use, the math’s got to work. You have to be able to show how you can make a profit - and the sooner, the better. As Vicki Marion, the CEO of Viadux Inc., says, “It’s never too early to be profitable.” While profitability depends on many things, one of the most important is the design of the product.
To succeed in business, focus on finding the right customers and on learning what they want. Then use your skills and resources to surpass their future hopes, not just to meet their present expectations. A new company shouldn’t compete on price because it'll risk going out of business if it does. Instead, it should work to attract customers by offering them more value for the same price they’re already paying. Price takers are “me-too” competitors. Value makers, like Nike, create new categories and new price points. If you don’t have a clear distinctive capability, you’ll always be jostling for position in the middle of the pack.
Thomas Edison's business failures often came because he relied primarily on his own taste and technology-centered logic rather than trying to understand what other people wanted. For example, when he invented the phonograph, he studied both the cylinder and the disc, but made the mistake of selecting the cylinder because of its technological superiority (as the cylinder revolves, each part passes under the stylus at the same speed). He also preferred cylinders because phonographs using cylinders would allow people to make home recordings. Edison didn't anticipate that the phonograph would be used primarily for the distribution of music. He thought of it as a tool that would allow businesspeople to dictate letters onto cylinders that could be mailed to recipients without the need for transcription. Discs, however, had important advantages over cylinders: they were less fragile; took up less space; were easier to store, package and ship; could accommodate longer playing times by increasing the diameter; had a second side that added more capability without adding storage space; and were cheaper and easier to mass produce.
Being first, being best, even being right doesn’t matter. What matters is what customers think. Edison was first and had the best sound quality. But he lost out in the marketplace by pushing the cylinder when customers preferred the more convenient disc. Edison pushed the phonograph as a recording medium when customers were more interested in listening to prerecorded music. When Edison finally did switch to discs, he didn't use famous (and expensive) musicians, but instead hired excellent but lesser-known artists. As a result, he was never able to capture market share from his competition, the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs follow their own internal compasses instead of looking at the consumer’s needs. Potential investors want to see consumer data to support an entrepreneur’s belief that the product will sell. Once they believe the product will sell, they’ll want to examine the company’s business model to see how it plans to make money by doing it.
Whichever business model you use, the math’s got to work. You have to be able to show how you can make a profit - and the sooner, the better. As Vicki Marion, the CEO of Viadux Inc., says, “It’s never too early to be profitable.” While profitability depends on many things, one of the most important is the design of the product.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Understanding "pain" in the marketplace.
It’s always easier to sell an established concept that's been around for a while, one that people understand because it’s very, very expensive to educate a market.
Different levels of innovation please different people.
- Satisfied customers, who already feel well served, accept small, incremental improvements and resent major changes.
- Potential customers who are satisfied but not delighted by a competitor’s product are attracted by a distinctive innovation that shows clear advantage but remains reassuringly familiar.
- Revolutionary changes appeal to potential customers who reject or ignore all the options currently being offered to meet their needs. Innovation that’s too radical won’t be widely accepted.
It’s not such a serious problem to have a lot of competitors. You need to be different from them, but the more people who are making money in an industry, the better you should feel about going into that industry. Some people develop a business from their hobbies and interests. Others start by listening to problems that their friends and acquaintances are having. Many of the most valuable companies, products, brands and industries have been built around pain. For example, the Macintosh meant that you no longer had to know DOS to use a computer. FedEx made it easy, reliable and relatively inexpensive to send a package from one side of the country to the other, overnight. Saturn took the haggle out of buying a car. Jiffy Lube turned a daylong hassle of changing your car’s oil into a 20-minute errand. The common thread tying all these products and services together is that they addressed a pain felt by large numbers of people.
To increase the chances of succeeding when starting a business using these ideas, here are a few things to bear in mind (excerpted from “What a Pain in the Ass!” by Chris O'Leary).
1. Pain isn't an all or nothing thing but a continuum that ranges from minor inconvenience to life threatening. Some things, like being able to pay for gasoline at the pump, can save people a few seconds, while others, like Microsoft Excel, can save hours or days of work.
2. One person's pain can be another person's pleasure. For example, the earliest personal computers were sold to hobbyists who enjoyed putting them together. For them, the assembly process was a pleasure, not a pain.
3. There’s a difference between buying a gadget because it's cool and buying a product because it gets rid of someone’s pain. While the pet rock was probably useful as a personal security device, most people bought one for other reasons.
4. Pain depends on the circumstances. Abraham Maslow said we have a hierarchy of needs and we only worry about higher-level needs, such as finding expression for our talents, when our more basic needs like food, shelter and safety are already met.
5. Generally, a great idea eliminates a significant source of pain for a large number of people. However, it’s possible to make an excellent living by solving a big pain for a small group of people. Just make sure that they’re willing and able to spend a significant amount of money in the process.
6. A new product or service requires that people change, and changing is always hard. One of the best ways to convince someone to change is to point out how much less pain they would feel if they bought this product or used this service.
7. You need to relieve more pain than you cause. An idea that’s built around solving a pain and that doesn't introduce its own pain will have a much greater chance of succeeding. One reason that Lotus Notes had only limited success is because it was so complex to use.
8. Engineering-driven organizations are notorious for developing and selling products that are technically cool but fail because they don’t solve any real pain. Marketing’s job is to align the efforts of engineering with the pain being felt in the marketplace.
Different levels of innovation please different people.
- Satisfied customers, who already feel well served, accept small, incremental improvements and resent major changes.
- Potential customers who are satisfied but not delighted by a competitor’s product are attracted by a distinctive innovation that shows clear advantage but remains reassuringly familiar.
- Revolutionary changes appeal to potential customers who reject or ignore all the options currently being offered to meet their needs. Innovation that’s too radical won’t be widely accepted.
It’s not such a serious problem to have a lot of competitors. You need to be different from them, but the more people who are making money in an industry, the better you should feel about going into that industry. Some people develop a business from their hobbies and interests. Others start by listening to problems that their friends and acquaintances are having. Many of the most valuable companies, products, brands and industries have been built around pain. For example, the Macintosh meant that you no longer had to know DOS to use a computer. FedEx made it easy, reliable and relatively inexpensive to send a package from one side of the country to the other, overnight. Saturn took the haggle out of buying a car. Jiffy Lube turned a daylong hassle of changing your car’s oil into a 20-minute errand. The common thread tying all these products and services together is that they addressed a pain felt by large numbers of people.
To increase the chances of succeeding when starting a business using these ideas, here are a few things to bear in mind (excerpted from “What a Pain in the Ass!” by Chris O'Leary).
1. Pain isn't an all or nothing thing but a continuum that ranges from minor inconvenience to life threatening. Some things, like being able to pay for gasoline at the pump, can save people a few seconds, while others, like Microsoft Excel, can save hours or days of work.
2. One person's pain can be another person's pleasure. For example, the earliest personal computers were sold to hobbyists who enjoyed putting them together. For them, the assembly process was a pleasure, not a pain.
3. There’s a difference between buying a gadget because it's cool and buying a product because it gets rid of someone’s pain. While the pet rock was probably useful as a personal security device, most people bought one for other reasons.
4. Pain depends on the circumstances. Abraham Maslow said we have a hierarchy of needs and we only worry about higher-level needs, such as finding expression for our talents, when our more basic needs like food, shelter and safety are already met.
5. Generally, a great idea eliminates a significant source of pain for a large number of people. However, it’s possible to make an excellent living by solving a big pain for a small group of people. Just make sure that they’re willing and able to spend a significant amount of money in the process.
6. A new product or service requires that people change, and changing is always hard. One of the best ways to convince someone to change is to point out how much less pain they would feel if they bought this product or used this service.
7. You need to relieve more pain than you cause. An idea that’s built around solving a pain and that doesn't introduce its own pain will have a much greater chance of succeeding. One reason that Lotus Notes had only limited success is because it was so complex to use.
8. Engineering-driven organizations are notorious for developing and selling products that are technically cool but fail because they don’t solve any real pain. Marketing’s job is to align the efforts of engineering with the pain being felt in the marketplace.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Recognizing new business opportunities.
In 1947, Johnny Barfield, the son of a black Alabama sharecropper, had no formal skills so he took a job as a custodian at the University of Michigan that paid $1.75 an hour. While cleaning the chemistry building one day, he sat down for a rest next to a pile of magazines. As he browsed through one, he came across an article on contract cleaning. “It suddenly dawned on me,” he recalled later, “that there were lots of people out there willing to pay for something I’d become an expert in.” So, in 1954, he and his wife, Betty, loaded up a station wagon with mops, buckets, ladders and sponges, and started up Barfield Cleaning Services, which ITT bought 15 years later for millions of dollars. From contacts he made cleaning auto plants, Barfield started a second business in 1977, Bartech Staffing Services, which provides companies with temporary technical workers. Today, The Bartech Group, billing and managing $1 billion in revenue annually for its customers, is one of America's most respected, successful and resourceful talent acquisition and management firms. Bartech is run by Johnny's son, Jon E. Barfield, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.
While living in Paris in 1974, lawyer Tim Zagat launched his first survey—a two-page Xerox comparing his friends' ratings of well-known restaurants with those in the restaurant guides. He and his wife, Nina, duplicated the format when they returned to New York in 1979, handing out questionnaires to 150 other foodies so that they—and not the critics—could judge restaurants on a scale of 1 to 30 in the categories of food, decor and service. By 1994, the Zagat Survey had already grown into a $7 million business. Today, the pocket-sized Zagat Surveys, recognizable by their burgundy covers, have become best-sellers, with over 350,000 participants rating and reviewing restaurants in major U.S. cities and in more than 100 countries worldwide. The Zagats decided early on they weren’t really in the restaurant reviewing business; they were in the business of polling popular tastes. So, they now sell guides rating dining, travel, nightlife, shopping, golf, theater, movies and music.
Successful companies like Zagat frame their identity in terms of their core purpose rather than in terms of their products or services. What they stand for is more important than what they sell. Motorola grew and prospered, guided by its purpose of “applying technology for the benefit of the public.” Meanwhile, Zenith’s business declined because it didn’t take advantage of new opportunities, sticking instead to its mission of making TVs.
As the above examples illustrate, companies get started in many different ways. But the common denominator is that an entrepreneur saw an opportunity they thought had long-term market potential, figured it was only a matter of time until someone was going to make money at it, and decided they might as well be the one. They found many different ways to succeed. Burger King was a knockoff of McDonald's, only different. Fuddruckers was an innovator, offering premium burgers at three times the price with service and surroundings to match.
The most successful startups are precise and targeted. They go for a niche, getting into the nooks and crannies where other companies are too big or too lethargic to go. They make sure their products had a clear reason for being and a clear advantage over their competition. Having a niche is critical in a startup because it allows the company to earn high gross margins thus allowing its initial capital to last long enough for the business to achieve financial viability.
While living in Paris in 1974, lawyer Tim Zagat launched his first survey—a two-page Xerox comparing his friends' ratings of well-known restaurants with those in the restaurant guides. He and his wife, Nina, duplicated the format when they returned to New York in 1979, handing out questionnaires to 150 other foodies so that they—and not the critics—could judge restaurants on a scale of 1 to 30 in the categories of food, decor and service. By 1994, the Zagat Survey had already grown into a $7 million business. Today, the pocket-sized Zagat Surveys, recognizable by their burgundy covers, have become best-sellers, with over 350,000 participants rating and reviewing restaurants in major U.S. cities and in more than 100 countries worldwide. The Zagats decided early on they weren’t really in the restaurant reviewing business; they were in the business of polling popular tastes. So, they now sell guides rating dining, travel, nightlife, shopping, golf, theater, movies and music.
Successful companies like Zagat frame their identity in terms of their core purpose rather than in terms of their products or services. What they stand for is more important than what they sell. Motorola grew and prospered, guided by its purpose of “applying technology for the benefit of the public.” Meanwhile, Zenith’s business declined because it didn’t take advantage of new opportunities, sticking instead to its mission of making TVs.
As the above examples illustrate, companies get started in many different ways. But the common denominator is that an entrepreneur saw an opportunity they thought had long-term market potential, figured it was only a matter of time until someone was going to make money at it, and decided they might as well be the one. They found many different ways to succeed. Burger King was a knockoff of McDonald's, only different. Fuddruckers was an innovator, offering premium burgers at three times the price with service and surroundings to match.
The most successful startups are precise and targeted. They go for a niche, getting into the nooks and crannies where other companies are too big or too lethargic to go. They make sure their products had a clear reason for being and a clear advantage over their competition. Having a niche is critical in a startup because it allows the company to earn high gross margins thus allowing its initial capital to last long enough for the business to achieve financial viability.
Friday, October 24, 2008
The first dream, a poem by Billy Collins.
The former U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins, talked about poetry and read some of his new poems at D.G.Wills Books in La Jolla last Sunday, October 19th. He attracted such a large crowd that people spilled out the door, onto the sidewalk and into the street, causing the poet to worry about their safety. His latest poetry collection is called Ballistics.
This Friday, I'm using this occasion to bring you another poem by this wonderfully fresh, inventive, and accessible writer. I hope you enjoy it.
The First Dream by Billy Collins
The wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning
as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.
He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,
how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.
Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,
except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,
you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.
This Friday, I'm using this occasion to bring you another poem by this wonderfully fresh, inventive, and accessible writer. I hope you enjoy it.
The First Dream by Billy Collins
The wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning
as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.
He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,
how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.
Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,
except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,
you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Creating serial innovation.
One reason why the UCSD’s CONNECT program has developed so many new ideas and products is because it encourages interaction between creative scientists and business entrepreneurs as they hunt together for scientific answers to urgent problems. Successful innovators never lose track of what they’re doing; bringing together a concept of what's needed in the marketplace with what's possible in the world of science.
Turning a company into a serial innovator is like a new novelist, still flush with a best seller, who now needs to write that second novel. Hundreds of local technology companies are established businesses today thanks to CONNECT and now need to jump-start another product, a new story. In older, more traditional industries, the innovation crisis is even more serious, though less visible. Merger mania among the big drug companies is driven by the shortage of new Rx products ready to come to market - at a time when many of their most profitable products will soon run out of the patent protection that keeps their prices high. And although the packaged goods giants are rushing to market with thousands of new product ideas, 90% of them fail within 12 months of launch. We still don't know enough about how good ideas happen or where they can lead.
In 1918, an assistant US Postmaster General named James Blaksee put together a fleet of parcel-post trucks to pick up farm produce from designated spots along the country’s main roads and ship it directly to town. However, parcel post soon turned out to be something entirely different than what was originally envisioned - a means not to move farm goods to town but to move consumer goods from town to country. The nature of revolutions is such that you never really know what they mean until they’re over.
Creative guru, Roger von Oech, suggests that we question ourselves as we approach problems so we don’t miss the obvious. He recommends:
(1) Documenting observations without jumping to conclusions.
(2) Asking why, over and over again, to get to the root of the problem. He notes that problems aren't always well expressed; they’re often expressed as solutions and/or wishes instead.
(3) Circling the problem and describing its impact from multiple perspectives.
One of the best ways to promote creativity is through informality. What starts with an accidental discussion over a relaxed cup of coffee often has a surprising outcome. Companies should create more opportunities for these random and relaxed encounters. Today, more and more of these informal chats take place remotely via the internet.
People need to experience something within themselves that will spark and sustain their effort to innovate - and when they experience this "something," they’ll be self-sustaining. They’ll think about their projects in the shower, in the car, and in their dreams. They’ll need very little management from the outside as their intrinsic motivation will flourish. Inside out will rule the day - not outside in. People will innovate not because they’re told to, but because they want to.
Rolf Smith reminds us that, “Being creative is when you think about your thinking. Being innovative is when you act on your ideas.”
Great companies succeed because of their ability to shape and leverage multiple streams of innovation. These include incremental innovation (e.g., thinner mechanical watches), architectural innovation (e.g., SMH’s Swatch watch), and discontinuous innovation (e.g., Seiko’s quartz movement substituting for mechanical movements). They take advantage of brand new markets for existing technologies while proactively introducing substitute products. At the same time, they create new markets and competitive rules by cannibalizing existing products.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning," according to Albert Einstein
Turning a company into a serial innovator is like a new novelist, still flush with a best seller, who now needs to write that second novel. Hundreds of local technology companies are established businesses today thanks to CONNECT and now need to jump-start another product, a new story. In older, more traditional industries, the innovation crisis is even more serious, though less visible. Merger mania among the big drug companies is driven by the shortage of new Rx products ready to come to market - at a time when many of their most profitable products will soon run out of the patent protection that keeps their prices high. And although the packaged goods giants are rushing to market with thousands of new product ideas, 90% of them fail within 12 months of launch. We still don't know enough about how good ideas happen or where they can lead.
In 1918, an assistant US Postmaster General named James Blaksee put together a fleet of parcel-post trucks to pick up farm produce from designated spots along the country’s main roads and ship it directly to town. However, parcel post soon turned out to be something entirely different than what was originally envisioned - a means not to move farm goods to town but to move consumer goods from town to country. The nature of revolutions is such that you never really know what they mean until they’re over.
Creative guru, Roger von Oech, suggests that we question ourselves as we approach problems so we don’t miss the obvious. He recommends:
(1) Documenting observations without jumping to conclusions.
(2) Asking why, over and over again, to get to the root of the problem. He notes that problems aren't always well expressed; they’re often expressed as solutions and/or wishes instead.
(3) Circling the problem and describing its impact from multiple perspectives.
One of the best ways to promote creativity is through informality. What starts with an accidental discussion over a relaxed cup of coffee often has a surprising outcome. Companies should create more opportunities for these random and relaxed encounters. Today, more and more of these informal chats take place remotely via the internet.
People need to experience something within themselves that will spark and sustain their effort to innovate - and when they experience this "something," they’ll be self-sustaining. They’ll think about their projects in the shower, in the car, and in their dreams. They’ll need very little management from the outside as their intrinsic motivation will flourish. Inside out will rule the day - not outside in. People will innovate not because they’re told to, but because they want to.
Rolf Smith reminds us that, “Being creative is when you think about your thinking. Being innovative is when you act on your ideas.”
Great companies succeed because of their ability to shape and leverage multiple streams of innovation. These include incremental innovation (e.g., thinner mechanical watches), architectural innovation (e.g., SMH’s Swatch watch), and discontinuous innovation (e.g., Seiko’s quartz movement substituting for mechanical movements). They take advantage of brand new markets for existing technologies while proactively introducing substitute products. At the same time, they create new markets and competitive rules by cannibalizing existing products.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning," according to Albert Einstein
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