Archive for category connect
Four Ideas Triggered by Haruki Murakami
Posted by Tim in book riffs, connect on 6 January 2012
Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors, and in reading a couple of his books recently, I ran across several quotes made me think about innovation. In large part, this is because nearly everything I encounter makes me think about innovation one or another. Nevertheless, here are four thoughts triggered by Murakami.
The first two quotes come from his most recent novel 1Q84.
Thanks for reading the book to me. I felt close to the Gilyaks. Why do the Gilyaks walk through the forest swamps and not on the wide roads[?]
Even if the roads are convenient, it’s easier for the Gilyaks to keep away from the roads and walk through the forest. To walk on the roads, they would have to completely remake the way they walk. If they remade the way they walk, they would have to remake other things. … I don’t like to walk on the wide roads either.
In the Chekhov passage, this was framed as a diffusion of innovation problem: there were brand new roads that had been built for the people, but the Gilyaks refused to use them. Why? This illustrates an important point – when you change one thing, you have to change others.
It’s frustrating when people don’t adopt our great new ideas. Often, they resist not because of the idea itself, but because of the other things they would have to change to accommodate the new idea.
In the second quote, one person who is in hiding discusses how she could be found out:
“I don’t get it. Would an analysis like that really turn up where I am now?”
“I don’t know,” Tamaru said. “It might, and it might not. It depends. I’m just saying that’s what I would do. Because I can’t think of anything else. Every person has his set routines, when it comes to thinking and acting, and where there’s a routine, there’s a weak point.”
“It sounds like a scientific investigation.”
“People need routines. It’s like a theme in music. But it also restricts your thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic…”
This relates to a point I raised yesterday about the tradeoffs between efficiency and innovation. Routines help us become more efficient – the are an essential part of creating regular outcomes that can be measured and improved.
At the same time, these routines limit the scope of the ideas that we think about, which makes it harder to innovate. If you’re trying to innovate, think about the routines you use at work and personally, to try to identify how they might also be limiting your freedom.
1Q84 is an excellent book, but if you haven’t read any Murakami before, it’s probably not the best place to start.
I also recently finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
In other words, you can’t please everybody.
Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it the other way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like my place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what. This is what I learned through running a business.
John always talks about how strategy is making choices. In addition to saying what you will do, you also have to be clear about what you won’t do – what you’ll say no to.
In his new book Betterness: Economics for Humans,
The math may be different in your industry – it might take more or less than one repeat customer in ten to succeed. However, the fact that you need to make this one insanely happy is a constant. And you can’t do that if you’re trying to please everyone.
Finally, here’s a short quote from Norwegian Wood:
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
I’ve talke about this before – finding your own set of information resources is a crucial part of innovating.
Of course, the real value comes from finding novel connections between the information that you’re processing – connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation.
Are You Creating or Replacing?
Posted by Tim in book riffs, connect, networks on 28 December 2011
Are you creating something new or replacing something that’s already there? If you’re replacing, you need to do much different things than if you’re creating something new.
Every time you try to get your ideas to spread, you have to break connections. This is a lot harder if you’re trying to replace a deeply embedded idea.
Here’s how I’m thinking about it:
Replacement is like trying to knock out the red target in the middle of the diagram. The triangles might be suppliers, or complementary products, and the circles might be customers. The point is, the idea is really embedded.
If you’re trying to replace something, you have to come up with an idea that is MUCH better than the one you’re trying to replace. Here is how Stowe Boyd put it today talking about the new Microsoft Phone:
The iPhone was easily an order-of-magnitude better that the shit phones we all tolerated when it launched. Microsoft had years to come up with something awesome, and it’s ok. Which means death, today.
Replacement means being an order-of-magnitude better.
More academically, here is Clayton Christensen saying something similar in The Innovator’s Cookbook, and pretty good edited volume put together by Steven Johnson:
Even if innovators succeed in cramming disruptive technology into an existing market application, the incumbents typically win. Digital photography, online consumer banking, and hybrid-electric vehicles are examples of potentially disruptive technologies that were deployed in such a sustaining fashion. Billions were spent on these innovation to beat out already acceptable and habitual technology; little net growth resulted, as sales of the new products cannibalized sales of the old; and the industry leaders maintained their rule.
In short, replacement is very difficult. You have to stand out from the crowd, which is awfully hard, and it requires a quantum leap in functionality.
If you’re creating, you face a different set of problems. When you create something new, you don’t have any connections at all – you have to create them from nothing. This is tough.
However, the payoff to creating something new can be a lot higher than replacing. And there are some ideas that make this easier.
- Not all crazy ideas are great, but most great ideas are crazy: Fred Wilson says:
When people ask me, “how do you know which companies and services are going to be the biggest successes?”, I usually tell them to look for the companies and services that are mocked and misunderstood. For some reason, that correlates highly with the biggest breakout successes.
- New ideas start out crappy: Greg Satell has a great interpretation of Christensen’s research, and he summarizes it by saying that disruptive innovations come through changing the basis of competition. To do this, you have to smart small, often with a new customer base, and with ideas that aren’t yet fully formed. This is completely different from how you approach replacement ideas.
- For new ideas, you can use things like the lean start-up methodology: this includes the concept of the minimum viable product. The basic idea here is that you get a working version of your idea out as quickly as possible, so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. This requires clear thinking about metrics, and a good business model, which you test all the way through.
Think about the difference between coming up with something that is an order-of-magnitude better than what’s currently out there, versus putting out a minimum viable product and experimenting. They are completely different. They require different skills, different mindsets, and different methods for experimenting and testing your assumptions.
That is why you have to be clear about whether you’re creating or replacing.
Innovation Lessons from Hedy Lamarr
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation, time on 23 December 2011
Every time you use wi-fi, bluetooth, a cordless phone (including mobiles), GPS or anything with an RFID tag, you’re using a technology called spread spectrum radio. The first version of spread spectrum was invented during World War II as a method for controlling torpedos using rapidly changing radio frequency to control their direction in a way that couldn’t be jammed. It was invented by the composer George Antheil and the actor Hedy Lamarr.
That’s Hedy Lamarr:
not Hedley Lamarr:
The story of the invention is told by Richard Rhodes in Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, which is well worth the read.
The story includes several important innovation lessons, including:
- Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act of innovation: Rhodes interviewed Neno Amarena an engineer that discussed Lamarr’s inventive work with her in later years:
“More often than not,” he told me, “the inventive process follows a cascade of ideas and thoughts interconnected from previous concepts that for the most part lie separate, unconnected and unrelated. It takes a clear state of mind, which is usually someone thinking ‘outside the box,’ to suddenly or serendipitously see the connected between the unrelated concepts and put it all together to create something new.” In that regard, the process of invention is no different from the creative process in other fields. Scientific discovery proceeds the same way. So do painting and sculpture. So does creative writing. The results are different, because each process operates on different realities and by different rules.
That’s just a beautiful passage, which captures things perfectly.
- Innovation is a process: coming up with a great idea isn’t enough to innovate. You also have to select which ideas to pursue, you have to make them work, and you have to get them to spread. Lamarr and Antheil did all of the first three things brilliantly, but they fell over on the last bit. They figured out how to make spread spectrum work through frequency hopping, and were granted a patent for that. However, they couldn’t get the US Navy to adopt their idea. The donated the patent to the Navy, where it sat for about 20 years. It wasn’t until the 1980s that people started to realise what Lamarr and Antheil had accomplished. Which leads to the third point -
- Ideas spread slowly: and they can be ahead of their time. We like to think that the value of an idea is self-evident. This often isn’t true, and even when it is, that doesn’t mean that people will adopt it. In addition, you can be ahead of your time technologically. According to Rhodes, that seemed to be the case here:
“Lamarr and Antheil,” Price writes, “seem… to have been more than a score of years ahead of their time, considering that [frequency hopping] evidently was not used operationally against intentional jamming until [1963].”
You have to fight to get your ideas to spread, and this is a crucial part of the innovation process.
There’s also one last point that is easy to overlook: Lamarr and Antheil invented this breakthrough technology in their spare time. She was busy becoming a movie star, and he was writing symphonies while they worked out how to turn frequency hopping into a functional idea. A frequent excuse for not innovating is “I don’t have enough time.” But you do. Find the time, and use it.
What is Influence, Really?
Posted by Tim in connect, experiments, networks on 11 December 2011
One of my colleagues is doing research on social network use, and she asked me to help get people to take her survey. It takes about 8 minutes to fill it in. I was glad to help, and to do it, I set up a test.
First I posted the link on my Facebook page and asked my friends to take the test. About 20 out of 188 did so.
A few days later, I posted a link on Twitter, and asked everyone following me to take the test. Another 20 did, out of around 3000.
And now, here’s an interesting question: how do you blog readers stack up against my Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers? My bet is that you’ll win – to prove me right:
Click here to take the survey yourself!
The contrast in results between Facebook and Twitter illustrates some important lessons about influence. A lot of people have been talking recently about how to best measure online influence. Like innovation, influence is another thing that is awfully hard to measure.
One big problem is that influence is pretty hard to define in the first place. What does it mean? To me, influence is about getting people to take action. If that’s the case, you might think that I am lot more influential on Facebook (where about 11% of the people on my list of friends took the survey) than I am on Twitter (where about 0.7% of the people on my list of followers took the survey).
But I’m the same person – so am I influential or not?
One of the best thinkers around right now on the topic of influence is Valeria Maltoni – here is what she says about Klout’s attempt to measure influence:
I can tell you that Klout knows squat about me and my behavior. Zero, nothing, niente, nada. Got it? The fine folks behind the algorithm have no idea of who gets my emails and calls, which are the tools I use most to conduct my real business.
They know nothing about what I read and why I read it, because they are not reading these articles or talking with me. They are just tabulating the keywords and volume of my Twitter activity. Twitter. Shrink me into 140 characters. Or maybe they are 134 more than those in Pirandello’s play (more context was the lesson there, it is here, too).
Are the people in my life even on Twitter? You don’t know that.
Am I the person you read here every day? (And I thank you humbly and sincerely for reading and thinking about this content.) You are not just the person who is reading. You are much more than one thing you do, so why would I be just the person who is sharing here?
Martijn Linssen has done a lot of good work assessing the success of Klout in measuring influence.
This experiment illustrates some important points about influence:
- You can’t reduce a complex phenomenon to a single number: influence happens in person, online, with people we know well, and with people we’ve never met. This makes it very tricky to measure. This leads to:
- Don’t mistake the metric for what you’re trying to measure: the real problem with things like Klout is that once we have a metric, people will start trying to game the metric. You can do this, but it doesn’t increase your actual influence. The only way to do that is to do things that have a strong, positive impact on people, and to do it consistently. That’s a system that you can’t game – and if you focus too much on managing the metric, you’ll actually get worse at the thing that really matters.
- Influence really happens in networks: Duncan Watts has done a lot of excellent research that shows that the main thing that causes ideas to spread within networks is the extent to which the people in the network are likely to spread the idea. Here is how he put it in a recent post:
When we hear that a raging forest fire has consumed millions of acres of California forest, we don’t assume that there was anything special about the initial spark. Quite to the contrary, we understand that in context of the large-scale environmental conditions — prolonged drought, a buildup of flammable undergrowth, strong winds, rugged terrain, and on so — that truly drive fires, the nature of the spark itself is close to irrelevant.
Yet when it comes to the social equivalent of the forest fire, we do in effect insist that there must have been something special about the spark that started it. Because our experience tells us that leadership matters in small groups such as Army platoons or start-up companies, we assume that it matters in the same way for the very largest groups as well. Thus when we witness some successful movement or organization, it seems obvious to us that whoever the leader is, his or her particular combination of personality, vision, and leadership style must have supplied the critical X factor, where the larger and more successful the movement, the more important the leader will appear.
- Consequently, understanding how ideas spread through networks is essential to understanding influence: this is an idea that Greg Satell has incisively written about. Here’s what he says:
In effect, starting an epidemic is similar to a broadcast search. You are better off casting your net as widely as possible and reaching influential people as well as less influential ones. (See this article for more about broadcast and directed network searches)
Some paths will fail, but the more paths you initiate, the more likely that your idea will infect those who are susceptible to it. Just like delays at any airport can affect large hubs, influence can originate anywhere in social networks.
So the real answer to the question of whether or not I’m influential is: yes. Or no. Or maybe. The one thing that we can say is that my Facebook friends seem to be a lot more willing to act on a request for help than my twitter followers are. But this again is a network effect, and doesn’t actually have that much to do with me personally. The connections on Facebook are different, and people use that network to meet objectives that differ from those that Twitter users are trying to achieve.
Influence is very important, but measuring it is hard. The best way to increase your influence is to keep producing ideas that help people.
Also, if you could retweet this, that would be cool – it would really help my Klout score…
(just kidding – I’d much rather have you fill in Sabine’s survey – and the number of people that have gone to the survey from here is now higher than we got from either Facebook or Twitter!)
(that’s The Minutemen playing their great song Take Our Test)
How to Steal Like An Innovator
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation on 21 November 2011
I’ve been obsessed with this video for the past couple of days:
The song is Nouvelle Vague covering Dance With Me by Lords of the New Church. It’s a great cover. The video is an even more inspired piece. Youtube user Luakabopper took the song and put it over this amazing dance sequence from Bande a Part (the movie after which Quentin Tarantino named his production company). The combination of a Bossa Nova cover of a new wave song spliced with new wave cinema is genius all the way around.
It might not be obvious, but this great video tells us a lot about innovation. Here are some ideas:
- Innovation is about connecting ideas: I’ve always been fascinated by covers. When they’re done well, talented musicians take a good song and make it completely their own. This is combinatorial creativity. Taking an existing song, and combining it with your existing talent.
Innovators connect ideas as well. In his controversial article on Steve Jobs, Malcolm Gladwell says:
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution.
John Gruber points out some of flaws in this argument, but the main one is that there’s no such thing as a clean sheet of paper. Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation.
- Innovation gets to the core of ideas: the key to making a good cover is to find the key part of the song you’re playing and focus on that. This is what separates the talented bands from the not so talented ones. There are plenty of cover bands playing bars all around the world that don’t do anything special. The just play the songs as closely as to the original versions as they can. The thing that is great about Nouvelle Vague is that they are extremely skilled at finding the the critical core of each song that they play.
In his great post How to Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon included this picture:
And he said:
It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is.
In this age of information overload and abundance, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s important to them.
This is true for innovation as well. The key to connecting ideas is to get to the core of the ideas that you are adapting. If you just copy an idea in its entirely, there’s no creativity involved, and no innovation. You must subtract to innovate through combination.
- You can’t just copy ideas, you have to create ideas of your own: you might argue that doing Bossa Nova covers of 1980s punk and new wave songs creates more novelty than value, but I love the Nouvelle Vague. It’s definitely novel, but in their best songs, there is something fascinating going on – these songs are interpretations that genuinely add something good to the originals.
This illustrates the innovation idea called absorptive capacity (Paul Hobcraft has done a great job of explaining the ideas behind absorptive capacity). The basic concept is that in order to absorb knowledge and ideas created by others, you have to be generating new knowledge and ideas yourself first.
This is a critical point if you innovating through any form of collaboration. You don’t gain an advantage by collaborating unless you’re capable of developing and executing good ideas on your own.
So the key to stealing like an innovator is this: don’t just copy ideas, connect them. Connect ideas from the outside with the internal capabilities that you use to create unique value.
Make Your Own Map to Make Novel Connections
Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation.
If this is the case, how do we get better at it?
I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. Finally, she said “this is off-topic, but what exactly do you study?” She had stumbled across one of my strategies for connecting ideas creatively – reading very widely.
Here is how I approached this issue in an earlier post:
A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised that it didn’t matter if I gave anyone else my exact RSS feed, they wouldn’t be able to replicate my blog.
The reason for this is that the articles in my RSS feed that trigger ideas are completely dependent upon my unique set of experiences, including all of the things that I’ve read and done previously. It reminds me of the idea of psycheography that was developed by Guy Debord and The Situationists (it should be noted that they would be horrified at the use of these ideas in a context that has anything to do with business, but I guess this is part of building novel connections between ideas!).
Consider this map of Paris:
It shows the sections of the city used by a student over a period of several weeks. There are two important points to think about this with this. First, each person’s map of the city they live in will be unique. My version of Brisbane will by fundamentally different from that of everyone else that lives here. The same is true for all cities. Second, most people use only a very small percentage of the city in which they live. The student’s version of Paris is actually quite a small amount of the overall city.
The Situationists’ response to this was the dérive:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
This might seem a bit abstract, but there are some important implications here for innovation, including:
- Identify the paths you normally take through information: the world of information is even bigger than a city. Each of us takes a unique path through this every day. What is yours? What are the limits that this path imposes on the ideas that you have and the connections you make?
- Introduce some new paths through this information: the dérive was a method for finding a way out of the normal paths one takes through a city. How can we do the same with information? Twitter can work as a serendipity engine, but to achieve this, you need to consciously connect and pay attention to people that have backgrounds and interests that are quite different from yours. And again, there is great value in reading widely.
- Make your own map: I’ve been telling my MBA students that their assessments should reflect their own map through the materials that we’re working on together – each person’s will be unique because they are applying the ideas in a unique situation. In other words, they have to make their own map through the material. So do you.
All of this is probably just a way to rephrase what John was saying when he was telling us to Be a Hedgefox!
The bottom line is this – to increase the quality of our innovative ideas, we have to figure out a way to make novel creative connections between ideas. To do this, we have to find a way to access ideas outside of our normal patterns of thinking. We have to make our own map.
Reciprocity & Sharing
I’m currently attending the XIIth European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. It’s much less academic than most of the conferences I go to, which is a refreshing change. I ran into a problem yesterday, though, which got me thinking.
I gave my workshop on the first day. About 20 people came to it, and they were terrific. The asked questions, they challenged ideas, and they raised many interesting points leading to some excellent discussion. It’s one of the best conference experiences that I’ve had.
The problem came the next day, when I was trying to decide what sessions to attend myself. Several of the people that came to my session were presenting themselves, and since they had been so great during my talk, I felt that I owed them my time and attention in return. However, with 20 people at my talk, it has been impossible to repay all of them.
And I realized that this is always the case.
When I think of the list of people that have helped me get to where I am today, I realize that the list is unbelievably huge. And in many cases, I can’t repay these people in kind.
I can’t go to the conference presentation from every person that attends mine. I can’t retweet blog posts from everyone that tweets my posts. I can’t even read the blog posts of all the people that read mine.
This is why I feel like I have to share. I can’t pay everyone back with time, or attention, or a tweet. So I hope that in writing things here, and in sharing ideas, I can at least give something back in a different way.
To everyone that has helped me out – thank you!
I’ll try to keep up my end of the relationship by giving away as much as I can here. I hope that works.
Bad Filtering Kills Businesses
If your business model is based on information, and whose isn’t these days, then you need to be able to aggregate, filter and connect. While reflecting on the death of Borders Books, I thought of three stories of filtering in retail.
First Story: Tower Records
In the mid-80s, I went in to the Tower Records in Tacoma, looking for Stop Pretending, the new record by the Pandoras. I figured my odds of finding it were high, since there was a big promo display for the record up on the wall.
I went over to the “Rock – Misc P” and flicked through the records. No luck.
I went up to the counter and asked the clerk if they had it. He said no – they’d gotten one copy, and another guy that worked at Tower had bought it. I asked them why they had the display on the wall, and he told me that the guy that bought the record really liked it, so he made the display.
Then I asked if another copy was coming in. No. Why? Because for records from independent labels, the buying policy was to send one copy to each store. If they needed more than one copy, then it had to be special ordered.
There are five forms of filtering, and this is an example heuristic filtering.
Heuristic filtering is rules-based, and this is a great example of a dumb mechanical process. It’s dumb because there’s no learning (“hey, people in Tacoma seem to like the Pandoras, send them more copies of the record”).
This approach worked fine as long as Tower was still the biggest aggregator around. The boycott of Tower that I started in response to this didn’t really seem to hurt them, even though I bought a LOT of records back then.
However, as soon as a bigger aggregator came along – various internet-based options – the Tower business model was toast.
People say that the internet killed Tower Records, but I think it was killed by bad filtering.
Second Story: Borders Books
In the mid-90s, I bought Science as a Process by David Hull, which became one of my all-time favourite non-fiction books. I bought it at the Borders in Westwood, which at the time had a superb science section. Back then, buying was decentralized to each store. So the Westwood Borders, just down the road from UCLA, had a significantly different selection from the Studio City Borders, and every other Borders in LA at the time.
This was expert filtering. Each buyer knew the kind of people that were shopping in his or her store, and they stocked books appropriate to that market.
Unlike Barnes & Noble, which appeared to use heuristics to stock their stores, each Borders was unique.
When Borders came to Australia and New Zealand around 2000, they had individual store buyers then too, so each store was still unique.
After the chain got sold, the individual buyers disappeared – replaced by a central buyer. This was done in response to the threat of online booksellers. The only way to improve efficiency was to cut down on staffing costs.
So Borders went to dumb heuristic filtering.
And now they’re gone too – also killed by bad filtering.
Third Story: Pulp Fiction Bookshop
I while ago I was browsing through the shelves at Pulp Fiction Bookshop here in Brisbane. They specialize in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Mysteries. Their selection in these areas is among the best I’ve ever seen.
A guy walked into the shop and went straight up to the counter. He said “My wife really likes Iain Rankin and Donna Leone. I want to get her a birthday present – is there a similar author that you can recommend?” The owner of the shop said “Yes, there’s a South African author (whose name I didn’t catch) that’s writing really good mysteries, but no one has heard of him (or her) yet. Try that.” The guy bought two books by that author, and left, looking pretty happy.
That’s expert filtering – both in terms of stocking the store and in terms of helping customers.
Even though people can buy books on the internet, and the Australian dollar is really strong, and the parallel importing laws here making it nearly impossible to sell books successfully, Pulp Fiction seems to be doing pretty well.
They’re doing well, because they filter well.
Conclusions
Simply calling these filtering problems is probably too simplistic. And yet, bad filtering definitely played a role in the death of Tower and Borders. Both of them were pretty good at aggregating. Borders was pretty good at using expert filtering to connect people with books they might like in-store, while Tower was less consistent in this area. For a while, Borders was pretty good at filtering, and Tower was always fairly bad at it.
The problems started when the internet killed their aggregation advantages. This caused Borders to do away with the one thing that actually made them distinctive – their expert filtering. Expert filtering is something that Tower never had.
Neither store ever was able to connect people up with products in the way that Pulp Fiction does. This type of expert filtering & connecting is better even than the algorithmic filtering you get at Amazon or iTunes.
The problem is that it doesn’t scale. So it’s hard to have a Borders-sized bookshop with great expert filtering. It’s easier if you specialize in something, as Pulp Fiction does.
To succeed in an information-based business, you must be good at aggregating, filtering and connecting information. And you have to be able to do all three. The stories of Tower and Borders show you how bad filtering can kill a business.
Ideas Are Something You Do
Posted by Tim in connect, experiments on 21 July 2011
Here is today’s exercise in connecting up ideas. First off, there’s this summary of the TEDGlobal conference from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter:
Then, there’s this quote from Seth Godin at the 99% Conference:
What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship.
Godin expands on that thought in this presentation as well – where he recommends “thrashing at the beginning” of a project so that you can deliver (“ship”) on time.
Again, the value is not in the idea, it’s in shipping something that’s come from the idea.
Finally, Rowan Simpson wrote a good post with questions that firms who want investment money from him should think through. He says:
The best thing you can do to stand out from the crowd is to point me at a product that I can use and, even better, that you are already selling. It doesn’t have to be polished or even finished, as long as you have planned for the work required to turn it into something that is ready to be used in anger.
Nothing impresses potential investors like scrappy execution. Most people don’t get that far.
This is part of why it’s hard to measure innovation. If ideas are something you have, then it’s easy. We can measure patents, or suggestions, or some other measure of our stock of ideas.
Measuring flow is harder – but idea flow is what determines innovation success. To measure innovation we need to track ideas that have been executed. And, even better, value created through this execution.
Ideas are something you do.
There Are No Innovation Shortcuts
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation strategy on 4 July 2011
Three things that caught my eye yesterday:
- An excellent post by Helen Walters, which included this section:
“The innovation shortcut is yours for the taking.”
—
This quote, from Gabor George Burt’s piece Why the Best Innovations Are About Relevance, Not Invention is the kind of statement to make blood run cold. Promising the earth and underplaying the difficult, time-consuming reality of innovation work is more than unhelpful. There’s no such thing as an “innovation shortcut” and promising one is unrealistic.Walters then addresses some of the good points that Burt makes, but her main issue here is correct – there are no shortcuts to innovation.
- In the daily barrage of spam comments, there are always ones linking to sites with titles like “Buy Facebook Likes” and many about Search Engine Optimization. These, again, are shortcuts, and they work as well any other shortcut. In other words, they don’t work at all.
- Mindy McAdams wrote an interesting post called Branding: Should journalists build a personal brand? which includes her response to a quote from Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post:
“Now, the first goal seems to be self-promotion — the fame part, the “brand.” That’s because we know that, in this frenetic fight for eyeballs at all costs, the attribute that is most rewarded is screeching ubiquity, not talent.”
It’s very important that new or would-be journalists take Weingarten’s point to heart. There won’t be anything to be branded unless you have some substance to market, and that means much more than a talent for writing glibly. Lots of people have such a talent. Many of them spend their lives writing for an audience of one.
“The work” is just that — work — and as part of the work, you have to get off Facebook and go outside and speak to real live people. You have to read, widely and voraciously. You have to be curious about those who live in skins other than your own. You have to learn what makes a good story and how to tell a good story well.
Walters and McAdams both make the point that at the bottom, success is built on working hard, creating substance, and meeting the needs of people. This is what you have to do to innovate.
You can’t find an innovation shortcut by discovering a new source of great ideas. You have to do the work to figure out how to make the idea real, and to find a way to get the idea to spread.
Search engine optimization doesn’t do you any good if the search engines don’t point to something of substance – you have to do the work create something worth searching for.
You can’t create a personal brand out of nothing. You have to do the work to make something before promoting it does any good.
It’s not about your great ideas. Innovation is about executing your great ideas to create value.
You have to do the work first.
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