Archive for category innovation strategy
Quick Thoughts on Innovation
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation strategy on 16 March 2010
Here are two quick connections that I made today relating to innovation.
First – watch this:
It’s called “All Creative Work is Derivative” by Nina Paley, and here’s her description of how she made it. Brian Arthur argues in his book The Nature of Technology that all new economic ideas build on the combination of things that already exist. I think that this is an excellent way to think of creativity – that it is about making novel connections. Innovation is then about getting these creative ideas to spread.
Second – check out this picture:
It’s from an excellent blog post called “Four Dimensions of Innovation” by Ellen Di Resta (definitely check out her blog – it’s very good). It is one of the best frameworks I’ve seen for classifying some of the important subsets of innovation. She talks about the differences between innovating at the more straightforward end of the spectrum – creating innovations for optimisation and for improvement. However, creating innovations for invention and disruption are harder.
Di Resta correctly points out that these types of innovation require different managerial skills. The problem is that we need to be able manage both the more incremental ideas as well as the more game-changing ones. The small innovations keep us competitive now, but the bigger ones keep us in the game as the competitive environment changes.
Noah Raford made a similar argument in his discussion of the taxonomy of design put together by GH VanPatter and Peter Jones (check out his blog too!). He also has four levels of design, with increasing complexity as you go up the scale. He points out that at the more complex end, design “problems are far more social, far more political, and tend involve many more people with vested interests and different goals.”
This is equally true of innovation, I think. The genuinely inventive and disruptive innovations are much harder to embed within the economy, because so many more people have strong connections to the ideas that are being replaced. That’s a big part of what makes executing innovation so challenging – we have to get the new ideas to spread. In the end, though, I suppose that’s what makes it fun too!
Finding the Best Way to Fail
Posted by Tim in filter, innovation strategy, selection on 14 March 2010
Nancy and I were talking about a kind of strange newspaper article that her sister sent her discussing the upcoming release of the DSM-V (the official diagnostic manual for mental illnesses). The author of the article was a psychiatrist advocating going back to the 19th century definition of depression – melancholia. I joked that we might as well go back to using phrenology.
If you’re not familiar with it, phrenology was a diagnostic system [sic] based on the idea that the bumps on your head could tell you something about the brain structures underneath the skull. The theory goes on to suggest that the different brain structures reflect different personality traits. As a science, phrenology was discredited a long time ago – around the same time we stopped talking about “melancholia”.
But Nancy had a fascinating response to my joke about phrenology. She said (approximately):
Phrenology was actually really important because it was the first time that people started thinking about the localisation in the brain. Before that, they thought of it as a pretty undifferentiated organ – like a kidney – where each part did the same thing. So phrenology was actually one of the first steps towards modern neuroscience.
That reminded me of a great post by Randy Haykin about the Apple Navigator (which I talked about earlier here). Haykin talks about how many of the key features of the Apple iPad were first introduced in the Apple Navigator – a prototype from 1987 that never launched as a product.
The stories of phrenology and the Navigator show how both science and the economy are evolutionary processes. They both build on earlier ideas to create new ones – usually through creating new combinations. Phrenology failed as a scientific theory, and the Navigator failed as a product, but both contained ideas that could be combined with others to form new, better ideas. We learned from the failures.
That’s why a lot of people, including me, advocate developing a tolerance of failure when we’re innovating. Failure gives us a chance to learn, and it helps us execute ideas that might form building blocks of better ideas in the future. If at least some of our ideas aren’t failing, we’re not trying out enough new things.
However, failure also has consequences – something that venture capitalist Mark Suster forcefully points out in Why the ‘Fail Fast’ Mantra Needs to Fail. His key point is that when fast failure is encouraged, it can have several major drawbacks for start-ups. It can encourage poor business model development, premature abandonment of start-ups, and a cavalier attitude towards the money that others have sunk into the venture.
All of these are valid points. But I think it shows that we are using ‘fast failure’ to cover many different things. One of the key quotes in Suster’s post is this:
You want to talk about the ultimate “fail fast” – how about if you fail before you’ve spent any money building product because you validate there isn’t a big enough market or you can’t make money?
This got me thinking. I think that what we need is a taxonomy of economic failure. We can actually think of failure as a hierarchy that looks something like this:
- System failure (the collapse of communism)
- System component failure (stock market crashes)
- Major firm failure (Enron going out of business)
- Start-up failure (pets.com going out of business)
- Product failure (New Coke tanking)
- Idea failure (Apple Navigator prototyped but never launched)
As you go down that list, failure gets less expensive. When I talk about tolerating failure, I’m talking about trying to set up systems that encourage cheap fast failure. This is usually at the level of ideas. I agree with Suster that encouraging failure at higher levels can be irresponsible.
Innovation courts failure. Not every great new idea will work – and since it is nearly impossible to tell in advance which ones will work and which ones won’t, we have to find cheap, quick ways to test them out. This can be done through the use of experiment as in rapid prototyping combined with iteration based on feedback, through the use of modelling or other simulations, or through the use of a screening tool like the stage-gate process.
The main point is that we need to try to encourage failure before new ideas get too embedded into the economic network. At the top level of the failure hierarchy, failure causes enormous disruption and pain, because those parts of the system are so deeply interconnected. It is much better for ideas to fail than it is for products, firms or economic systems to do so.
(photo from flickr/evansville under a Creative Commons License)
Business Model Innovation for News
Posted by Tim in business models, innovation strategy, time on 13 March 2010
We’ve talked quite a bit about the situation in which the news industry currently finds itself. It is interesting because it is an industry in the middle of massive disruption, which makes it a great case study. Consequently, lots of other people are talking about it as well.
This week I tweeted abougt two stories on this topic – Marc Andreessen’s interview in which he says that media companies have to “burn the boats” and fully commit to digital, and Hal Varian’s talk urging news organisations to “experiment, experiment, experiment”.
In another of his fine weekly reviews, Mark Coddington summarises this discussion and points to two interesting responses to Andreessen from Alan Mutter and Paul Gillin, who both think that it is a bit too early to burn the boats.
Here are some of the highlights. First off, Andreessen -
[he] was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
Mutter’s response:
some 93% of the industry’s $45 billion in sales were associated with the legacy print product. Even though ad revenues probably fell $10 billion in 2009, print-driven newspaper revenues sill are running at better than $30 billion a year.
It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.
And then Gillin’s:
In their most recent round of earnings reports, most publishers stated that they are now deriving between 12% and 16% of their revenue from online advertising. Most of them have also not done nearly as much as they can to monetize other sources such as events, transaction fees and value-added and classified advertising. Once publishers reach the threshold of 20% online revenue, they can conceivably shutter their print operations while sustaining the business and the brand. They’re trying to get to that threshold gracefully, though. Lots of money can still be made in print if publishers can manage that asset down steadily while reducing costs in lockstep….
Burning the boats isn’t a wise strategy at the moment. But it’s a good idea to start collecting firewood.
Finally, here’s Varian:
In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.
New tablet computers like the Kindle, iPad, and Android devices may encourage people to read online news at home in the comfort of their easy chairs. At Google, we certainly don’t think we have all the solutions, but we are definitely keen on working with the news industry to help it attract bigger audiences and generate more ad revenue. Experiments like Fast Flip, Living Stories and Starred Stories may help pull together the at-work and at-home access to the news. Online news access on handheld device like cell phones and tablets is likely to be quite different from traditional newspapers reading, with much more multimedia content, interactivity and reader involvement. The transition to a fully online news will be difficult, but there’s a good chance that we will emerge with a significantly more compelling user experience.
My opinion is that it’s a diabolically hard problem. I agree with Mutter and Gillin that you simply can’t walk away from more than 90% of your current revenue. The print operations must continue as the news organisations follow Varian’s suggestion to promiscuously experiment – a recommendation that I strongly endorse.
The thing that bothers me about most of this discussion, however, is that the vision is still conservative. There’s no point in simply porting news online. These organisations must be experimenting with finding ways to create entirely new experiences around the news – the game must be fundamentally changed.
That’s what makes me at least partially sympathetic to Andreessen’s argument – the current news organisations have to find a way to psychologically move away from print, and they also have to move away from the idea of recreating newspaper on a website, or a smart phone, or a tablet. That doesn’t cut it. So here is my prescription – and I think that it is generic to all large, entrenched incumbents facing major disruption:
- While maintaining your current core operations, you have to abandon them psychologically. This is what Andreessen is getting at – full commitment to the new model requires no safety net, at least in his view. I’m not sure this is entirely true. The main point is that one way or another, you have to come to grips with the idea that your core operations are on a death watch.
- The second step is that you need to follow Varian’s advice and start experimenting. Try it all – big bets small bets, and everything in between. Prototype rapidly, get your new ideas out there, get feedback, and iterate. I believe that the future of news will look nothing like a newspaper that just happens to be online. I don’t know what it will look like, and the key point is that no one else does either. That’s why the rapid prototyping approach is great – it gives you a chance to shape the new future.
- Forget focus groups or consumer feedback. In saying this, I’m certainly not saying ignore the customer. However, they don’t have any more of an idea of how they’ll use new technologies than anyone else does right now. It’s smarter to figure out what jobs they are trying to get done. That will help you figure out which experiments are the most promising to prototype.
- The last suggestion is the tough one – in all turf wars between the current way of doing things and the experiments, you must support the experiments. You have to be willing to cannibalise your current strengths. Remember, your current model is dead, even though it’s still operating. Consequently, the way we’ve always done things can not be allowed to interfere with trying to make the new way of doing things. Arguments like “we’ve always done it this way” and “but that will take away revenue from our cash cows” represent capitulation and defeat. Ignore them.
These ideas are fairly easy to type, and a whole lot harder to execute. However, if you’re facing disruption, it’s your only choice. Try everything you can think of, see what works, do more of that, and learn from what doesn’t work. That’s the algorithm for business model innovation, and implementing it gives you your best chance at surviving the disruption.
A Patent is Not a Business Model
Posted by Tim in business models, innovation strategy on 7 March 2010
A patent is not a business model, and we need to stop acting like it is.
One of the statements at the Australian Association of Angel Investors Annual Conference that really rubbed me the wrong way came from a person in a university technology transfer office who said something like: “Open innovation is dead. It was just a fad, but companies are now realising that they have to have protectable IP if they are going to succeed.”
This is wrong in just about every conceivable way.
Stefan Lindegaard is one person that provides an excellent set of resources concerning open innovation. In one of his recent posts, he included links to a HUGE range of resources on open innovation, including a list of firms using it (including 3M, BMW, Dell, GlaxoSmithKline, Huawei, and Unilever), and numerous open innovation intermediaries, software and conferences. The inclusion of firms like GSM and Unilever are particularly interesting, since they are both in industries that have the capability of benefiting from patent protection, yet they are still pursuing open innovation. This actually makes sense, because open innovation was originally designed as a method for getting more patented technologies into play. The idea is often caricatured by opponents as meaning ‘please take all of my ideas and use them’ – this is patently absurd.
However, my biggest problem with the statement is the contention that having protectable IP is the only way to succeed. I guess this is understandable coming from an organisation whose primary performance metric is patents generated. As John has pointed out, overall, patents are a lousy proxy measure for innovation.
The focus on patents and IP is simply another incarnation of the overemphasis on ideas. The built-in assumption here is that once you have an idea that no one can copy, then you’re set. But we know that’s not true. Ideas have to be executed, and they have to diffuse – and empirically we know that these are the parts with which most organisations have difficulty.
A great idea is a core part of any business model. However, it is simply that – one piece of the puzzle. You still need to know who benefits from your great idea, and how to get your idea embedded into the value network. You need to know how to generate revenue from your idea. Patents create scarcity, and that is one way to make money. But there are others. One of the reasons that open innovation being used more widely is that it lets you outsource idea execution and idea diffusion to partners that are better at it than you are. That is why many organisations use open innovation strategies to take advantage of ideas that have patented, but which they are poorly equipped to execute.
We have to stop thinking about patents and intellectual property as ends in themselves. They are components that can built into successful business models. They are one way of certifying that our ideas are good. But as we’ve said many times here, great ideas are not enough. Let me repeat that: great ideas are not enough. To succeed, we have to better than our competitors at executing our great ideas, and better at getting them to spread.
(picture from flickr/gurdonark under a Creative Commons License (of course!))
New! Improved! Shiny! Yes, It’s Innovation 7.0!!!
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy on 5 March 2010
Innovation 1.0: A guy in his garage
Innovation 2.0: A team in their research lab
Innovation 3.0: People – dispersed….. everywhere!
And we’re going to skip right over Innovation 4.0 – Innovation 6.0 to introduce the best, most up-to-date, most exciting version of Innovation yet – yes, that’s right:
Innovation 7.0!!
If you’re using Innovation 3.0 right now, Innovation 7.0 is four better!!
Innovation 7.0 is innovation that’s embedded in your actual cells! It lets you crowdsource your customer-related design-driven open innovation! What could be better? Nothing! If you’re not using Innovation 7.0 right now, your competitors will crush you like a bug! You’ll be like Kevin Kline – stuck in cement, and your competitors will be like the steamroller!
OK, so maybe Innovation 7.0 is a lousy idea. As I’m writing about it, I realise that there’s not much substance to the idea – it’s mostly hype. We should probably just ignore it.
I ran across two things this morning that got me thinking about hype and innovation. The first was a post by George Siemens talking about Web 3.0 for libraries. George critiques an article by saying that the ideas in it are basically sound, but that by wrapping them into the Web 3.0 idea it gives them an unuseful air of hype. And then there was Scott Berkun’s suggestion that we stop using the word ‘innovation’ completely. He makes two main points – that innovation is defined so broadly that it’s a useless term, and that firms would be better off aiming to be competent before they even think about being innovative.
I’ve got mixed feelings about both posts. I agree with Berkun’s second point to a degree – that’s why we keep talking about the importance of executing ideas. Doing things well is where many firms fail so improving the basics of performance is an imperative for many.
And businesses in particular are certainly vulnerable to fads in thinking, so hype can in fact be dangerous. On the other hand, I’m not sure that saying ‘don’t use this phrase’ actually gets us very far.
Here’s an argument that parallels Berkun’s: a penguin and an eagle are both birds, yet they look completely different, they act differently, they live in different environments, there’s no clear connection between the two of them. If we try to use the word ‘bird’ to describe two such obviously different things, then it is a useless word, and we shouldn’t use it at all.
Innovation can be defined clearly. It does get used to signify many different things – because it describes a broad phenomenon: executing new ideas so that they have economic value. It’s a classification equivalent to ‘bird’. Of course there are different ways to do this. There are many different ways to do this. Which is why we have so many different types of innovation to discuss. Incremental and radical, open and closed, design-driven and customer-focused: penguins and eagles. They are among the many different ways that we can execute ideas with economic importance.
I love Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation – nearly every idea in the book is worthwhile. But I don’t agree with him here. Of course we must execute more effectively. And yes, don’t believe the hype. And use language as precisely as possible. But I don’t think we can afford to throw out the concept of innovation just yet. I think there are a lot of great ideas out there that we still need to execute. You can forget “Innovation 7.0″, but we still need “innovation”.
Designing Espresso Innovation
Posted by Tim in business models, design, innovation strategy on 26 February 2010
Here are some thoughts on ‘design-driven innovation’ versus ‘design as making things look cool’:
Design-Driven Innovation – Nespresso from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.
And here are some related points:
- We often think of design as making stuff look cool, but when we talk about design-driven innovation, we’re actually talking about creating new categories of goods and services based on a deep understanding of what our customers are trying to do.
- With many design-driven innovations, market testing is very difficult because it is extremely hard for people to envision how the innovation will work. However, this does not mean that mean that customers are unimportant in the innovation process. It simply means that they can’t tell us in advance what they want. So design-driven innovation faces higher levels of uncertainty than innovation processes trying to solve a known problem.
- The Nespresso case is apparently very popular in Europe, where the system was first launched (a full description of the way the system works can be found here). It is a great example of business model innovation (here is an excellent discussion of this). I talk about the importance of working from the espresso-making process out to the machinery instead of vice-versa – many of the innovations in the business model follow from this choice. By setting up the Nespresso Club to sell the coffee, they essentially built an iPod/iTunes style system – this model was just as innovative in coffee as it was in mp3 players.
- This is another great example of the difference between invention and innovation. The patent for the espresso capsule was granted in 1976, but the first Nespresso machine was not on the market until 1991. This is not at all unusual.
Nespresso is a pretty interesting case study. It shows some of the benefits of design-driven innovation, and the benefits of business-model innovation as well. It’s pretty good coffee too.
What Art Curation Can Teach Us About Innovation
Posted by Tim in design, innovation strategy on 21 February 2010
We often think of art as being innovative by its nature – but what about curating art? A couple of weeks ago Nancy and I went to a talk Amanda Pagliarino, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Head of Conservation. She was discussing some the challenges that her team faced in getting all the exhibits ready for the Asia Pacific Triennial 6 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (the ABC did a nice review of the show last week on the Artscape show).
The talk was fascinating. Pagliarino talked about some of the issues involved in mounting five of the larger pieces of art in the show. Here is a picture of part of the process of installing Line of Control by Subodh Gupta (with more here):
This was apparently one of the heaviest things they’ve ever exibited – so they had to figure out how to have the crane inside the gallery for a full day, how to set it up so that the diesel fumes wouldn’t have an impact on other pieces in the gallery, where to place the piece so that the floor would support it for the length of the show, and several other obstacles.
The issues with Mushroom Mantra by Charwei Tsai were completely different:
For this, they tested a number of different types of mushrooms to see which were easiest to write on, which would decay most effectively (and without creating too much of a smell!), and what kinds of dirt would work best.
Each of the five pieces that Pagliarino discussed had issues that her team had to address. All of them were different, all of them were completely new to the staff at GoMA, and several of them were problems that no gallery curator in the world had encountered previously. So there was a lot of innovation involved in putting this show together. Several of the problem solutions were ingenius. All in all, it was a terrific talk, and I learned a lot.
I think that there are several innovation lessons here as well:
- It takes a unique skill set to innovate in a situation where nearly every problem is unique. Many jobs encounter difficulties that can be addressed through some form of troubleshooting. In the case of art curation, there is more of an emphasis on creatively attacking ideas, rather than running through a process. One thing that I found very interesting is that the QAG team often used experimentation – they tried multiple small experiments (as they did with Mushroom Mantra), and they failed quickly, cheaply and privately. Once they settled on a solution through experimentation, they were ready to install the pieces in public. However, in some cases, time was so tight that they just had to use their best judgement.
- That said, over time the problems can be divided into classes. One of the unique features of GoMA as a gallery is that it has a couple of absolutely gigantic walls. They have taken advantage of these spaces to mount some unusually large pieces. After the talk I asked Amanda if she thought that they had developed a unique competence in installing really big pieces of art, and she said that she thought they have. Mayo Martin has an interesting perspective on some of the issues surrounding bigness in this exhibition, which are also worth reading (though I disagree with him about Chen Qiulin’s house from the Three Gorges region).
- This leads to the third point – that art curation appears to be very strongly collaborative. When they encounter problems that are new to them, they use the international network of curators to find out of anyone else has dealt with the problem before. It sounds like nearly all of the knowledge in the network is tacit, which suggests that the most effective curators will be skilled at working the network.
- Finally, I think there are some significant parallels between art curation and managing. Both frequently encounter unique problems that require you to think on your feet and come up with something new. Most of the jobs can be done by routine, but it is how you deal with these situations that determine how successful you you really are. This is something that I think we need to keep in mind when we’re training managers – MBA students often want to learn things that they can apply. These are the things that are good for routine problems, but they don’t help with unique ones. We need to get better at training people to deal with these.
One last example from APT 6 – one of the pieces had been commissioned by QAG specifically for the show. They sent the dimensions of the wall that would house the piece to the artists making it in North Korea, who when put together a mosaic. When it arrived, the dimensions of the piece matched those of the elevator, which are about one meter higher and one meter longer than the wall on which it was meant to hang. After trying everything they could think of, the curators eventually concluded that they only way o exhibit the piece was by cutting a meter off the top and off the sides. I would have thought that one of the first rules of art curation would be “don’t cut up the art”, but in this case, it was all they could do. “Don’t cut up the art” actually probably is the first rule of art curation – but sometimes, you just have to get the job done. When you’re curating an art exhibit, and when you’re managing innovation, sometimes the rule book has to go out the window.
Building an Entrepreneurial Network
Posted by Tim in business models, innovation strategy, networks on 20 February 2010
What is the biggest challenge facing an entrepreneur? There’s coming up with a great idea, which can be hard. There’s finding funding, which is definitely a challenge. There’s getting your idea to work, and we’ve been arguing here for quite a while that execution is critical. But I think that the biggest challenge is actually building your network – and it’s one that people give almost no thought to at all.
On the last day of the Australian Association of Angel Investors National Conference yesterday, we started the day hearing elevator pitches from three start-ups. It was pretty interesting to listen to them, and there were some common themes. All three firms had what sounded like great technology. The ideas were clever, they appear to meet market needs, and all of them are far enough along that they’ve successfully executed the ideas. All of them need more money now to get to the point where they’ll cash in, but I think that to actually get to that point, they need better ideas about developing their networks.
There are two key parts to this. The skills you need to execute an information-based business model are aggregating, filtering and connecting. Building the entrepreneurial network is all about connecting – and also getting people to unconnect.
The first key part is linking into the value network which surrounds and supports your innovation. Entrepreneurs often focus too much internall, on their own ideas, and don’t think as much about this, but it’s a critical issue. Which parts of the economy support your idea? What is your relationship to them? Finding financing is part of this, and so is finding suppliers and distributors.
In large firms, these links usually already exist. That is the easy part for them. The hard part is getting their own internal systems to change – this often means they have to break some of the existing links in their system which is hard. Entrepreneurs have the opposite problem – they have no existing links at all. They have to build their own, and in doing this, they often have to get people to choose them over their current collaborators. In many cases, entrepreneurs are trying to build links to existing companies as part of their exit strategy. When I was working for a software start-up ten years ago, everyone’s exit strategy was to sell out to Microsoft. The conversation at the AAAI Conference shows that the strategy now is exactly the same, except that we’re all trying to sell to Google instead.
In either case, your position within the value network will determine whether or not this can happen. Alan Noble from Google said yesterday that in many cases they are waiting for software start-ups to demonstrate these links before they’ll consider buying the firm.
The second part of building the network is connecting with customers. With the large firms, it means that they either have to get current customers to stop using whatever they’re buying from you now and switching to the new innovation. Many firms resist this, because they don’t want to cannablise existing markets. The other option is to find new customers for the new idea. The problem here is that the new customers often require a completely new value proposition – and existing firms find it diffiult to create these.
Again, entrepreneurs face the opposite problem. They don’t have to worry about cannabilisation – in fact, they want to cannabilise existing markets! Their problem is that they don’t have any customer connections at all. And in many cases (as in all three firms presenting at the conference), the assumption is that superior technology will automatically win. We know this isn’t true, even when the technology is demonstrably superior along all technical dimensions (see the story of the 56k modem, for example).
The example yesterday came from a firm with a bunch of bioremediation technologies. One of them sequesters hazardous waste, and it apparently does it more cheaply and more effectively than the current technology. The potential market is very big, and they are in negotiations with a couple of major firms to buy the product. The problem for them is that everyone knows that the current technology works. Why take a chance on something new, especially if there are major downside risks if the new technology doesn’t work as advertised? How can you demonstrate that your new technology will work when it hasn’t been used in this exact application or on this scale before? It’s a big problem.
To break these existing bonds, you not only have to be better, you have to get people comfortable enough with your innovation that they are willing to abandon what they’re currently using – you have to get them to unconnect from something else before they’ll connect with you.
I think that entrepreneurs would benefit greatly from thinking about building a network. To me, the most interesting questions for these start-ups are: how will you link in to the value network? and who is your competition and how will you get people to unconnect from them? If I were investing my own money, I’d want good answers to both of these questions before I signed a cheque.
(Picture from flickr/Eole under a Creative Commons License)
Get Better Ideas, Not More
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation strategy, replication on 16 February 2010
Innovation is all about executing ideas so that they have economic or social value. John and I have both talked frequently about how many firms overemphasise generating ideas when they try to increase innovation. When they make this mistake, they end up with a lot of stockpiled ideas, but the amount that they have successfully executed hasn’t gone up because they have mistaken invention for innovation.
There are two issues with ideas that we need to manage – we need to get better ideas, and we need to get them to spread. At a personal level, these are the two parts of connecting – we connect ideas together to create novel, valuable new ideas, and then we connect these ideas to people to get them to spread. We also have to do both of these things as firms when we are managing innovation.
I ran across a great example of these issues today with the blog. A couple of days ago I wrote about how Venessa Miemis used the skills of aggregating, filtering and connecting to create a great blog post called ‘iPad: Overhyped Flop or a Case of Great Design Thinking?‘. The post was very good, and it ended up going fairly viral, with over 14,000 views in a week. Venessa’s assessment is that the bulk of this traffic was driven by this tweet from Tim O’Reilly:
That seems like a pretty reasonable assessment to me. Our conclusion was that connecting the idea to O’Reilly was what led to it being connected to many of the 14,000 people that arrived later. Coincidentally, I had the same thing happen to me yesterday with my post using the aggregate, filter and connect framework to analyse the success of O’Reilly Media. It also was tweeted by Tim O’Reilly:
You couldn’t really ask for a better controlled experiment, could you? So what happened with my post? Well, O’Reilly drove a bunch of traffic to my site – today has had the single highest number of visitors to the blog ever, and it’s still only 1 pm here in Australia. But the total number of visitors is about an order of magnitude less than the number Venessa had.
Why is this? I think it is because of the quality, or at least the spreadability of the ideas in the two posts. Seth Godin uses this diagram in his post today to show how the quality of an idea is worth more than the number of (faux) followers you are talking to:
He is arguing that if your idea is more likely to be passed along, than you can start by giving it to only 100 people (the purple and green lines), and it will quickly spread further than worse ideas seeded among 10,000 people (the red and yellow lines).
Why were Venessa’s ideas more likely to spread than mine? A few reasons:
- I think hers were better thought out. Her post on the iPad is thorough, it makes really good sense, and she articulates the key themes that she found very well. Mine was a lot rougher and this makes my post less likely to spread (though I’m still thrilled with how many people have read it!). The better idea spread much further through the same channel.
- Venessa’s topic has a broader appeal – which makes it more spreadable. There are a lot more people interested in whether or not the iPad will be any good than there are interested in business model innovation. Hard to figure, but true!
- The iPad is a better fit with Tim O’Reilly’s network. If we can generalise about over a million people, I think it’s reasonably safe to say that they are probably more interested in technology than in innovation ideas. So the overlap between the overall higher number of people interested in iPads and O’Reilly’s list of followers is high too.
I think this is a perfect example of the importance of connecting up ideas before we try to connect them to people. Godin’s conclusion is:
A slightly better idea defeats a much bigger but disconnected user base every time.
The lesson: spend your time coming up with better ideas, not with more (faux) followers.
This is an important innovation lesson as well. We don’t need more ideas, we need better ideas. In many ways this is a stock and flow problem – if we only focus on stocks of ideas, we’re less able to get them connected to people. We need to think about our idea flow. As the story of these two posts illustrates, the quality of an idea has a lot to do with how well it flows through our networks. It is yet another example of the greater importance of quality, not quantity.
As we’re managing innovation, we need to figure out ways to increase the quality and the flow of our ideas, not just the number of them.
Think ‘Network Structure’ not ‘Networking’
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation strategy, networks on 13 February 2010
The biggest problem with the idea of ‘networking’ is that it is a bad idea. Why? Because as it is usually practiced, networking consists of going out and making a whole bunch of new connections, and then hoping that something good will come of them. It is much more productive to think about your position within the network as you create connections. Once we have creatively made connections between ideas (which is the core creative act in innovation), we have to get our new ideas to spread. We do this by connecting the ideas to people.
When we analyse networks, the basic assumption that we make is that network structure is important. In practical terms, what this means is that the overall structure of the network is important to how well it functions, and our personal effectiveness within our networks depends upon our positions inside those networks as much as on the number of connections that we have.
Here’s an example. One line of network research has been built around Ronald Burt’s idea of structural holes – it is discussed nicely here by danah boyd. The idea is that in large networks, there are often major clusters within them that are not connected – the gap between the clusters is a structural hole. It can be very profitable to be the one that fills that hole by connecting the two clusters. And you can fill a structural hole even if you don’t have a lot of connections – here’s an example from one of my research papers:
In this network, the actor at node 5 has a lot of power, because all information from the two clusters must pass through her. Burt’s original argument was that from an economic perspective, filling a structural hole was one of the best things that you can do. He has gone on to show that filling structural holes leads to creativity – it’s the power of connecting ideas again!
However, from a network perspective, you can see how this structure isn’t so good. There is only one path for information and ideas to pass from one cluster to the other. If this were an organisation, this would be a horrible structure to have. Valdis Krebs and June Holley talk about how to address this problem through network weaving. The key idea here is that you should try to fill triangles. Valdis illustrates the idea by telling the story of how Ed Morrison connected up two people that he knew from the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce and Commerce Lexington, who were facing similar problems.
You can see here that the triangle starts with Ed filling a structural hole. But instead of acting as a broker, he acts as a builder – and connects Lynda and Cynthia to each other by introducing them and initiating a conversation about their common problems.
The key idea in network weaving is that filling in triangles leads to better-functioning networks. The trade-offs that you get for giving up your position in a structural hole are twofold: you gain stature and social capital by connecting people up, and the network becomes more capable of generating beneficial ideas that you can use yourself. June explains this really well in her talk ‘Networks in a Networked World’, whic you can find on this page.
There are a couple of key points here:
- In both of these examples, your position in the network is much more important than the number of connections you have. This leads to the basic mistake that most people make when they are ‘networking’ – the focus on quantity. You are much better off to have a network building strategy, which you can use to weave a better-functioning network.
- Bridging structural holes and filling in triangles can both be good business strategies – but they support different business models. Amazon’s strategy works not because they are simply an aggregator – they have very effectively positioned themselves in the structural hole between publishers and readers. Apple has done basically the same thing with iTunes. But filling in triangles also works – in many ways this is the key method for building gift economies that are driven by effective communities. This is the model used by Seth Godin, Hugh MacLeod and O’Reilly Media.
- If you’re managing networks within an organisation, you almost certainly want to eliminate structural holes, and use the network-weaving approach instead. In first place, unfilled structural holes are bad, so you want to get those bridged. But having only one person filling the holes can also be bad – you’ve substituted a bottleneck for a hole, which might not be much of an improvement. In most cases, you’ll want to build a more densely connected internal network, with many pathways over which ideas can flow.
To get our ideas to spread, we need to connect them with people. But doing this is not simply about volume – it’s not how many pageviews we get, or how many followers we have on twitter. Who we’re connecting to and where we sit within the network is much more important. So stop networking. Instead, start building a network.
We Have to Connect Ideas to Connect to People
Posted by Tim in book riffs, connect, innovation strategy on 11 February 2010
How do we create value in a world of mash-ups, remixes and nested hyperlinks? As I keep arguing, we do it through connecting – connecting ideas together, and connecting ideas to people. This is one of the core ideas that Jaron Lanier gets at in his frustrating but good new book You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier is a significant figure in the computing world who has accomplished a great deal. He was one of the pioneers in virtual reality, and coined that phrase. He was sharing a house with Richard Stallman when Stallman hatched the idea for GNU, which ended up leading to Linux, among other things. He’s been right in the middle of a lot the technological advances that we’ve seen over the past 30 years – so when he talks about digital issues, it’s worthwhile to pay attention to him.
You Are Not a Gadget builds on an argument that Lanier has been formulating for a while. The core ideas have been laid out in his essays One Half a Manifesto and Digital Maoism. The main theme is that Lanier takes issue with what he calls ‘cybernetic totalism’ – the key idea of which is:
That biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software. Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving so quickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and will fundamentally change the nature of what’s going on in the familiar neighborhood of Earth at some moment when a new “criticality” is achieved- maybe in about the year 2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know.
To argue against this, he ends up arguing against a number of ideas that are currently popular, such as the discussion around the role of ‘free’ in business models, commons-based intellectual property initiatives, and the idea Moore’s Law will inevitably lead to a merging of computer science with, well, everything else.
Many parts of the book strike me as just wrong. He mangles the discussion of Stewart Brand’s ‘information wants to be expensive… but it also wants to be free’ dichotomy in a way that seems willfully obtuse – I have a hard time believing that he doesn’t have a better understanding of that argument. And when he talks about problems with musicians trying to make money with digitally-based business models – he contrasts the current state of affairs with a romanticised past that never existed. For example, he says that current model serves kids in a van that are willing to drive around to play gigs reasonably well, but that this isn’t a sustainable career. When has that ever been? Every band I’ve ever loved has done that, and they’ve been doing it since at least the mid-60s?
He then asks for examples of musicians that have succeeded with digitally-based promotion models. He discounts Jonathan Coulter because he has lowest-common denominator appeal (ummm, again like pretty much every single popular act for the past 40 years – that’s kind of the definition of ‘popular’) and then says he doesn’t know of any himself. Well, there are examples like Ani DiFranco and Kristin Hersh, and there also cumulative stats like the ones reported by the Times Online Lab, which show that in the UK, the share of music-generated revenue that goes to musicians rather than intermediaries has risen substantially over the past 5 years.
I think that some of these issues weaken his overall argument. But the book still has a couple of extremely strong points. The first is that Lanier has a number of concrete recommendations, which could be tried. I’m not sure they’ll work, but for example, his ideas about creating standardised formats and reporting rules for financial instruments strike me as well thought out, and something that we really do need to try.
And the core of his argument is exactly correct – we must have economic and creative systems that stimulate and reward the creation of new ideas. Open innovation only works when the organisations involved are creating their own ideas and contributing them to the mix. Mash-ups only work if there is something to mash-up in the first place. Lanier’s tagline is ‘You have to be somebody before you can share yourself’, and I think that this is exactly correct.
When I talked about Howard Rheingold’s filtering strategies the other day I discussed his idea that it is not enough simply to aggregate and filter information – you have to do something with it. You have to connect ideas up in a novel way – this is the fundamental creative act. You have to connect ideas together. This is hard. It takes time, it requires talent, and you have to work at it to develop your skills. You have to put the hours in, and develop grit to go with your intelligence.
Hutch Carpenter wrote a terrific post today about the importance of ideas. He used the example of what goes on within firms, saying:
When I post an idea, I create the basis for finding others. That because when I post an idea, I’m making…
A call for your interest
Think about that. The act of publishing an idea is a broadcast across the organization. It’s a tentative query to see who else feels the same way. Or if not the same way, who has an interest that overlaps mine.
This is unique to ideas. Ideas are potential. They are a change from the status quo. There are others who share at least some aspect of your idea. In large, distributed organizations, where are these people?!!
Carpenter also quotes Brian Solis who says that “Ideas connect us more than relationships.”
I think that these ideas are critical as we build our networks. We don’t just blog and tweet and link-in just for the sake of making connections. At least, we shouldn’t. We should do these things to share our ideas. We should build our network around our ideas.
But to do that, we have to have some first. The value in Lanier’s book is in pointing this out. Before we can connect to people, we have to connect up ideas. That’s how we enrich those with whom we connect.
Innovation for the Long Term
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, time on 9 February 2010
We had some rain here over the weekend. Here is what was reported in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review (emphasis added):
Heavy rains fell across NSW and south-east Queensland over the weekend, which flooded homes and roads, brought down trees and caused motor accidents. But in good news for Sydney, 115 millimetres of rain fell across the Warragamba catchment which could result in dam levels rising over the coming days. The rainfall is ill-timed for the NSW government as it coincides with the switching-on of a $2 billion desalination plant, which will run regardless of dam levels for the next two years as it undergoes engineering testing. Nevertheless, dam levels remain at 50 per cent of capacity and this is the first significant rainfall over the Sydney catchment since mid-2007…
I am still astonished by the logic in the part that I highlighted. It is basically saying this: Australia has been in a country-wide drought for 7 of the past 8 years; Sydney hasn’t had any significant rain in 2.5 years; the dams have fallen below 50%; but the $2 billion investment in a desalination plant might look bad because it rained over the weekend. This is lunacy.
The desal plant may or may not be a good idea. Whether it is or not will depend on a number of factors – projected rainfall over the coming years, projected population trends for the Sydney region, and trends in water use/conservation. Many of the assumptions that underpin a model of the impact of a plant will be debatable. Nevertheless, there is simply no way to judge the wisdom of a $2 billion investment based on whether it rained this week or not. This is the worst kind of short-term thinking.
We see the same thing happen in business here. Every time there is a down-turn in the price of iron, multiple mining projects are put on hold. To me, this doesn’t make much more sense than judging the merits of a desal plant based on last week’s rainfall. According to some talks I’ve had with folks in mining, the thing that is happening here is that their due diligence systems require them to calculate the net present value of projects based on current prices. So when prices are high, they build like crazy, and when prices drop, everything stops. It seems to me we’d be better off looking at expected long term prices of whatever they’re digging. But then, the miners are all making a ton more money than me, so maybe I’m missing something…
This is also an innovation problem. When the global financial crisis hit at the end of 2008, investment in innovation fell through the floor through pretty much all of 2009. This is, again, crazy – for a couple of reasons. Tom Fishburne illustrates the first reason perfectly (his cartoons are great, and you should check out his site):
He’s drawn it exactly the way that I talk about it in classes – you can’t just turn innovation on and off like a faucet. Innovation takes time, and it needs a process. Short-term thinking combined with NPV hurdles for new ideas is one of the best possible way to ensure that you will never come up with an innovative idea again.
The second reason that it is crazy is that we know that the best way to manage innovation is through the use of some kind of portfolio process. This mixes small bets with big ones, and it is the best way to make sure that we have a constant flow of good new executed ideas. One tool that is very useful for this is the Three Horizons model.
We have talked about this a few times – the very short description is that the first horizon involves implementing innovations that improve your current operations, horizon two innovations are those that extend your current competencies into new, related markets, and horizon three innovations are the ones that will change the nature of your industry.
When we shut off innovation in a downturn, it is usually the longer-term innovation projects that get killed. These are the ones that will ensure that we are still in business in five years, or in ten. It is absolutely critical that we consistently innovate across all three time horizons. Unless our very survival is under threat right now, we can’t afford to stop investment in innovation. Even if it did rain over the weekend.
(Storm photo by flickr/Richard.Fisher under a Creative Commons license)
Grit versus Intelligence in Innovation
Posted by Tim in book riffs, innovation strategy, time on 6 February 2010
When I was younger, I placed a high value on intelligence. It made sense, since I was reasonably smart. However, it wasn’t until I added some grit that I started to really get things done. Up until my university years, most things came pretty easily to me. I was fortunate in that I was able to concentrate and learn a lot about things that interested me, so almost by accident there were some things that I ended up building some skills in. But it wasn’t until university that I started having to make the conscious decision to work harder, and do things that weren’t immediately fun if I wanted to get anywhere.
The summer after my first year, I got a job as a floor hand in a feed mill. It was really hard work. For the first couple of weeks, I could barely drag myself home at the end of each day – I felt broken. At the end of those two weeks, my boss Doug called me and the other new floor hand in, and chewed us out pretty comprehensively. The basic message was that we had to work a whole lot harder, or he’d get rid of us.
My first impulse was to tell him to screw himself. I was working harder than I ever had before – I had no idea even where to begin. I went home and talked about it with my Dad. He agreed with me that it didn’t seem fair. But then I started thinking about what it would mean if I quit. What if I didn’t find another job? I had to make money over the summer as part of my scholarship arrangements. After a lot of thought, I went in the next morning and asked Doug for some specific suggestions that I could follow to get better. He gave some, and I discovered that I could indeed work harder than I had been.
That’s when I got some grit. It still took a long time for me to get better at digging in and working at things, but I’m getting there, slowly.
I bring this up because Julien Smith highlighted an excellent article yesterday by Jonah Lehrer in the Boston Globe on the issue of grit versus intelligence. Lehrer starts by discussing a stream of research from psychologists that has shown in many cases, grit accounts for success more than intelligence does. It starts by talking about the story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple:
There is something appealing about such narratives. They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany: There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius. Everybody knows that things fall – it took Newton to explain why.
Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight – it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia.”
I think that this is a critical issue for innovation. We’ve talked a lot about the gaps that are common between inventing something and the idea actually getting embedded in the economy – there are several examples here, and a discussion of Edison and the light bulb also illustrates the point. Randy Haykin talks about another great example by showing how many of the features in the new iPad from Apple originated in the Navigator – a prototype the firm made in 1987.
You have to have intelligence to come up with these great ideas, but you have to have grit to get them to spread. It’s not an either or situation – one way or another, you need both. As Lehrer says, the genius idea is attractive, because it doesn’t require nearly as much effort. But the simple fact of the matter is that to successfully innovate, we need perseverance. Execution is at least as important as ideas, probably more so.
That’s why I think that Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod is one of the best innovation books I’ve ever read. He talks about creativity not as inspiration, but as hard work. Here’s an excerpt from one of his 39 other keys ‘Dying Young is Overrated’:
But the kid thinks it’s all about talent; he thinks it’s all about ‘potential’. He underestimates how much time, discipline and stamina also play their part. Sure, there are exceptions. But that is why we like their stories when we’re young. Because they are exceptional stories. And every kid with a guitar or a pen or a paintbrush or an idea for a new business wants to be exceptional. Every kid underestimates his competition, and overestimates his chances. Every kid is a sucker for the idea that there’s a way to make it without having to do the actual hard work.
So the bars of West Hollywood and New York are awash with people throwing their lives away in the desperate hope of finding a shortcut, any shortcut. And a lot of them aren’t even young anymore; their B-plans having been washed away by Vodka & Tonics years ago.
Meanwhile their competition is at home, working their asses off.
Innovation is not about having great ideas. It is about having great ideas, and getting them to spread. You need both grit and intelligence to do this. If you need some more grit, I can put in a good word for you with Doug at the feed mill…
(Feed mill picture (not the one I worked at!) from flickr/rverspirit under a Creative Commons license)
Institutional Innovation
Posted by Tim in complex systems, innovation strategy on 5 February 2010
Here’s a fairly radical idea: if the problem with economic development is that many poorly developed countries have poor institutions, maybe instead of trying to improve their institutions it makes more sense to move the people that live there to a place with better institutions. Let’s break that down a bit.
There is a line of economic research that I find pretty persuasive – it says that the biggest problem in economic development is poor institutions. One of the leading researchers in this area is Dani Rodrik – his book One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions and Economic Growth is the best development economics book that I’ve read. His basic idea is that economic institutions both drive and constrain economic growth, and the the correct mix will vary from country to country based on each nation’s history, culture, economic system, and so on. The research that supports this approach is solid, and to me it makes a lot more sense than the one size fits all approach followed by the IMF, among others.
The second part of the opening paragraph paraphrases some of the recent talks by Paul Romer – another outstanding international economist. His fundamental idea is to try a charter cities approach to develop – the overly simplified one sentence version of that idea is that he wants to create more Hong Kongs.
Here’s a slightly longer explanation from his piece that came out last week in Prospect Magazine:
So, two days later, I opened my own TED talk with a different photo, one of African students doing their homework at night under streetlights. I hoped the image would provoke astonishment rather than guilt or pity—for how could it be that the 100-year-old technology for lighting homes was still not available for the students? I argued that the failure could be traced to weak or wrong rules. The right rules can harness self-interest and use it to reduce poverty. The wrong rules stifle this force or channel it in ways that harm society.
The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new “charter cities,” where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.
It’s a pretty good example of how hard it is for ideas to spread – even good ones like electricity. We’ve already talked about how Edison’s idea for the light bulb didn’t diffuse until he built a generating station and power lines. So it clearly take a fair bit of effort to get ideas to spread. And there are still issues with electricity in some countries. The idea that is gaining momentum in development circles is that it is structural problems that are leading to a lack of development.
Romer argues that the way around this is to stop fighting to change the institutions, but to create new ones in protected regions. I’m not convinced that the idea will work, but I think it is a pretty good example of re-thinking problems that seem intractable to those that are deeply embedded within a system that needs to change (see the discussion from yesterday’s post and the day before’s).
William Easterly has looked at the same ideas about institutions, and advocates an approach quite different from Romer’s. He talks about about the need to take a more bottom-up approach. In his books (The Elusive Quest for Growth and White Man’s Burden), Easterly talks about experimenting with a lot of different development and aid ideas, find the ones that work, and scale those up. It is pretty similar to the idea of algorithmic innovation that I’ve discussed previously.
What does this have to do with you if you’re trying to make innovation work better within your particular organisation – a firm, a university, a government department or whatever? I think economic development is an important issue in and of itself, but there are also a couple of useful ideas for organisations in this. The first is that if you are in one of those organisations that seems highly resistant to innovation, the approaches that Romer and Easterly are using can be taken as blueprints. Both are trying to address the issue of how to get good new ideas to spread within systems that appear to be completely stuck. As I argued yesterday, this is actually a common problem within many organisations.
So one way to attack this problem is to completely reformulate your basic assumptions, like Romer is doing. The advantage to this is that if it works, the payoff might be huge. The risk is that the overall level of risk is also high. This is basically the Apple approach to innovation – trying to reconfigure every market they enter.
A different angle of attack is to unleash a barrage of small experiments, find the ones that work, then scale these up – the Easterly approach. The advantage to this approach is that the cost of failure for each individual experiment is small, and if you try enough, you have a good chance of stumbling across a big idea that will work. Or the cumulative effect of the small institutional innovations might lead to a bigger change. The risk is that you might come up with a number of successful small innovations that fail to change the larger system. This has been the Google approach – their 20% rule for working on your own projects is a classic bottom-up innovation system.
Risks and payoffs – both paths are hard. But both are better than sitting around doing nothing, and better than continuing to try things that demonstrably don’t work. Some ideas to think about at least…
If you’d like to learn more about the Charter Cities idea, there is a good website for it, and Romer’s TED talk is also very good:
Innovations That Last
Posted by Tim in design, innovation strategy, time on 2 February 2010
Here’s another video:
Innovations that Last from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.
Here’s the brief summary:
Today I wore to work a shirt that I bought in 1994. I’ve worn it a whole lot in the time since I bought it. It was made by Timberland, and it’s a well-made shirt that is still in pretty good shape. Since I bought it, Timberland has become more interested in making shirts that give the appearance of ruggedness rather than providing actual ruggedness. So there are no 16 year shirts for sale from Timberland now.
The shirt contrasts with two pretty cool gadgets I’ve got on my key ring – one is a little pocket knife that folds up and looks like a key, the other is a usb stick that looks like a key. Both are pretty flashy, and it is very convenient to have with me all the time with my keys. However, both have fatal flaws – every time I use the bottle opener on the knife, I cut my fingers, and the usb stick comes with a cap that covers the contacts, which just will not stay on the stick. Now the cap is lost, and if I don’t do something, the contacts will get scraped, and the stick will become unusable.
The shirts and boots that Timberland is making now, and the knife and the usb stick are all examples of poor strategy for the 21st century. They look flashy and they seem innovative, but they’re not built to meet real needs, and they’re not built to last.
I think that we have to focus our innovation efforts on ideas that are more durable. We have to come up with products and services that are sustainable. We have to make shirts that will last 20 years – I know we have the technology for it! We have to make usb sticks that are convenient, but which don’t come with built-in features that will trash them in a short period of time.
In other words, we have to make sure that our innovations take time into account. Whether we know it or not, all innovations have a life span – the way to make them live a long time is to make sure they meet real needs sustainably.
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