Is the first step of innovation ignoring all the advice?

Posted on May 9, 2012 by sim

Regardless of how one defines innovation, there is no shortage of people offering guidance on how innovation should be done properly, how it can be done more efficiently, how it definitely should NOT be done, how it has been done in selected successful companies and – most dangerously – how it can be done successfully in a proven, repeatable manner. It is, after all, good business to be in the business of solving everyone else’s problems – or at least pretending to.

If you read just one such book/article on innovation (or any business topic for that matter), chances are that considered in isolation it seems to make sense, and you’re like “a-ha! So this is how it goes!”. And you’d be wrong. Read another one and you’ll begin to understand that, as in most matters prone to over-simplification, as soon as you take a look at more than one piece of advice you will find they conflict. Read a few more and what emerges is what could either be called a mess where everybody conflicts with everyone else or a healthy discourse on a complex topic. In any case, nobody can claim they have the whole thing figured out holistically and universally.

Now, one area of such conflicts that has risen again is whether innovation is the result of perseverance, a matter of coming up with great ideas in the first place, pivoting from your plans when needed or perhaps something else. Pivoting in this context (for those who are not familiar with the term that was coined by Eric Ries) basically just means changing course when something isn’t working and trying your best to identify, in as lean, fast and cheap way as possible, when that something isn’t working.

Those who subscribe to the perseverance camp – that you need to be ready to stick to something long enough and eventually you will succeed – rightly point out that many innovations are the result of doggedly pursuing a goal despite adverse experiences or advise or even market feedback to the contrary. I can’t help but think that many innovations would’ve been impossible if the people working on them had followed Ries’ advice on pivoting. The first argument against this camp is along the lines of the old definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. But the thing is, it’s essentially impossible to keep doing the exact same thing because, at a minimum, the environment around you changes constantly.

One of the examples given by the “persevere” camp is Rovio, and how their runaway success Angry Birds was the company’s 52nd game. Rovio, however, is a bad example – one could just as easily argue that all they did was pivot 51 times, and eventually found a hit.

Things that require years and years of development are a better example; it’s hard, if not impossible, to use “lean startup” methodology for products that require groundbreaking research. Sometimes it is prudent to just keep trying. And as much as people extol the creative innovations of startups (to which the lean startup methodology is, quite naturally, most applicable), sometimes it is necessary to have a (really) big company to successfully bring out a big-hitting innovation. Like, say, the iPhone – which required not only huge resources but also perseverance to create in the first place – and once it was out in the market; the original iPhone was not a blockbuster in terms of initial sales. And what comes to other businesses, far too often people forget that practically all other areas of business move far slower than electronics.

My view on all this is that there is a very simple top-level answer: it depends. And as much as that seems to be a cop-out, I think it’s much of the other advice that is a cop-out – and not only a cop-out, but outright misleading. Giving innovators a “formula” for success, or companies a “proven method for innovation” makes for a good story and good business because people always seem to want a simple success formula.

It does not, however, make the advise valid or even valuable. It’s also worth remembering that neither pivots nor MVPs nor really any of the other “new” terms out there are really new – they are just new ways of formulating existing concepts and approaches that have been used long before someone coined the specific terminology.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think that all innovation advise that’s out there is useless. There are many lessons to be learned from many of the innovation “camps”, with the emphasis on the plural. You need to consider the entire spectrum, take the bits relevant to your organization and apply them with whatever modifications are necessary.

To end with, here are some recent views on innovation:

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A road trip

Posted on Apr 18, 2012 by sim

Last week, we took our last longer (~2,000km) road trip as a family of four as we headed to Adelaide – the first time for all of us. I shall not bore people with too much text, but rather convey the trip in the form of some photos.

Our first stop was at Grampians National Park, another awesome national park. The scenery was breathtaking, even if it was a bit chilly the first day there.

The MacKenzie waterfall was one of the most beautiful waterfalls I’ve ever seen. Look at the people to the left of the waterfall on one of the photos to get an idea of its size. And having a kookaburra sitting on a branch next to the falls made the whole scenery just perfect.

Adelaide seemed like a very clean, convenient and nice city. We managed to cram in quite a few things – including Australia’s biggest train museum that our son was completely thrilled about but even the adults found surprisingly fascinating. Given it was a short visit, we didn’t get to see all the places we wanted to, so there are things left for next time as well.

The view of the edge of CBD from our hotel in the day and during the night. The Adelaide Hills on the background are one place that we have to explore much more when we come back.

Adelaide Central Market. Good place to pick up some fresh food. And coffee. And sweets.

Botanical Gardens:

Driving back, we took the coastal route through Great Ocean Road via Warrnambool where we stayed at a friends’ place. Some people say the drive is boring, but with most of the road from Adelaide to the coast looking like this, I cannot agree. It was a narrow country road, but also extremely beautiful and having very little traffic on it made it a pleasure to drive.

Along the Great Ocean Road, the Loch Ard Gorge is one of our favorite spots. It’s a wonderful little cove amidst the huge cliffs and really a place that looks like something straight out of a movie.

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Best small purchases ever

Posted on Apr 4, 2012 by sim

Over the years, I’ve become progressively more and more anti-consumerist in my thinking. This means that increasingly I try to buy less stuff, focus on better-quality and long-lasting things and buy only things that can feasibly be thought of as a good investment – not in terms of monetary returns, but in terms of value gained from the purchase vs sending the thing to the dump a year later with little or no use.

So I gave some thought on what have been my best purchases over the years. Some fall into the physical products category, while some are subscriptions or memberships and some more go under software products. So just in case anyone cares, these are what I consider have been my best purchases ever:

The first thing that comes to my mind is my trusty camera, Canon EOS 5D along with the lenses. Now five years old, it still works like a charm and keeps producing excellent-quality photos. That alone is a minor miracle from a piece of modern electronics, most of which suffers from planned obsolescence in the 12-24 months time frame. It was an expensive investment at the time, but has totally been worth it and an essential cornerstone of my photography hobby – and when it eventually does break down, I will get the same model at whatever its latest iteration will be at the time.

The next thing is also related to my hobbies, namely cooking – and the best purchase in that category have been the few Zwilling knives that I own. They make chopping and cutting a joy. Other great kitchen purchases have been the Krups blenders that I’ve written about earlier as well. Again, I have to admire a modern kitchen appliance that can handle 10+ years of active use.

There have been several books that I consider very good investments, many of which I’ve briefly touched on in this blog as well. From cooking ideas to self-education on a number of topics, I still in the age of Internet find books to be an invaluable resource. While I increasingly now buy Kindle books rather than physical ones, I can’t imagine I will ever stop buying physical books altogether – some books still work far better as the physical kind.

On the magazine front, I consider my digital subscription to The Economist money well spent; this allows me to keep in touch with what the more sane portion of mainstream media is thinking of, as well as many macro-level global economic/geopolitical/other trends.

There are at least two memberships that have been great. First, membership at the Friends of the Zoo in Victoria has been well worth the money. All three zoos in the Melbourne area are great and our kids love them.

There’s also another membership that, while a very recent addition, has already proven its value: the Alternative Technology Association (ATA). Their magazines Sanctuary – Modern Green Homes and ReNew – technology for a sustainable future are absolutely wonderful, packed with invaluable information and data and, most importantly, geared towards real-life, local & resilient solutions and for people with real-life incomes. I’ve seen too many “sustainable” homes elsewhere that are really only suitable for people with $1M+ budgets, which makes me wonder just how sustainable they really are.. In any case, the ATA is a very down to earth and fact-based outfit, and the magazines are among the best I’ve ever read.

On the software side, there is one piece of commercial software that clearly stands out – I love Adobe Photoshop. It’s expensive, but I still love it. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a number of apps that I consider well worth the money – most recently 53′s Paper for the iPad, which has actually made doodling on it not only usable but fun.

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Hiding from mainstream advertising

Posted on Mar 28, 2012 by sim

I hate ads. It’s not the concept of advertisement itself that I hate – although I harbor my fair share of negative sentiments towards the overtly consumer-oriented lifestyle which is what 99% of the mainstream ads are directed at stoking – but the simple fact that I find most of the ads are just badly done. They’re either misleading, stupid, wildly exaggerated or inaccurate, promote completely unnecessary or even harmful things, are just plain boring or are filled with flat-out lies, for which I have zero tolerance. I will do my damn best to protect my kids from that pollution for as long and as completely as possible, and educate them early to “read” the ads with an extremely critical eye.

Luckily, thanks to both benefits naturally derived from my lifestyle and by using some active ad prevention, I live relatively ad-free.

Take the biggest ad medium of them all, television. Turns out people in Finland and Australia watch pretty much the same amount of TV; 3hrs 9mins per day in Australia vs 3hrs 13mins in Finland [1], [2]. I find this an amazing amount of time. I watch zero hours of television per day, week or even month. None.

(For many years, we didn’t have a television at all. When people heard that, most were perplexed, even astonished, and asked “So what do you DO in the evenings then?!” as if watching TV would have been the only socially acceptable or imaginable activity. I cannot help but be amazed at the lack of imagination or interest in other things that these people displayed just by posing that question.)

The other mass media, radio, is a similar story. People spend a lot of time listening to the radio; Australians a little over two hours per day on average, Finns a little over three hours [3], [4]. Me? Approximately 10 minutes per week; the round-trip time on my weekly grocery drive.

What about the Internet? Online advertising is supposed to be one of the biggest things since sliced bread, and I spend a lot of time on the Internet – but almost entirely ad-free. All I can say is thank goodness for the ad-blocking software, which I love to bits. I’d pay for that, it’s that important to me. When accessing the Internet on someone else’s machine, I’m absolutely astonished how much crap they can stuff on most pages, making them essentially unbearable. And no, I have no problem paying for quality content, so you don’t get to call me a freeloader that relies on offloading the business of eyeballing ads to other people.

Mobile is a little bit trickier, and the mobile devices’ browsers really need good ad-blocking software. Again, I’d pay for that. But since my primary use of mobile devices does not involve random browsing, ads are not a big problem there.

So what, if any, advertising channels do reach me? Somewhat ironically, turns out they’re the oldest advertising channels – outdoor advertising and fliers / printed media. While I’ve transferred all of my newspaper and media readership online, we still have a mailbox that gets stuff put in it – although most of the time it’s just a proxy repository for the recycling bin. So that leaves outdoor advertising, which for the most part just reinforces my views on advertising: that the vast majority of mass advertising is, to put it as politely as I possibly can, not very good.

(Specialized, well-executed and targeted ads are a different matter as they serve the useful purpose of raising awareness of interesting companies/products/services – but they’re a small minority of the overall flood of advertising. I am yet to be creeped out by systems that would serve spookily relevant ads.)

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Building barriers or tearing them down?

Posted on Mar 17, 2012 by sim

I’m having a hard time finding time to write about a few topics that require some significant groundwork to get to, so here’s one thing that often bothers me; completely unnecessary barriers people often unconsciously put up.

Do ecologically responsible people have a secret dress code?

I like to think of myself as a person both enlightened about and concerned about environmental and ecological matters; “green” to a certain degree, if you will. That means I’ve frequented events and places where such topics are discussed, and I’ve noticed that I clearly stand out from the crowd on most occasions. Whereas I’m often dressed along the lines of business casual, it seems that “green” folks, particularly the hard-core variety, have some kind of a secret dress-code that requires colourful outfits, shabby hairstyle, preferably a beard, and clothes – or at least bags – made from hemp etc. So can you not be really green unless you dress the part?

This presents a dilemma; I firmly believe one of the reasons many “green” ideas sometimes lack credibility in the mainstream business and media is that their spokesmen and -women look “too different” from the dominant style in the fora that they present in. It’s a well known and researched fact that unfamiliar/different looks have a clear (often negative) impact on how the person is perceived. Sometimes I feel that my attire (and mind you, I don’t don things like Armani suits anywhere – but I do lack the hemp clothes and the beard, too) has a similar impact on the “other” side; people feel sceptical because I don’t look the part. So it goes both ways, and it’s as if my looks don’t match my values.

All of this is obviously wrong, damaging to both sides and can seriously limit the possibilities of real progress being made. Which brings me to another point, namely..

Limiting cross-domain co-operation through segregated terminology (or: we don’t learn from each other because we don’t understand one another)

Ever talk to, say, an investment banker? Or a climatologist? Or a network designer? Or an economist? Or any specialist, really – they all employ a very unique vocabulary, acquired from studies and from experience. Regardless of their speciality, there is an abundance of special words and abbreviations that are most often only understood by the that particular group of people. People who don’t understand the terminology are automatically assumed of being incapable of understanding the concepts either, and are pretty much immediately disqualified as potential sources of advice. Because what do they know, they don’t even know what a CDS, or CDN, or CDA, or whatever it may be, stands for!

Unfortunately for everyone, the vast majority of the concepts could be discussed in plain language, or at most simplified only a little, into a form that most people of normal intelligence would be able to understand. At least the gist of whatever it is. But few people from any profession take the time to explain their field in simple terms; some are simply unable to speak normally any more, and maybe other “experts” take some bizarre pride in being able to talk in a complex manner with their peers, extract some odd sense of superiority in being able to speak what in essence is a foreign language even though the language may be the same, or some other reason. And it need not be because of arrogance, maybe people just don’t really understand that everyone does not understand their terminology. I know I often think – whether I’m talking about a fact, situation, term or whatever – that “well if even I know this, how could not everyone?”

But malicious or not, these communication and co-operation barriers are also very damaging. It inhibits or even prevents the cross-pollination of ideas, concepts, solutions and methods between different groups of people, different lines of research and different types of businesses. I love cross-domain stuff, and some domains have an annoyingly steep learning curve before you really can even begin to scratch the surface. Maybe people working in every domain should strive to make theirs more approachable to the rest of the people and more understandable to everyone. People in all domains could learn so much, and maybe success stories like IDEO could become much more common.

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