The Mercedes brand and Daimler corporation celebrate "125! years of innovation". But I judge those 125 years as 125 years of more or less INCREMENTAL innovation.
Why? Think about the invention of the engine and car itself: a breakthrough. But after that? 125 years later we still sit behind a wheel, behind a polluting engine, above 4 wheels. All automobile companies just changed (not even optimized) each oh so small bit of the original car. Still running on fossile fuel, killing people, polluting the environment, causing jams.
Of course, there is no great resemblance between the mother of all cars and its latest newborn. But is that an achievement to be truly proud of? After 125 years? Heated side windows? A rear-drive camera (because today's cars are too bulky to be handled without these implants)?
Of course: Everybody is building the best car they ever have. But: What else? A poorer car every year? Come on!
And now think about the Mercedes A-Class, B-, C-, E-, S-, SL, SLK, G-, M-Class and Smart: Seeing all these models and strategies I do see more than 1000 YEARS OF INCREMENTAL INNOVATION.
After all these models, strategies, and years we still haven't transcended the car into mobility.
"They all do not answer the coming challenges of climate change, air pollution, traffic congestion in the world's metropolises.
They all do not deliver satisfying answers to human's new individuality, independence, and impatience."
We still haven't transcended ownership.
We still haven't transcended wheels and streets.
Still haven't transcended the human-driver concept (not even for cargo transportation).
Still haven't transcended petrol.
After 1000 years of development at Daimler. Innovation?
99,9% pure distraction. Advertising. Gimmicks and gadgets. No breakthrough concepts in 125 years, just fashion, incrementals, self-referentiality.
And now: "Mercedes A-Class - The pulse of a new generation!". Seems to be the Generation Golf, or? Hm.
Mercedes, Daimler, come on, there must be more! All you ingenious engineers, you visionary managers, all you board millionaires. Where is your leadership leading us? A Golf with no windows but all wheels?
What will you offer us in another 125 years?
Even Car Sharing, cleverly visionized, will change the history of the automobile much more than the bulk of all that 125year-long trail of incremental innovations.
What's about more courage, more change, more creativity, more true breakthroughs, more inspiration, more leadership!
“We’re always searching for that secret formula, that magic pixie dust to sprinkle over our products, services, books, causes, brands, blogs to bring them to life and make them Super Successful … why are so many so convinced that [insert favorite buzzword] is the answer vs. just making a product that helps people kick ass in a way they find meaningful?”
Marketing is too often seen as something that happens at the perimeter of a business. Once everything is defined, marketing steps in to magically drive consumers to take products from the shelf. Even if the product experience is undifferentiated and unremarkable.
The most important marketing is indirect and long-term. It’s the hardest to measure, but the most meaningful when done well. This is the marketing that is baked into the entire organization. This is the marketing that makes meaningfully unique products and engaging consumer interactions.
The best marketing breaks the marketing silo. We all work in marketing, no matter what our functional expertise may be. We all impact our products and services and touch consumers in some way or another.
There’s no room to stand on the sidelines with eyes closed. What it takes to make our businesses fly isn’t fairy dust. It’s meaningful involvement from everyone.
(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)
(ralf says: Even more strange: marketing has been reduced to advertising for years now. Because everything else has been taken away by fellow departments in search of excellence, additional responsibilities, bonus opportunities, you know what I mean.
Everybody thought s/he could do marketing, ie. market the thing lying there on the table before them.
1991, in a strategy meeting I attended even before I officially started at GlaxoSmithKline, the marketing director explained that marketing and communication starts as soon as we talk to people outside BEFORE we start to develop the potential product. BEFORE WE EVEN KNEW what the potential product would be! Everything we did was marketing or - in other words - marketing was the only thing we ever did. Talk to people, listen, create, innovate, deliver.
No marketing fairy dust, but plain business innovation and brand engagement - as I call it today.)
Tom, when not cartooning (eg. for Marketing Week), is method's international managing director. Based in London, he frequently speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences about marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas. Twitter: @tomfishburne
(Note: Tim wrote "Are You Climbing Hills or Crossing Valleys?". I commented: "You will have to lead your people and your consumers across the valley to where dragons live". Tim liked that comment and we - more or less - agreed that I will elaborate on that.)
Corporations, their inner cultures, their leadership and management will have to decide what they want to stand for: being cowards not daring to travel uncharted lands, not daring to discover new horizons, not daring to transcend the edge of their company plate ...
... or to embrace change, to conquer the unknown. To walk off the beaten track and create and innovate!
Will they create the future? Be curious and brave? Do they want to learn and develop? Challenge the existing game, change the rules, change the playing fields?
Will corporations, their inner cultures, their leadership and management, brands, and marketers outgrow themselves, strive for excellence, and inspire others to follow?
Will they search for new business models - instead of hiding on common ground? Will they disrupt their category landscape? Will they understand their customers and anticipate their new individuality, independence, and impatience? Will they lead?
Will they become the heroes of future success stories? Will they be known for being brave pioneers creating new markets?
Will they be known for proving that there are no dragons? That the dragons solely exist in our minds and stories? And that these stories are told by market leaders to keep young adventurers, inventors, and challengers of the status quo off their own back?
You all should become heroes, brave men and women, fighting establishment's intolerance, arrogance, and ignorance! Do not believe the stories the old are telling you.
You all should push your individual limits, borders, limitations each and every day. Stop making sense! Beat your inner dragons! Lead us to the land of future riches - mental and material! Follow your intuition, your heart, your curiosity!
I just finished listening to my version of the new album by Kaiser Chiefs, The Future is Medieval, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with it.
You may well ask what makes it my version?
The thing that makes it mine is that I picked the 10 songs to go on it, I picked the order they’d go in, and I made the artwork. And I guess I’m promoting it now too, even though what I’m really interested in is the business model.
…there are two key things that the band is doing with this digital (and it’s only digital) release:
Let fans create a “custom” album with custom artwork. The band is effectively releasing 20 songs, and users get to pick which 10 they want, and put them in any order they want — and then they get a custom piece of album artwork, based on the choices. The website is fun to play around with as well.
Then, once you’ve bought the album, you also get a “fan page” for the unique album that you created, and if you drive others to that page and they buy the copy of the album that you created, you get £1 (the full album costs £7.50).
There are some other little features as well, but those are the two big ones. It’s definitely an interesting idea, and I’ll be curious to see how it goes.
I’m pretty curious to see how it will work too. Masnick has some reservations about the choices that they’ve made – but it illustrates an important point. When you face a turbulent environment, as record labels certainly do at the moment, then you have to experiment with new business models to find out what works.
We’re quite excited about this. Why not make an album yourself? We wanted to reward the fans for being our fans and thought this could be nice.
We just sold all our tickets for our first two gigs exclusively on our facebook page, which worked a treat and we’re going to be getting fans to use Facebook polls to help us pick set-lists and stuff. God knows if it’ll work.
We’ve used a load of our own money to hire some really clever people to build the site and market it so we’re hopeful.
This definitely isn’t some sort of two-fingers-to-the-system thing. In fact our label Fiction have been very supportive.
It’s not supposed to be a massive statement to the world or a fight against anything. It was just fun and we needed that to be honest.
So what’s different from a business model standpoint? A few things.
By getting people involved it changes the value proposition pretty significantly. If you take an hour to put together your own version of the CD, then you’re likely to feel pretty invested in it. In my case, that worked pretty well because even though I love and have bought a couple of Kaiser Chiefs songs, this is the first full CD of theirs that I’ve ever gotten. Marion Gibbon has a good analysis of some of the issues here as well.
The value network is different too, with fans promoting the record (although here is a critique from Dan Catt of that part of the scheme who suggests that this isn’t necessarily the best idea in the whole experiment – something that I agree with).
It’s also interesting to see what hasn’t changed – the value chain that produced the record is pretty standard. The band was supported by their label to go into the studio to make the music, and all the rest of the process right up to distribution is pretty standard. So it’s not a full DIY value chain like Kristin Hersh is using.
I’ve got no idea if this will work or not. But in a sense it doesn’t matter, because once it’s done, we’ll know something about this type of approach. And other bands and labels can try it themselves, or come up with a way to make this business model better.
The one thing that I do know is that if your business model is in trouble, trying out ideas that involve your customers more deeply in the process of creating things is probably smarter than suing them.
That was the end of the regular post, but here is where I’ll tell you a bit more about my version of the album. Carl Wilkinson has a good discussion of the ideas behind the album, whether or not it is a good idea for artists to give up control over track sequences, and the story behind his version of the album in this story at the Financial Times. Strangely, his first three tracks are identical to mine, even though I’m pretty sure we used a different method for picking songs.
In looking at this and a few other posts about the records, I think I messed up the artwork on mine. In any case, if you’d like to see the artwork, or check out my song choices, you can go here:
I’m pretty sure that the overlap between people reading this blog and Kaiser Chief fans is pretty small:
If you’re interested in hearing some of the music from the record, this is the first single Little Shocks:
If all this grabs your interest, you should check out the new record. But whatever you do, don’t buy my version – make your own!
(ralf says: "When you face a turbulent environment, as record labels certainly do at the moment, then you have to experiment with new business models to find out what works", Tim writes above.
I have to add, just to make that shure: If you do think these times are not turbulent, and you are not overwhelmed by that, you are not moving fast enough! Now you have a problem! You do not seem to understand what people's new individuality, independence, and impatience really do imply for brands, businesses, and their success (where I might repeat myself).
The music industry, like car, publishing and energy industries are the best examples for coming late and never beginning to realize that ...)
Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle
How Thrillist, PSFK and start-up iFlow are capitalizing on the accelerating need for content curation. (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com) Barring the invention of a “time turner” like the one Hermione Granger sported in 3rdHarry Potter novel, most of us will never have enough time to consume the information we might otherwise want to absorb. There’s simply too much info and too few waking hours. Enter the notion of curation, a relatively new term that is not unlike the editor of old, a trusted person or organization that filters information and aggregates it in an organized fashion for others to enjoy.
According to Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, “curation is the new way of organizing the web going forward.” And no doubt he’s right. Curious about why new curators like Thrillist and PSFK were thriving while the traditional publishing world floundered, I spent some time with their respective founders, Ben Lerer and Piers Fawkes. These conversations plus one with Eric Alterman, the founder of a new curation engine called iFlow, revealed four insights that could help you too capitalize on the curation phenomenon.
You can’t curate for everyone, so be targeted In Brian Solis’s recent tribute on FastCompany.com to Rosenbaum’s book, Solis noted, “the social capital of a curator is earned through qualifying, filtering, and refining relevant content.” The key words here being filtering and relevance, something that Thrillist with its focus on urban males 22-30 has done exceptionally well. Explained Lerer, “we’ve zoned in on a niche group that was previously starved for the kind of information we deliver.”
Thrillist, for the uninitiated, started in 2005 with a newsletter to 600 New Yorkers and is now in 18 markets with 2.5 million subscribers. Added Lerer, “our voice is extremely targeted to a very specific part of the male demographic.” Lerer and his fellow curators of newish nightlife have built a highly profitable business during a time when traditional publishing tanked. This was done, according to Lerer, “by zoning in on a small sector of the population and speaking to them in a voice that they trust.”
It’s not curation without a well-defined focus The New York Times famous line “All the news that’s fit to print,” made sense when newspapers were the primary source of daily information. Now it seems more like a potential epitaph, as newspaper readership plummets in the face of more focused web-based alternatives. One of the up and coming alternatives is PFSK, which founder Fawkes described as “the go to source for new ideas for creative professionals.”
Founded in 2004, PSFK has grown from a trend-spotting website to a hybrid company that publishes content, creates events and provides consulting services to clients like Nike, Target and BMW. When asked if PSFK was in the curation business, Fawkes affirmed, “yes, our job is to find new ideas and we present them up to 50 times a day.” Reflecting on their focused approach, Fawkes added, “every month a million designers, ad folks, digital entrepreneurs and media mavens get inspired by our content.”
If the curation is good enough, it will [almost] market itself In the new world of curation, “information becomes currency and the ability to repackage something of interest as compelling, consumable and also [as a] sharable social object is an art,” wrote Brian Solis. This perhaps is the fundamental difference between the old world newspaper and the new world of curators. New world curators can connect and engage with other curators, helping to disseminate information quickly and at little to no cost.
Ben Lerer of Thrillist recalled taking this approach out of necessity since, “one of the stipulations with the money we raised was that we couldn’t spend any of it on marketing.” “So we focused all our energy on building something that people actually liked and would want to pass along to their friends,” explained Lerer. By “putting content first and making sure its written for the guy reading it,” Lerer and his team developed a loyal audience that in turn shared the content and or acted upon it demonstrating they too were in the know.
Human curators beat the algorithms No matter how you many words you type into Google, you’re not going to find a recommendation you trust without clicking deep into another site. On the other hand, a quick visit to Thrillist and PSFK provides recommendations and ideas that are trustworthy without fail. When discussing the shortcomings of algorithmic curation, serial entrepreneur Eric Alterman explained, “only human curation can deliver real time content… that consumers are actually seeking.”
Seeing an opportunity in the limitations of algorithmic curation combined with the overwhelming flow of content generated via social media, Alterman is just about to launch a new curation platform called iFlow. Alterman believes that iFlow will address the problem of information overload, enabling “efficient curation into highly contextual aggregate streams [that] include all content types.” Given Alterman’s track record of turning ideas into successful companies like KickApps, his hope “to bring the art of content creation to the widest possible audience,” is anything but a pipe dream.
Final Note:While admittedly I’m no longer in Thrillist’s demographic, I became a fan in ‘08 when one of my clients wanted to connect with their readers. Seeing Lerer’s presentation at a recent PSFK event, I was simply blown away by their success in three short years. It was the quality of the presenters at this conference that got me thinking about curation and led to my conversations with Lerer, Fawkes and Alterman (see their respective interviews on TheDrewBlog.com).
(ralf says: Curation is one great way for brands and companies to become media - instead of just eg. collecting friends. Curation is not as easy as you might think. You will need a distinctive position to inspire people to stay - and share. Curation is as easy and as difficult as building a brand. Curation is brand building!)
Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser
"...many firms rest comfortably in the knowledge that while new ideas may arise, their "old" idea provides substantial value. With luck, the old idea can be extended for many years and the firm can build defenses against the preponderance of new ideas. Over time comfort, inertia and a defensive mindset take hold. It is far easier to defend, after all, than to attack." ... "It's not merely old ideas that are dangerous, it is old expectations, old rules of thumb and old methods of managing. The pace is changing, and old theories and old expectations are just as dangerous as old ideas."
This is a good introductory documentary to Nikola Tesla who like other great scientific luminaries was tapping into the spirit world on the side. Tesla had voices and visions just like Francis Bacon and let's not forget that Descartes had an angel talk to him about the way to understanding was through maths and measurement and that Crick discovered DNA's twin helix structure on acid. That's not a story materialist science likes to remember as there's nothing empirical about channelling the spirit of St. Germain for good ideas.
I take heart that Google celebrated Tesla's birthday a while back because it was the largest nod to date with respect to the suppressed technology that the big names have held back from us for reasons of cattle hearding wealth extraction and to keep us in perpetul conflict over a limited resource that is caveman technology compared to what has and can be invented. (I am coming over to the abiotic theory of oil though. Fossil fuel doesn't stand up to interrogation the more I think about it).
Google aren't big enough to take on Govcorp quite yet, though that day is fast approaching as free energy is pretty much a leitmotif of the universe. Look at the constant expansion, the electromagnetic spectrum, zero point energy, vacuum energy and the light the light the light that is inexplicably in constant creation. The documentary is worth watching just to understand what a total weasel Thomas Edison was and how history has portrayed him as a hero as that's how capitalism works. It elevates the most profitable. Not the cleverest or the most free. Word.
(ralf says: And we all hope that in these times of the web, and people's new individuality, independence, and impatience inventors and innovators do not fall prey to the establishment as easy as in past times.
Fight for your disruptive ideas, publish them, discuss them, collect a community and likewise thinkers around you - in your department, company, organziation, and - of course - freelance life.)
Charles is a creative planner in the advertising business. He is based in Asia where he has worked for agencies as distant as Beijing and Singapore. He has a popular advertising blog in which he shares his day to day life and latest digital thinking. Twitter: @charlesfrith
One of the key issues we face in managing organisations is the state of the environment surrounding us. Is it stable or turbulent? This has an impact on our innovation strategy. In stable environments, we can afford to concentrate just on getting better at what we’re doing. However, in turbulent environments, we need to undertake more exploratory innovation efforts.
One problem with this scenario is that stable environments can turn turbulent quickly and without warning. Think about the housing markets in the US and the UK in 2008 (and all the markets related to those two). This is the basis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swan theory.
Lee Smolin makes some important points about coping with these types of shifts. The main thrust of the article is that scientific research may be too conservative these days as researchers focus more on taking a safe approach to facilitate publishing, while not spending enough time on the riskier big questions. While black swan events (things with a low probability of occurring, but which have a large impact if they do actually arise) are often negative in financial markets, they are sought after in science and innnovation.
I found the article through a good post by Roland Harwood. The angle that he thought was most interesting was that the article proposes the formation of markets for research. That is an interesting angle, but not the one that grabbed me. I was struck by this section:
Some scientists, he suggests, are what we might call “hill climbers”. They tend to be highly skilled in technical terms and their work mostly takes established lines of insight that pushes them further; they climb upward into the hills in some abstract space of scientific fitness, always taking small steps to improve the agreement of theory and observation. These scientists do “normal” science. In contrast, other scientists are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as “valley crossers”. They may be less skilled technically, but they tend to have strong scientific intuition — the ability to spot hidden assumptions and to look at familiar topics in totally new ways.
To be most effective, Smolin argues, science needs a mix of hill climbers and valley crossers. Too many hill climbers doing normal science, and you end up sooner or later with lots of them stuck on the tops of local hills, each defending their own territory. Science then suffers from a lack of enough valley crossers able to strike out from those intellectually tidy positions to explore further away and find higher peaks.
This is a nice description of innovating on fitness landscapes, an idea that John and I have been talking about in our classes. And it is particularly important now. There are numerous reports coming out showing that companies have become increasingly conservative in their innovation efforts as a response to the global financial crisis. In Smolin’s analogy, companies are reverting to only undertaking hill climbing. Many have never thought much about valley crossing in the first place, while many others are pulling resources out of more speculative ideas.
This is as wrong for business as it is for science. Innovation is central to survival, and successful innovation requires both hill climbing and valley crossing. Now more than ever it is critical for firms to figure out a way to continue to invest in areas that have breakthrough potential. Newspapers and record companies have collectively been very effective at getting to the top of their hills. And these industries are in big trouble now because they have completely missed on out the discovery of new, better hills. It’s a challenging process to manage in good times, and probably even harder now. But it’s still essential.
One way to cope with this problem is to maintain an innovation portfolio. The idea with this is that we always need to investigate ideas that both help us climb hills and cross valleys. A large percentage of our efforts do need to go into hill climbing. This leads to incremental innovations that keep us competitive.
However, it is essential to always be working on a few ideas that will lead to valley crossing. This can prepare us for times when our environment becomes turbulent unexpectedly. This turbulence can come from an unexpected financial shock, a natural disaster, or the introduction of a disruptive innovation.
In all of these cases, maintaining an innovation portfolio will make you better equipped to deal with this change.
On the innovation journey, we need to be climbing hills, but we also have to cross a valley every now then as well.
(ralf says: Companies should adapt their bonus schemes to the above. And they should become much more rigid about it.
Everybody can do improvements. Improvements are bread & butter. But only if you truly innovate, you will carry your success to your future.
You will have to disrupt. You will have to anticipate, not follow, to inspire people, to lead a market.
You will have to lead your people and your consumers across the valley to where dragons live.)
Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle
Something just became very apparent and now I realized a few things...
I have neglect my blog for my massive love of Twitter
I fell in equal love with Tumblr
I still love advertising
I want to know everything about everything
This list could be endless
But what happened?
Over the past few months I have had some amazing things happen. New projects, meet some amazing new people and appeared on some pretty strange stages (the ass grab with Gary Vaynerchuk at the Art of Marketing Toronto may be the highlight), but even with these new projects and events it became harder to blog.
I was hardly bored because I was challenging myself; I was determined to understand the power of Twitter and Tumblr and all things under the Social Media sun, all making writting new blog posts that were worth reading harder. It all became very simple putting down in 140 characters or a simple "post to Tumblr" link.
And now I looked at my old friend the "A View From An AdGuy" blog and relize that I have posted so little new content or details of these new opportunities.
So did Twitter and Tumblr kill my blog? Hardly, on my blog there is still a great resource of wonderful content archived there. Information for young AdLanders to get inside the thinking needed to be a better/smarter creative, to become portfolio ready and access to information that will remain of value. What did I learn about Twitter and Tumblr?
Twitter gave me "instant" access to a new frontier of smart people and information.
Tumblr gave me a new way to post "Thing of Interest" instantly... with or without comment.
New opportunities to "curate" content and indights about advertising, marketing and communication.
In 8 short months I went from a handful of followers to over 4,300.
I had the privileged of being named 2011 winner of The Shorty Award for Advertising Education.
Joined in on a group of highly active and intelligent folks in a pair of Twitter "tribes" called #usguys and #MMchat.
Attended the Wharton School of Business "Future of Advertising" Think Tank in New York by invitation only and because of being of my Twitter presence.
So is my blog dead. Far from it.
Will it grow?
I hope so.
I back.
Cleaning up some dead links. Re-post and update older content.
Maybe even give you a few updates about the great things that have happened over the past few months.
Thanks for your support, interest and mostly time for having interest in what I am thinking.
(ralf says: Good to have you here, Anthony!)
Anthony is a Professor of Creative Advertising at Seneca College@York University in Toronto. As former award winning Creative Director his passion is now focused on nurturing and motivating new young talent on strategic planning & creative concept development of advertising. Twitter: @southsideadguy
The metaphoric shift here is quite clear – from “diets that are built” to “diets that are eaten". However there are some less obvious consequences that emerge from this change such as the loss of the hierarchy of foods like grains which used to occupy the base of the pyramid. Or the elimination of a mechanistic “builder” mindset towards the feeding of oneself and one’s family.
While subtle, these metaphors clearly shape behaviour in different ways, however beyond the terribly hackneyed television ad construction of using a metaphoric illustration and then ending the spot with “that’s sort of like (insert product)", I don’t think we use metaphors enough. Seems like they could be very interesting briefs for writing and design?
(ralf says: Sometimes metaphors are the essence of experience. They are crowdsourced over time. They are proven successful. They are evidence based. At least, if they had time to grow over time.
Choose your metaphors well! They might be powerful!)
Adrian is founding partner of Zeus Jones a branding company believing actions speak louder than words and that modern brands are defined by what they do not what they say. He speaks (and writes) regularly about non-communications based models for marketing & branding. Twitter: @adrianho
Steve Blank wrote an interesting post today on the Startup Genome Project. The report is based on a survey of 663 startups. All of them are web-based businesses, and they are all early in their lifecycle. The objective of the study is to determine what factors drive startup success, and the report draws some interesting conclusions.
You can read the executive summary and also download the report through this page.
Several of the drivers of success jumped out at me as particularly interesting. While many of the conclusions are specific to startups, some of the ideas apply to anyone trying to execute innovation. Here are some of the highlights:
Listening is an essential part of innovating: here is how they summarise these findings:
We examined whether founders learned in the following ways:
a) Learning from best practice Companies that follow startup thought leaders like Steve Blank, Paul Graham,etc. are 80% more likely to raise money. Almost all companies that raised moneyhad helpful mentors. Companies without helpful mentors almost always failed toraise funding.
b) Ability to listen to customer feedback Companies that are tracking metrics average a monthly growth rate that is 7xcompanies that are not tracking metrics and are 60% more likely to raisefunding than companies that don’t track metrics.
c) Ability to act on feedback Companies that fail to listen and act on feedback tend to scale withoutvalidating the size and interest of the market.
The need to listen is essential in any innovation effort. You need to be sensitive to what the early adopters of your great idea tell you, and you need to be able to respond effectively to what you learn.
Innovators are motivated by a strong sense of purpose: when asked why they started up their firm, 68% said it was to have an impact, 27% wanted to gain experience, and only 5% did it to make money. This is very consistent with Dan Pink’s contention that to motivate creative people you need to give them autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose. The desire to have an impact is very strong in innovators – much stronger than people usually think.
The more successful startups change their focus at least once, but not too often: in Silicon Valley language, this is referred to a pivoting – changing the focus of your business model. This is how the report phrases it: “Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6xbetter user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startupsthat pivot more than 2 times or not at all.” Changing focus too much is bad, but so is not changing at all. This relates to the first point about the importance of listening. You usually won’t have your idea exactly right on the first go, so you have to listen in order to figure out how to change. This is consistent with the little bets approach advocated by Peter Sims.
Innovation is a discovery process as much as it’s anything else. The Startup Genome Project shows that this is true for entrepreneurial startups, and it is also true for people trying to innovate in other settings.
Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle
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