So maybe that's the, the secret to innovation is to find things that society
will say, yes, that's in fact a good thing, that's something we want.
However, I was an engineer, I was trained as an engineer, as a young person, very
young. And there was always a view in engineering
that the problem of innovation has nothing to do with people at all.
The problem of innovation is that some kind of technology has to be developed and
has to work. Think about it this way.
When you do brain surgery, it's hard to keep the body alive.
It's just hard. And it's not about individuals or groups
or organizations, it's not about society, it's just a very difficult thing to get
the oxygen into the hemoglobin and get that through the lungs and get that to the
cells, a very difficult thing. So if you look at these, you ask them a
question. Well, which one is it?
Which of these is true? Let me ask you to just take a moment and
think about, which one of these do you believe is true?
Is the problem that, of why innovation fails, the individaul?
Is it that the person is not challenged to think differently?
Is that the problem? Or maybe it's the problem of the group,
that new ideas are killed by a group during brainstorms because of members'
behavior. The CEO comes in and does these behaviors.
Or, maybe innovation's killed at the organization level, because the
organization doesn't consider innovation as strategic.
Where's the market? The market fails to recognize, or respond,
to an opportunity to make life better. Or, is it because society that society
doesn't except something as legitimate, and society does not support values and
aspirations that, that don't go with it. It has to support us, it has to make us
feel better as a society. Or, is it technologically that the, the
innovation was just not fully developed. Maybe the innovation is not quite ready
for prime time. It's not quite ready to be released into
the world. So which one is it?
Why does innovation fail? Well, I'm not sure.
But let's take a look at some other approaches.
So again, what I just talked about was the ways in which The academic literature, the
books that we read talk about innovation. And any innovation book you pull off the
shelf can, can pretty much be slotted in any one or two of these categories here,
and, and it takes that perspective. But now, as I began to look at this, I was
thinking about, well, how do I make sense of this?
Yeah, they're all true, of course they're all true, but which one is true when?
And which one is more true? So let me tell you few stories about some
other things that, that had occurred to me as I was doing lots of reading and I was
trying to understand what was going on. One thing I came across, I was doing some
work with the company called ACH Foods, ACH Foods in Memphis, Tennessee.
They have a number of, of interesting brands, one of their brand is called
Mazola and it's a oil brand and many, many countries have Mazola oil.
One day I was there, we were working on some innovation projects and they showed
me a product that they had come out with. This product is called Pure.
So this is Pure, and, Pure is interesting, because it is 100% fat, it's 100% oil.
And it's naturally fat free, there's no oil in this oil.
What does that mean? There's no oil in the oil, how can that
be. Well, take a look.
If I take a look at the look at this. 0 calories 0 fat, 0 trans fat, 0
cholesterol, 0 carbohydrate, 0 protein. This stuff is better than water I guess.
No, in fact, take a close look here. Serving size, 1 4th of a second of spray,
0.25 grams. Hm, so it seems what they've done is
they've made the serving size, so small that it falls under the regulations about
what fat is. How, what fat content is.
In fact, it is under half a gram of fat per serving.
So let me see if i can get a quarter of a second of spray.
Oh, that's not a quarter of a second of spray.
Okay, I guess I will get fat. I ate too much of that.
So you get the idea there that, that's one, let's take that as an example.
Here's another example. This was the first electric car.
The Nissan Tama. In fact, we're thinking now, oh, we have
all these great electric cars. Then here's an old one, that was done in
the 40s. Why would they have done this car as an
electric car? Well, there's some things here that were
going on. Think about the time.
Think about what's going on in the world. Think about the availability of, of
national resources things like oil and things like that.
Hm, it begins to make sense why the Nissan Tama would have been done.
Here's another one, the PalmPilot. Maybe you've seen the PalmPilot or heard
about the PalmPilot, but let me tell you a little bit about the story of the
PalmPilot. So this PalmPilot was this device that was
formed Apple, company Apple had been trying in the early 90s to, to basically
to, to crack this problem, that, that is, to innovate around this problem called
handwriting recognition. So their idea is if I could get people to
put things in, into, let me go grab mine here, if I could get people to do entry
into their device with handwriting, that would be very successful.
It would be an easy thing and people could carry it around.
Well, it was very difficult to do that. But one person figured it out.
And he said, well, why are we making it hard for a computer to recognize
handwriting? Because if you think about the way people
write, sometimes you write this way, sometimes you write that way, sometimes
you print, sometimes you're in cursive. There's all these different ways of
writing. And so what happens is very difficult for
the computer to understand. And so, this gentlemen said, why don't we
just, we're doing dumb, the, we're acting dumb as Jeff Hawkins, we're doing the dumb
thing. We're making the computer do the hard
thing. Lets just have the person do the hard
thing. Lets just have the person do the hard
thing. Lets teach him a new way to write.
Hm, let's get everyone to write a new way so the computer can understand it.
And in fact, it was very successful. It took about 5 minutes to learn the
graffiti drawing language that was here and that was designed to allow the
computer to understand it very rapidly. Interesting.
This was a very successful product that was only displaced by the BlackBerry by
RIM. And I believe it was probably because RIM
had online e-mail which no one else had. And they had it probably for as much
patent reasons as they had for technical reasons.
Well, here's another one, this for you in Northern Europe, you might recognize this
as a Schnellimbiss. It's sort of a fast food joint, like the
equivalent of a traditional McDonald's. So if you'd been in Germany a hundred
years ago, you might have seen these things.
Well, if you wanted to break into this industry, that is, to go into the
Schnellimbiss industry, the problem is all the good spots.
This is the food place, they have french fries, they may have sausage, they may
have beer, they may have all kinds of things that are interesting to people.
And, they have it in a place where you walk by.
And, the problem is the places where you walk by are all taken.
The good spots are taken, next to the subway station, next to a you know, soccer
stadium, next to they're all taken. And so, if you want to move into this
industry, it's going to be very difficult to do.
Well, someone figured out how to do it, and I present to you, the grill walker.
The grill walker's a person, they walk around, they have propane on the back,
that's the gas in the back, and they have the grill in the front.
And they make these sausages, and they walk around and sell them would you like a
sausage, sir? Would you like a sausage?
Hm, what do you think? This is a pretty good response to the
problem of these location monopolies that people had.
Why was this successful when the electric car wasn't?
Why was this successful and the first MP3 player wasn't?
That's, that, that's been perplexing to me.
As I started thinking about this in more detail, I started thinking about, like,
why did this thing work? What was the, the, the, what happened that
allowed this thing to work? Well, it turns out there were a number of
conditions of success, things that had to be true in order for this thing to work.
He had to have hungry people. They had their own certain health codes.
There were all these things that I've shown here that have to be true in order
for this project to work. But in fact, you see this small area here,
the small overlap area, is in fact the area where the current solution is.
The current solution solves all these problems.
So now, somehow, the new entrant, the new person in there has to open up this space
in some way that allows for more different ideas for how to solve this problem.
And so, where there were location monopolies before, by having a person walk
around pushing this thing around, we have no location monopolies, and all of a
sudden, we're at a place where we can try something different.
So in fact, there, here is something very different.
A little research on this invention, on this company, and it turns out they sell
their most sausages where? Where do you think they sell the most
sausages? So, let's, let's say they were in Germany,
and they were walking around selling sausages.
Where would they sell the most sausages? Well, number one is soccer games.
Of course, after soccer games and people come out, they're hungry, maybe they've
had some beer, they've shouted a whole great deal at the players and at the
opposing team. They're hungry and so they eat it all up.
And the second most, which is kind of interesting to me, they said that they
sell a lot of sausage at government demonstrations.
Of all the places to sell our sausage, I guess that kind of again, we're shouting
at people, and doing that kind of thing, makes us hungry as well.
So here, we see how the starting with the small, with the puny, remember the puny
idea? Starting with the small, puny idea, if we
can just open up that space and open up that space, there's more possibilities for
us to innovate in. Same goes for the handheld innovations why
I showed you the PalmPilot, well, there are all these things that had to be true.
It had to cost a certain amount. We had to have a certain device size.
We had to have a certain battery life, and the processor speed, and all these things
had to be true. But the problem was the software was so
complex that this thing didn't work. There was not an overlap.
And so, when Jeff Hawkins came in he said, well, let's just have the person do the
hard part and let the computer do the easy part.
By doing that, he created an overlap and all of a sudden, there was a possible
solution. So, all the conditions of innovation, all
these different things that are the conditions were met and so, innovation was
possible. So as I've been thinking about this, I've
been finding more and more stories that sort of meet this, this, this pattern.
There's a story about the Metropolitan Opera, and how they went to their, propose
a project, their, a new way of, of letting more people into their space called live
in HD. And so, live in HD, what it is, is the
opera, opera's excuse me, the opera's performed live, and then they videotape
it, they don't videotape it, they video it and stream the video into a series of
movie theaters around the country. And so people in the movie theater can
actually watch the opera as it's going and these are people who might normally,
normally go to the opera. People who might not be able to fly to New
York and do the opera there. Well, the way this thing came about is
interesting. So if you think about what are the
conditions under which a successful performing arts program can be put on and
it's kind of interesting. So we have things like the board, and
then, of course, the board is the governing body of the, of the opera.
They're going to say, yeah, we want to do some Mozart or we're going to do some
Wagner, and then that's the decision and so all the choices that we have are inside
of that. Then we have a certain stage size, and
production size, and production cost and, you know, all these things that have to be
true in order for this innovation to occur.
Well, this one is interesting in that, when they first started working
innovation, in fact, they worked a year into innovation that they were working on
this for a long time before they realized someone read the contract with the artist
that said basically, you can't do this. So imagine, you're working on a project,
you work on a project for an entire year, and then you find out you can't do it that
way. Hm, so, understanding is what they did,
where they re, they sort of changed, they reconfigured the way that they were
talking about it, so they weren't talking about changing the artist's contract,
changing the union contracts. What they were talking about is about an
intellectual property agreement, is a very different thing, is a very positive thing.
Changing a union contract's negative, and even the language makes you sort of grumpy
and, but if you say oh, we're going to do profit sharing or we're going to have
equity and we're going to do streaming royalties.
All of a sudden, it's a very different conversation.
It's the same thing, but it's a very different conversation.
And so, by changing this, they were able to actually get this innovation done.
And so, in fact, there is now live in HD through the Metropolitan Opera.
Here's another one from the art world. Christo, you may have heard of Christo.
Christo loved to wrap stuff and loved to, to sort of surround things and here he's
wrapped 11 islands. So he had 11 islands.
This is off the coast of Miami Key Biscayne, there's a set of islands there.
And so, he decided he going to wrap these things in bright, hot pink polypropylene.
Hm, okay, well, why would you do that? Well, okay, that's hard, that's why we do
it. So, if we think about what was hard about
doing it. Was it hard to think of the idea?
Well, let me wrap something. He's looking around, maybe he's flying
over in a plane saying, I'll wrap those islands down there.
That doesn't seem that hard. But was is hard is getting a bunch of
people to help you do this. So this thing required about 400 people,
more than 400 people to do. There were my understanding is about 6 1/2
million square feet of hot pink polypropylene.
Where do you get that? Hello, Home Depot, can I have some hot
pink polypropylene, six and a half million square feet?
We're going to need a deposit on that, sir.
Couldn't imagine doing that we have to be, sew it altogether, all these things were
sewn there was flotation devices inside to make them float.
Had to be towed into place and people had to stay there day and night to make sure
no one stole them, that the waves didn't carry them away.
They had to consult with marine biologists, with mammal experts, with
ornithologists, with bird experts, and make sure they weren't hurting anything.
Even construction engineers to make this happen.
So it seems like it would have been a pretty hard thing.
But you know what? None of this was hard in compare to the
permissions that they had to get. They had to get permission from the
governor, they had to get permission from the county, they had to get permission
from the Department of Environmental Regulation.
They had to get permission from everyone, from all these organizations in order to
allow this thing to happen. So what do you think is harder, getting
some hot pink polypropylene or getting permission to wrap some islands?
I'll bet it was the latter that was much more difficult.
In fact, Christo and Jean-Claude, in their art, talk about the process, the part of
the process of this thing is actually getting that permission.
That's part of the art what, that they see.
So, part of the art is overcoming the constraints that would stop this thing
from happening, that is, creating the conditions of success.
