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Are we innovative, or aren't we?

25/03/2011

It happened again two weeks ago. I was giving a talk on User Experience Design and I promised the audience I would uncover some secrets about innovation at the end of the show. And yep, you actually could see their ears growing and each one of them enthusiastically sat out an hour of funny movie clips, practical jokes and plain old usability knowledge. But I swear I could hear them whisper at least every 5 minutes:
“When is he going to talk about innovation…?”

So off we went, and after a while I began unwrapping some innovation secrets. I first asked the audience whether they found they had done some innovative work lately or not. I could have bet a bucket of money on it because most of them (well actually, all of them) said they hadn’t: “No, I haven’t. I’m no innovator at all, I just do my work.”
My second question was then what they thought was real innovation: “Oh, that’s easy. The iPad2, thát’s innovative. And Augmented Reality. And Near Field Communication. And that thing I can do with my smartphone, the Shake and Bake app: I simply select leftovers that I find in the fridge, enter the quantities, shake the thing and it comes up with recipes! How cool is that? That’s what I call innovation!”

Hmm, I don’t agree. Don’t get me wrong: All credits to the genius that first came up with the idea to cram an accelerometer into a phone. That most certainly was an innovative act and it created a world of opportunities to do a lot of nifty and mind-boggling stuff, of which the Shake and Bake app is only one example. Except, nearly none of the accelero-apps that exist today were anticipated by that accelero-phone breeder. The thing is, it was what came next, out of the minds of numerous more mundane app-builders what was truly innovative.

You might think that creating an accelero-powered app is a hard thing to do, and in some ways it is. For starters, you’ll have to learn some new programming skills when you want to go native. And you’ll have to pick your platform of choice, because you can’t serve them all in one go. But coming up with a clever idea for an app shouldn’t be too hard. Just give it a try, you would be surprised with what you can come up with when you start thinking for a few minutes about new applications for an accelerometer.

If you’re let’s say, chilling in your cozy den on a sunny day, I’m quite convinced that you can come up with some sparkling and colorful ideas to make the world a better place with your app. But the next morning, when your boss unleashes a torrent of innovation directives onto the factory floor, will your mind be as helpful as it was when your were mind-wandering at home? Will it help you to be as imaginative when it comes down to everyday business innovation? Most people’s minds unfortunately won’t. Their Genie will stay put in the lamp when they’re in their everyday work environment filled with daily tasks and routines. So what should you do?

Let’s start with some things you shouldn’t do:

Don’t wait for an epiphany. It won’t come. Most innovative ideas grow out of a combination of multiple humble hunches. It reminds me of the myth of Newton’s Apple. Surely it never happened as you were being told. The Apple incident was merely a hunch (one of several) that helped speeding up Isaac’s much more elaborated and structured thinking process.
Don’t see innovation as simply looking for a new outlet for your services or products in a clever way. Perhaps you’d like to think that this is innovative, but rest assured it’s not.
Don’t try to become the next Steve Jobs. You’ll never be as good as him popping out an iThingy every year. But you’re probably better than him at coming up with a new app for your customers or by releasing a new service in your own playing field.

So what should you do?

Number one by a mile: Live with your eyes and ears open. Innovation rarely happens between nine and five. Instead, start connecting the dots between what you see in the world around you, between your own expertise, between unmet customer needs, and so on. That’s much more effective than fiddling endlessly with a pencil behind your desk asking yourself what Jobs would do.
Stop looking over the hedge. Start with what you know and have instead of what you don’t know and don’t have. Personally I’d like to design the new Pagani Zonda, but if I’m honest, I wouldn’t know how to start and I don’t have the proper skills. So I’ll focus on what I do best, and that’s designing innovative user interfaces. A Zonda from my drawing board would most certainly result in a DOA.
Don’t go on a mission alone. Instead, think things through, sync with your peers, sketch some concepts, let it incubate, evaluate, experiment, ask your neighbor, check some facts, sync again, design a wireframe, iterate, and so on.
When you feel you’ve arrived on fertile ground, plant some seeds, water them and show early buds to colleagues. Gradually make your way to the top floor so that decision makers start showing interest too.
Don’t focus on cost, revenue and profit calculation early on in the process. You won’t fertilize your ground with numbers. Think about it: When the guy who invented the Nespresso system would have started his elevator speech to a Nestlé top executive by stating that consumers in the future would have to pay at least three times the price of a traditional brew, his mission most certainly would have been aborted on the spot.

So are you innovative? I think you most certainly are. It’s just a matter of putting Innovation with the big ‘I’ in perspective. Start from your own expertise, leverage your own strengths and take the plunge. You’d be surprised with what you can come up with.

Johan Verhaegen