By Pete Mortensen
Bruce Nussbaum highlights a quote from Diego Rodriguez at IIT’s Strategy Conference that I think is as good a measure of the health of current thought around innovation as any:
“Design thinking can be used to formulate business plans for new ventures.” Which, while true, doesn’t tell me why anyone who isn’t bought into these ideas should care.
A commenter, Rich, follows up with an even more optimistic take:
Design thinking must be used to formulate business plans to ensure successful new ventures.
Now, as excited as I am about the possibilities created when an iterative approach to creation is applied to new field after new field, I think it’s a step too far to call such an experiment a necessity that will ensure success.
On the other hand, I think Diego’s a bit behind the curve if he thinks that design thinking-driven business planning is brand new. Of course it can be used to formulate business plans for new ventures. That, in itself, doesn’t answer the most important question here: Will they be good business plans for successful new ventures?
Everyone is excited about design thinking these days, but I think we’re in for trouble if we view the innovation landscape solely through that lens. Great innovations are most likely to succeed when they are built on equal parts culture, design and business. Hybrid thinking, fluent in each of these domains, is more important when you look beyond the development of individual products. A lot of prototyping, by itself, does not a great business plan make.
If we want the current innovation boom to be more than a punchline in business courses 5 years from now, we need to see underneath the fad we’re currently a part of to discern the enduring ideas that will help promote long-term, sustainable growth in economies around the world.
Otherwise, we might as well go back to proclaiming that Six Sigma alone can secure the future of a business, or that the Internet will eliminate world poverty, or that TV will make the education of mass audiences so simple that schools will be unnecessary.
I mean, seriously. Design thinking can also be used to read the newspaper. But that doesn’t matter. Here are the questions to ask: Does it make it better? Does it look noticeably different from existing methods in the world? Does it connect with what people really need? Novelty alone is a dead end.
Filed under: Innovators
By Pete Mortensen
Fortune online has a reader-submitted Q&A with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. It’s a very informative interview, but my favorite part comes in the way Hastings talks about the well-worn track of fast failure.
In your opinion, do you learn more from failures or successes? Give us an example. Juan Saldivar, Monterrey, Mexico
With failures, you learn one of 99 things to avoid. So they are not that useful. I think it is more useful to learn from others’ failures. An example: AOL failed to adapt to the broadband world and clung to its narrowband dial-up specialty.
Though I’m slightly confused by the AOL example, I agree with the overall principle here. Learning from failure means a lot more than going out and screwing up everything. It means really understanding what has and has not worked in the past for others and then figuring out how to do it better yourself.
The first Macintosh computer wasn’t a success because Apple failed with the Lisa. It was a success because Steve Jobs saw what was wrong with the overall approach of Xerox PARC in bringing a workstation to market and neatly side-stepped them all.
The cliche is mostly right: Silicon Valley is built on a mountain of failure. But it you can make sure it’s somebody else’s failures that get you there.
Filed under: Innovation Humor
By Pete Mortensen
Maker Faire was in San Mateo over the weekend, and I had a fantastic time. I uses salad tongs to control a PC game, I bought a plastigami jumping frog, made a foam print of a drawing of said plastigami frog, rode home-made bicycles built out of scrap and even answered a phone call from a plant.
And then I saw the sign above, and I had to laugh. My! A two-hour class in innovation! Sounds great! Will glitter and pipe cleaners be provided? And it’s perfectly timed, right between creativity and prototyping!
Kidding aside, I think this display is oddly indicative of the cultural barriers and misconceptions all of us in this field have to overcome every time we use the word innovation. People think innovation is wacky creativity or novel solutions to well-understood problems. It’s putting on a silly hat and thinking outside the box. And in reality, innovation encompasses a lot more: Operational excellence, the discovery of new questions to answer, even slight improvements to existing products and services.
Innovations are any creations based on new knowledge with a social or economic benefit. And it’s serious business. It’s really hard, and it takes incredible teams to do it on even a somewhat consistent basis. You’re not going to learn it in a two-hour class in the middle of a craft and tinkering fair.
Here’s the crux of the problem. The services and capabilities offered by the best innovation consultancies have almost nothing in common with the creativity exercises and “So You Want to Be an Inventor?” activities offered by folks like Think Solve Do, Inc., the company that was running the innovation workshop. And yet the messages of creativity consultants and people in Jump’s peer set end up sounding exactly the same. It’s a problem that doesn’t have a solution yet, but it’s always fun to be reminded of the state of the discourse at random.
Some more pictures of the astounding innovation seminar follow.
