Filed under: Context for Innovation
When people think about innovation, they tend to take a very technology-centered view of the world. If an idea could have been executed 50 years ago, it just isn’t innovative, so far as most of the population is concerned.
Even otherwise rational companies who should just be creating new ways to grow often find themselves caught up in such hype: “This one product will save the company – and its specs are really large numbers!”
But as Jess McMullin notes, a lot of the time, innovation looks much more humble – it can mean taking a good idea from one context and putting it in another one. He calls it Sideways Innovation: Finding a new use for an existing idea in a new market. And he’s worried that not enough companies try it. I disagree. Plenty of people do Sideways Innovation – but it doesn’t sound as sexy as designing something from scratch, so we don’t hear about it as much.
Great examples of this phenomenon are all around us. The pair of Shure headphones in my ears right now are based off of professional in-ear stage monitors. The great Crest SpinBrush in my bathroom was developed using the same technology as the CapToys SpinPop way back in the day. The entire Starbucks empire sprang from the introduction of centuries-old Italian coffee culture to the United States. I would argue, in fact, that Sideways Innovation is incredibly abundant in the business world, but it doesn’t make for great stories in the press most of the time.
After all, the SpinBrush has been a tremendous success for P&G, as has the Swiffer, another product the company found elsewhere in the world (in this case Japan), but the acquisition, launch and iteration of existing products doesn’t sell magazines or get design consultancies work. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard experienced designers tell me that IDEO came up with the Swiffer. They didn’t. Continuum did. And even then, it was an adaptation of an existing product P&G bought the rights to. The consultancies have done great work extending that product line, but the essential insight began overseas.
But none of this fits the story about innovation that Americans want to hear or that the media wants to tell. Too often, we expect innovation to be about Americans inventing things and being smart. It’s a story that makes a rough economic period tolerable.
What we know down deep is that innovation is a global concern, and what really matters is sustainable growth, not wacky inventions. But until the American public is ready for a serious business story, the press is going to delight us with novelty, even if other methods for creating new ways to grow work better in certain contexts for certain companies.
Image via Spinbrush
By Pete Mortensen
The entertainment industry’s continual inability to grapple with the realities of a world where legal and illegal digital downloads are a click away has reached an appalling new low. NBC filed a brief with the FCC that claims digital piracy not only hurts the entertainment industry, it HURTS AMERICAN GROWERS OF CORN.
“Because of our nation’s interlocking economy, two-thirds of the lost earnings and lost jobs are in industries other than motion picture production. For example, in the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment.”
Ahem. No, I’m not making this up. I would dismiss it as pure marketing spin if it weren’t so outright insulting to the people who buy movies, music and TV content. As Art Brodsky, the writer who brought the absurd claim to the world’s attention notes, corn growers are doing reall, really well right now.
According to the June 20 Wall Street Journal, corn sold at $3.83 per bushel this morning, up from $2.08 a year ago. Corn futures are even higher — $4.03 for the December crop. And don’t worry about the popcorn guys. According to the Popcorn Board, Americans consume 17 billion quarts of popcorn each year. Of that total, 70 percent of popcorn is eaten at home, and the remaining 30 percent is divided up among all the other places – movie theatres and sports stadiums, among other venues.
Guess what you can do while watching tons of ill-gotten movies and TV shows at home? Eat a bunch of microwave popcorn. And that’s maybe the most shocking thing about this baldly facetious filing: The entertainment companies don’t actually have a natural ally in the snack-food industry. The snack makers don’t care where you got your entertainment – they just care that you want to munch their treats while you watch.
And here’s the thing: If the entertainment companies had spent a tenth as much time figuring out what people really need from their entertainment as these companies and associations have spent in demonizing the pirates and launching lawsuits against little kids, any one of them could be light years more successful in the digital era than they are now.
But don’t believe me if you don’t want to – I might just have it in for the corn industry.
Via Engadget.
