Notable passages from
The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

O'Reilly, Sebastopol, 2007

Name an emotion, motivation, or situation, and you'll find an innovation somewhere that it seeded.

However, it's simplyifying and inspiring to categorize how things begin. In reading the stories behind hundreds of innovations, some patterns surface, and they're captured here in six categories:

• Hard work in a specific direction - The majority of innovations come from dedicated people in a field working hard to solve a well-defined problem.
• Hard work with direction change - Many innovations start the same way as mentioned previously, but an unexpected opportunity emerges and is pursued midway through the work.
• Curiosity - Many innovations begin with bright minds following their personal interests. The ambition is to pass time, learn something new, or have fun.
• Wealth and money - Many innovations are driven by the quest for cash.
• Necessity - Waves of innovation have come from individuals in need of something they couldn't find.
• Combination - Most innovations involve many factors, and it's daft to isolate one above others.

[ ‹ ]

The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.

[ ‹ ]

Now imagine some relaxing events: reading a funny novel by the ocean or having beers with friends by a midnight campfire. They're activities with little risk and guaranteed rewards. We've done these things many times and know that others have done them successfully and happily in the past. These are the moments we wish we had more of. We work hard so we can maximize the amount of time spent on the planet doing these kinds of things.

Innovation conflicts with this desire. It asks for faith in something unknown over something known to be safe, or even pleasant. A truly innovative Thanksgiving turkey recipe or highway driving technique cannot be risk-free. Whatever improvement it might yield is uncertain the moment it's first tried (or however many attempts are needed to get it right). No matter how amazing an idea is, until proven otherwise, its imagined benefits will pale in comparison to the real, and nonimagined, fear of change.

This creates an unfortunate paradox: the greater the potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it. For example, solutions for world peace and world hunger might be out there, but human nature makes it difficult to attempt them. The bigger the changes needed to adopt an innovation, the more fears rise.

[ ‹ ]

The dangerous life of ideas

Quick test: Name five new ways to change the world, or you will die!

Sorry, time's up. Fortunately, I can't kill anyone from this side of the book, and writers killing readers is bad business. But if I did honor the threat, you'd be dead. No one can come up with one big idea, much less five, that fast. As absurd as this paragraph is so far, it mirrors how adults often manage creative thinking: "be creative, and perfect, right now." Whenever ideas are needed because of a crisis or a change, there's a fire-drill call, an immediate demand. But rarely is the call met with sufficient resources—namely time—to mine those ideas. The bigger the challenge, the more time it will take to find ideas, but few remember this when criticizing ideas to death moments after they've been born.

Cynical idea-killing phrases like, "that never works," "we don't do that here," or "we tried that already" are common and can easily make idea finding environments more like slaughterhouses than gardens. It's as if an idea knocks on the door, and someone answers waving an Uzi: "Go away! I'm looking for ideas." Ideas need nurturing and are grown, not manufactured, which suggests that idea shortages are self-inflicted. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that ideas will always be easier to find if they're not shot down on sight.

The myth that leads to this idea-destroying behavior is that good ideas will look the part when found.

[ ‹ ]

We live most moments with many filters. Consider eyesight: at best we see 160 degrees around us, less than 50% of the visual information nearby. Dogs hear more sounds and cats smell more odors than we do. Even as children, we learn rules of conduct and behavior, filtering out possibilities both to be safe and to fit into society. And, perhaps worse for creativity, as adults we aim for efficiency in our time, shortcutting through days, looking for fast tracks and power tools. The trap of efficiency is that it's not how explorers or inventors do their jobs: they turn their filters off for long stretches of time, trying to go where others haven't been. They wander into inconvenience, and danger, purposefully. Even when tasked with being creative, most people most of the time apply filters too soon.

[ ‹ ]

The true essence of brainstorming as a method is well described in Applied Imagination [by Alex F. Osborn], a fantastic read and a forgotten classic. The core message is simple:

• You have three things: facts, ideas, and solutions.
• You need to spend quality time with all of them.

The great mistake is leaping from facts to solutions, skipping over the play and exploration at the heart of finding new ideas. Most of us are experienced with finding facts—they're beaten into us throughout schools and colleges, and modern media pummels us with more. We're also familiar with solutions, which are the end results that pay the bills and explain why we've survived in the world. But idea finding? What's that? It's what few adults are patient enough to do, yet it's at the heart of creativity … and brainstorming (as defined by Osborn).

• Fact finding. The work of collecting data, information, and piles of research about whatever it is that needs to be done.
• Idea finding. The exploration of possibilities—free from as many constraints as possible—and using or ignoring facts as needed to find more ideas.
• Solution finding. The development of promising ideas into solutions that can be applied to the world.

[ ‹ ]

Lewis Thomas, author of Lives of a Cell and former dean of the Yale Medical School, wrote:

One way to tell when something important is going on is by laughter. It seems to me that whenever I have been around a laboratory at a time when something very interesting has happened, it has at first seemed to be quite funny. There's laughter connected with the surprise—it does look funny. And whenever you hear laughter … you can tell that things are going well and that something probably worth looking at has begun to happen in the lab.

That laughter, in part, means people are comfortable with and unafraid of new ideas.

[ ‹ ]

The goodness/adoption paradox surfaces if, for fun, we separate goodness (from the expert's point of view) from the factors that drive adoption [ease of adoption].

This suggests that the most successful innovations are not the most valuable or the best ideas, but the ones that appear on the sweet spot between what's good from the expert's perspective, and what can be easily adopted, given the uncertainties of all the secondary factors combined. The idealism of goodness and the notion that goodness wins is tempered by the limits and irrationalities of people's willingness to try new things, the culture of the era, and the events of the time. This explains why the first innovators—driven by the complete faith in their ideas—are so often beaten in the market, and in public perception, by latecomers willing to compromise.

[ ‹ ]

Problems as invitations

The word problem often means something bad, as in "Houston, we have a problem" or "I have a problem with your tuna salad," but successful innovation often involves more attention to problems than solutions. Einstein once said, "If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it," a gem of insight lost in the glory of what he achieved on that 20th day.

[ ‹ ]

Framing problems to help solve them

One way to creatively describe a challenge is to compare it to another kind of challenge that's been solved. Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit (makers of Quicken and QuickBooks software), felt that the problem to solve wasn't making good accounting software, but something else entirely: "The greatest competitor … was not in the industry. It was the pencil. The pencil is a tough and resilient substitute. Yet the entire industry had overlooked it." He creatively framed the problem and shifted the perspective of his team to find a better solution than pencil and paper. Even if his competition had more talented problem solvers, engineers, or designers, his creative framing of the problem gave him an advantage. Anyone can use Cook's basic framing strategy; by choosing a powerful reference (the pencil), and framing the challenge around it (sell software), he created opportunities before he wrote a line or code.

[ ‹ ]

But there is at least one truth: all innovations combine good and bad effects regardless of the intention fo the innovator or how well designed they are. If we accept this, and concede that perspective is everything when it comes to goodness, we can reframe our judgment of innovations.

An innovation can be:

• Good for you. The innovation earns you money, is enjoyable to work on, or solves a problem that interests you.
• Good for others. The innovation provides income to help family and friends; solves problems for the poor, sick, or needy; or through the innovation, or profits generated from it, improves the lives of people other than you.
• Good for an industry or economy. The innovation has benefits for many businesses and creates new opportunities for at least a subset of an industry or economy. Disruptions caused by the innovation are outweighed by new opportunities created.
• Good for a society. The innovation has a net positive effect on a community, city, state, or nation. While there might be some negative uses of the innovation, the net effect is overwhelmingly positive. The innovation is designed for sustained value, not just short term. The innovator identified who it might be bad for and tried to minimize those effects.
• Good for the world. The innovation has a net positive on the future of the human race.

And we can also ask the twin questions:

• What problems does this innovation solve? Whose problems are they?
• What problems does this innovation create? Whose problems are they?

[ ‹ ]