FutureLab's 8 Truths of Innovators

My brother alerted me to a good posting on "The Eight Truths of Real Innovators" from the futurelab blog.  It may be a bit pretentious to call these the "eight truths" but they are certainly thought provoking.  Perhaps readers will come up with their own "truths" to add to this list:

1. Stop equating innovation to R&D
   Its not about the lab experiment, it's about how you're helping customers.  Innovation doesn't just mean the code; it can be the development model, the business model, the distribution model and more.
2. Pay people to fail
   It is the risky projects that lead to competitive breakthroughs. Reward people for innovating and don't penalize failure. 
3. Treat everyone as an innovator
   Don't assume innovation only comes from a few select people.  Give folks the time and space to come up with new ideas. 
4. Kill bad ideas quickly
   Never fall in love with your own pet projects and don't be afraid to kill things early in the process. It takes a lot of at bats to hit a home run. (European reader alert: this is a baseball analogy.)
5. Launch first, worry about the shortcomings later
   There will always be people trying to perfect an idea or coming up with reasons why more research is needed.  But in the real world, fast to market trump perfection.  Or as Guy Kawasaki writes: Don't worry, be crappy (as long as you're innovating.)
6. Don't believe what your customers tell you, dig deeper
   You need to understand the reasons and thinking behind customers actions.
7. Don't try radical innovation, buy it
   Organisations annilihate any innovation which may undermine the status quo. Real innovators don't pursue radical innovations themselves. They just buy them when a dominant design appears to emerge. Maybe this is why Oracle has been on such an acquisition binge. 
8. Mix elements that shouldn’t be mixed: Bring non-business or non-product people into the innovation process.

• FutureLab: Eight Truths of Real Innovators (original posting)
• OnDisruption: Eight Truths of Real Innovators
• Guy Kawasaki: Art of Innovation

Comments

[Swashbuckler]

The pay people to fail reminds me of a blurb from "The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay" (http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_III.html). It says:

we could give quite a smashing demo of what we intended to build for real over the next few years. I remember giving one of these to a Xerox executive, including doing a protrait of him in the new painting system, and wound it up with a flourish declaring: "And what's really great about this is that it only has a 20% chance of success. We're taking risk just like you asked us to!" He looked me straigt in the eye and said, "Boy, that's great, but just make sure it works." This was a typical exeuctive notion about risk. He wanted us to be in the "20%" one hundred percent of the time.

Sad, but true...

[Roland Bouman]

5. Launch first, worry about the shortcomings later

Sure. As long as people really don't forget to do the worrying, and really are prepared to worry afterwards, accepting that as a consequence of this type of strategy.
Of course, this point also shows the limitation of being innovative. I mean, it seems quite obvious that you can't both be innovative all the time and worry about prior launches.

6. Don't try radical innovation, buy it

Nice. Imagine everybody had this attitude? I mean, somewhere, somehow, someone needs to actually be original. If someone deserves the predicate "real innovator" it surely is not one of the people buying themselves into it. For example, is Google a real innovator by buying what is now known as GoogleEarth, or YouTube? Don't think so.

8. Mix elements that shouldn’t be mixed

"Bring non-business or non-product people into the innovation process."

Seriously, what is left of this "innovative process" if you just buy your way in?

[Zack Urlocker]

Roland, some good questions for sure. But I would not dismiss business models or buying companies as being insignificant.

High-tech companies often fall in love with a "build" vs "buy" approach, but frankly, the customer doesn't really care whether you built something in the labs, bought it or grew it from magic beans. So once in a while it does make sense for a company to buy their way into a market, particularly if it changes their overall strategy.

A good example of that is BEA. BEA saw early on the impact of web application servers and bought WebLogic and turned that into a billion dollar business. Innovative? I would say so. Similarly, you could argue that Google and Yahoo have both innovated through acquisitions.

I'm not saying that all acquisitions are innovative; many companies decide they just want to follow a "me too" approach. For example, I think Oracle's very expensive acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel are far less innovative than if they had built something new or bought Salesforce.com, which actually is innovating.

--Zack

[Roland Bouman]

"So once in a while it does make sense for a company to buy their way into a market, particularly if it changes their overall strategy."

Well, we agree on this. From a business perspective, the result counts more than how you got there.

The reason for my somewhat emotional counter reaction is that I don't feel that the buyer is the one that should get all the credit for being "The Real Innovator" - especially not if it's a big company that is not very much at risk investing in a -then- much smaller original business.

At some point there has to be an individual, or a group of people (usually centered around an individual) that have the guts and the endurance to pursue their vision. I believe there really must be some kind of inner drive to make it succeed, and that's the league I'm thinking of when we the predicate "True Innovator" is being given.

I don't want to dismiss the foresight of those people that recognize the opportunity of such a movement and decide to try and buy the club - that's all proof of good entrepreneurship. But that's not the same as *being* the one that's worth to be bought.

Roland Bouman