Chapter 3: Generating a Disruptive Idea: Unexpected Ideas Have Fewer Competitors

Albert Einstein

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

—Albert Einstein¹

The Walt Disney Entertainment Company, one of the world’s foremost storytellers, came to frog design a few years ago with a challenge. The company wanted to bring serious consumer electronics to their target demographic: kids. This was a disruptive hypothesis, because at the time, there weren’t any consumer electronics for kids. Conventional industry wisdom always dredged up “My First Sony,” which was an unsuccessful attempt by Sony to break into this market ten years earlier with a product that was too expensive, lacked breadth, and looked too much like a toy. “We tried that ten years ago, and it failed” is an anathema to anyone interested in disruptive thinking.

Industry observers had already dismissed this market segment as a dead end. But Disney is a content company, not a consumer-electronics company. Given its strong brand recognition, emotional resonance, and unique customer loyalty, Disney recognized that it was uniquely positioned to address this market in a different way. It sensed an opportunity to bring consumer electronics to life and infuse an entire line of products with Disney magic. The challenge went deeper than just slapping Mickey’s face onto otherwise standard products. Disney wanted its brand association to be obvious, yet subtle.

But, opportunities by themselves don’t lead to profits or lasting change. Disney needed to leverage its brand identity, integrate content elements, and expand the world of its beloved characters to create a usable idea that would emotionally resonate with kids and would have enough usable features to convince parents that they weren’t buying yet another piece of junk. One of the first things we did was break down Disney’s characters. We got books of all the most famous Disney films and cut out the eyes, hands, heads, and bodies of all the characters. We worked with a Disney animator to deconstruct the characters even further, carefully observing how they used basic components, like circles and lines, to give their characters personality and movement. After breaking them down like this, we noticed that there were definitely some patterns shared by characters—things most people never consciously notice.

Think about the perfect position of Mickey Mouse’s ears: They never move, regardless of the position of his head, and that helps deliver a consistent silhouette. Or, the pervasive sense of asymmetry that gives characters a feel of constant movement, creating a sense of urgency and excitement.

Breaking down these patterns and thinking creatively about how we could connect them to consumer electronics laid the foundation for an entire product family, which is now distributed worldwide and generates $500 million in sales per year. Initially, we developed two products: a cordless phone and a two-way radio, both of which captured the essence of Disney characters without being too literal. For example, the mouthpiece of the phone looked like a smile and had a tiny lip line. The antenna took cues from Goofy’s tail, and Donald Duck’s eyes provided an analog for the design of the LCD display. It was all done very subtly, but when you held it in your hand, there was no question that it just felt like Disney.

As the Disney story shows, the big question for this chapter is: How do you transform an opportunity into an idea?

Transforming an Opportunity into an Idea

Well, the first thing is to get comfortable with the belief that any old ideas won’t do. What we’re interested in are disruptive ideas; that is, ideas with the power for great impact and influence. Ideas that challenge assumed boundaries and inspire a sense of what’s possible. In my experience, however, most ideas never get anywhere near this level.

There are three major stumbling blocks:

1. Teams and individuals feel overwhelmed, directionless, and lack focus.

2. Many organizations still think of the world in terms of isolated products, services, and information.

3. Most ideas never get articulated in anything other than water-cooler conversations.

Let’s look at all three stumbling blocks in more detail.

Stumbling Block 1
Teams and individuals feel overwhelmed, directionless, and lack focus.

In my experience, this is the direct result of relying on traditional brainstorming approaches, which, by the way, have been around since the 1930s, when ad-man Alex Faickney Osborn first popularized them in his book, Applied Imagination. Osborn proposed that groups could double their creative output with brainstorming, but he placed little emphasis on how to focus creative thinking and refine the quality of the output. The brainstorming method relies on participants saying anything that comes to mind, in response to a loosely defined focus, with the hope that something might just prove useful.

On its face, that sounds reasonable. But, the problem is that traditional brainstorming has ignored the huge difference between generating lots of ideas and capturing quality ideas. As a result, brainstorming sessions often leave organizations and teams feeling overwhelmed and directionless—a state Beth Comstock at GE insightfully calls, “paralyzed by possibility.”² Simply put, if your ideas are going to have any disruptive impact, you need to move beyond a shotgun approach to brainstorming and start pursuing creative effort with a laser-sharp focus.

Stumbling Block 2
Many organizations still think of the world in terms of isolated products, services, and information.

This is a mistake. They should be thinking more holistically of product-service-information hybrids. It’s getting harder and harder to compete if you don’t. The real advantage comes when your disruptive idea is blended in such a way that the product, service, and information components can’t be broken apart.³ For example, the disruptive idea behind the iPhone is that it blends product (e.g., iPhone with iPhone OS), service (iTunes+App Store), and information from the network (which includes wireless providers, Google, Yahoo!, iPhone developers, related iPhone social networks and communities, and the manufacturers).

To get a better sense of what I’m talking about, consider this quote from Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things: “…this Sangiovese may be a ‘classic’ wine from the Mediterranean basin, but this bottle is no longer a classic artifact. It has been gizmo-ized.”

Gizmo-ized is another way of saying that even a product as ancient as a bottle of wine no longer stands alone as a static object; it’s dynamic. “It is offering me more functionality than I will ever be able to explore,” Sterling writes, “This wine bottle aims to educate me—it is luring me to become more knowledgeable about the people and processes that made the bottle and its contents. It wants to recruit me to become an unpaid promotional agent, a wine critic, an opinion maker—it wants me to throw wine-tasting parties and tell all my friends about my purchase.”⁴

In Sterling’s view, there is nothing frivolous or extraneous about this sudden explosion of informational intimacy between himself (with his laptop), and a bottle of wine (with its website): “My relationship with this bottle of wine is a parable of my human relationship to all objects.”⁵ It enables a deeper, more intimate relationship between consumers and producers.

Clearly, we need a new mindset when it comes to generating ideas: one focused on the dynamics of a blended whole, rather than the details of its isolated parts. In other words, the relationship between a product, a service, and the information they provide is more important than the details of any one particular feature alone.

That said, don’t slip into thinking of disruptive ideas only in relation to new gadgets and technology. You can develop disruptive ideas for any opportunity you desire.

Stumbling Block 3
Most ideas never get articulated in anything other than water-cooler conversations.

As a result, they rarely escape people’s heads and instead remain there, unformed. The view from inside the company, however, is different. One of the most common phrases I hear from clients is, “We don’t need any more ideas; we have too many.” But when I ask to see the documented ideas they have, they start backpedaling: “Well, we don’t have them written down or anything. But, we discuss them a lot.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell. You can talk about ideas in general terms, at least for a while. However, abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and remember it. So, to increase the potential, you have to stop talking about it and explain it in sensory terms. “Sketch it out!,” as Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design, used to say. (He wouldn’t listen to an idea if you hadn’t done so.) Ambiguity disappears when you describe your ideas in visual or written form.

Getting past these three stumbling blocks is a challenge. The chaos of a creative process is overwhelming. It’s easier to think in terms of isolated products, services, and information, rather than blended hybrids. And, it takes considerably less effort to vaguely talk about ideas rather than specifically describe and visualize them.

This is where the methods in this chapter come into play. They will help you move past these stumbling blocks and generate the kind of disruptive ideas that transform compelling opportunities into commercial offerings.

What Is Your Focus?
(Getting Past Stumbling Block 1)

In the beginning of Chapter 2, I talked about how Apple progressed from

• Observation (people in Mac stores like to touch the computers) to…

• Insight (you’re rarely intimidated by something you want to touch, and if you’re intimidated, you don’t want to touch it) to…

• Opportunity (provide people a sense of control over the technology by establishing an immediate physical connection between the user and the computer).

To say there’s an opportunity “to provide customers with a sense of control by establishing an immediate physical connection” is wonderful, but it doesn’t do anything by itself. We need specific ways to accomplish that goal. Remember: Hypotheses feed observations. Observations feed insights. Insights feed opportunities. Opportunities feed ideas.

Focus Your Creative Effort

At this point, you should have identified and described an opportunity. Now, it’s time to develop the ideas to execute it. You’ll start by breaking down your opportunity into a number of parts and examining each one in a new way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to all of them. The main point is to focus your creativity.

In Chapter 2, I used the opportunity identified for a car manufacturer: “Provide drivers [who] with ways of being more productive [advantage] that are safe and optimized for driving [gap].”

Now for the breakdown. Start by focusing on one area of an opportunity statement: the advantage. (Opportunity statements can often seem overwhelming, so starting with one small piece will make it easier to work with.) The advantage, in this case, is “productivity.” Then, ask yourself when drivers could make use of their vehicles for productivity.

You might come up with something like this:

When running errands

When making phone calls

When dealing with inspiration (taking notes, for example)

When waiting (at lights, in traffic)

When traveling with kids (entertainment)

There are no “right” or “wrong” breakdowns. And we aren’t trying to come up with a comprehensive breakdown. That’s way too analytical for our purposes and, given how many possibilities there are, I’m not sure it’s even possible. The goal is simply to hone your focus and get those creative juices flowing.

After you have the advantage part of the opportunity broken down, you can start asking yourself all sorts of questions about how to deliver on the gap part of the opportunity. Again consider our car example. The gap part of the opportunity statement is “safe and optimized” for driving. So, some of the questions might be:

How can we safely optimize the way people make phone calls in their car?

Idea: Integrated hands-free phone calls.

How can we safely optimize the way people take notes in their car?

Idea: Hazard avoidance systems.

How can we safely optimize the way people entertain their kids in their car?

Idea: Integrated DVD players.

After you have the opportunity broken down into questions like these, try to answer them with as many new ideas as you can think of—from the obvious to the ridiculous. And be sure not to reject any ideas too quickly. That’s usually the result of applying some real-world constraints to the situation. (“That won’t work because…we don’t have the money, or the resources, or the capacity.”) You’ll have plenty of time to evaluate your ideas later. But for now, stay focused on generating them. And if you need an extra dose of inspiration, check out the next step.

Forcing Connections

It’s always a good tactic to look for examples of how a particular advantage or gap has been addressed in products or services outside of the situation you’re focused on.⁶ Because the problem is that most easily conceived ideas are the most familiar ones, the ones you’ve experienced most often. As a result, more often than not, the first ideas out of people’s mouths are stale clichés—and the fundamental sin of any disruptive idea is for it to be a cliché. It reminds me of Robert McKee’s advice to would-be film makers: “Cliché is at the root of audience dissatisfaction…. Too often we close novels or exit theaters bored by an ending that was obvious from the beginning, disgruntled because we’ve seen these cliché scenes and characters too many times before.”⁷ McKee could just as accurately be describing the first ideas to arise from a typical brainstorming session in a corporate boardroom.

To break away from cliché-thinking, you need to develop a habit of looking for alternative ideas instead of immediately accepting the most obvious approaches. Inspiration for break-through ideas often happens in the periphery, in analogous but not necessarily traditionally competitive categories. The next time you’re sweetening your coffee with Sweet’N Low, consider that the only reason it’s touching your lips is because a chemist working on coal tar derivatives made an unexpected discovery: the artificial sweetener saccharin. The goal is to look closely at the unconnected example and figure out how you could apply the entire idea, or part of it, to your needs. As New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman puts it, “The further we push out the boundaries of knowledge and innovation, the more the next great value breakthroughs—that is, the next new hot-selling products and services—will come from putting together disparate things that you would never think of as going together.”⁸

For example, a door handle is a physical connection between a person and a building. How could that relate to establishing a physical connection between a person and a computer? Apple’s solution was to put a handle on the iMac so that it’s the first thing people see when they take it out of the box. And grabbing the computer by the handle gives them an immediate sense of control over the technology. This is a powerful exercise, because it’s possible that you could take an idea that was developed in a completely unrelated field and directly apply it to your situation. Think back to the Nintendo Wii and the handheld controller that integrates the movements of a player directly into the video game. The inspiration for the motion controller idea didn’t come from looking at what other video consoles were doing; it came from a completely unrelated source: the accelerometer chip that regulates the air-bag in your car. Airbags respond to sudden changes in movement caused by accidents. Nintendo wondered if it would be possible to combine the accelerometer used by airbags with a handheld controller used to play video games. In other words, if you swung the controller like a tennis racket, could a “virtual you” on the screen swing as well? ⁹

Nintendo combined the accelerometer used by airbags with a hand-held controller used to play video games.

Here’s another example of how bringing two seemingly unrelated thoughts together sparked a new way of seeing things. One morning, a designer sprang into the frog design studio with a little more energy than usual. “I know why everyone says the iPod looks clean!,” he exclaimed. The iPod has become—in the minds of most of our clients and just about everyone else in the world—the poster product of great innovation. Ask anyone to tell you what they find so appealing about the design of the iPod, and, almost without exception, they answer, “I like it because it looks clean.”

Of course, there are obvious clues, such as the minimalist design; the simple, intuitive interface; and the neutral colors. But, these attributes alone don’t fully explain this seemingly universal perception of graceful hygiene. There had to be something deeper. And if a designer claimed that he had the answer, we were all ears.

“So,” the visiting designer said, “as I was sitting on the toilet this morning (which, of course, is where most good ideas come from), I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin... and then it hit me! Everybody perceives the iPod as ‘clean’ because it references bathroom materials.”

There were a few seconds of silence…followed quickly by enthusiastic laughter. No, not because he had arrived at this insight by sitting on the toilet. We were laughing because we knew that Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, came to Apple from a London-based design consultancy where he worked on a lot of lavatory basins.¹⁰

Coincidence? Perhaps. But, at the very least, it’s an example of how anything, no matter how unconnected, can spark new perceptions. Often, the more incompatible the connection, the more useful it may be—and the more it can help you break away from cliché-thinking and cultivate a fresh perspective. In the words of serial entrepreneur, Marc Andreessen, “The freshness of an idea can be tested by how much ridicule it provokes. An idea that isn’t ridiculed is probably stale.”¹¹

What Can You Blend Together?
(Getting Past Stumbling Block 2)

Before we move on, let’s quickly look at the ideas you’ve generated for your opportunity. Going through the exercise in the first part of this chapter should have produced a dozen ideas.

Not all the ideas you’ve generated will be worth pursuing, so pick the three that you think are the most promising. In other words, the three that offer the greatest differentiation and the largest number of benefits to either your customers or your company. Why three? Because three gives you a good range to experiment, challenge assumptions, and gather feedback in the next stage.

These are usually the ideas that you and everyone on your team (if you’re working in a team) recognizes as sure winners. Others aren’t nearly as good, and everyone might agree that they’re unworkable.

A word of caution: Don’t worry about trying to select the most practical ideas; focus on the most disruptive ones. We’ll work on developing the practical ones in the next stage of the process (see Chapter 4). In the meantime, try to look past the obvious, and be sure to consider some ideas you aren’t sure about and that are unusual enough to be disruptive.

Many significant innovations in the last century got their start as unexpected discoveries or seemingly impractical ideas. One of the most famous of these occurred in 1928 when Scottish Scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu and noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his Petri dishes and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. The result? Penicillin.

Refine Three Ideas

After you select your three ideas, start the process of refining them into a more holistic and powerful form.

The stumbling block here is that many organizations still think of their offerings to customers as isolated products, services, and information. When they do think of these components together, companies tend to use the word bundle, which still has the connotation of separate products. But, as I mentioned, real meaning comes when an offering is blended in such a way that the product, service, and information components can’t succeed independently.

Two blending techniques are especially helpful (they’re the two I use when working with clients):

• Blend the bits. Start thinking about the product, service, and information bits simultaneously. So, if one of your ideas is for a new product, what are the services and networked information that would be essential in supporting that product?

For example, the phone we developed for Disney started as an idea for a cordless phone that rests in a charging base that looks like Mickey’s shoe (the product). We then added a way for people to find misplaced handsets. By pressing a button on the charging base, Mickey’s voice would scream, “I’m over here!” (information). This then led us to think about “downloadable character voices” so Donald Duck and Goofy could tell you where they are, too (the service).

• Blend the benefits. Always remember that, with few exceptions, whatever you’re offering has to benefit three key customers: partners, buyers, and users. What are the benefits? Whom do they benefit? How and under what circumstances are they delivered? If only one or two of those customer groups actually reaps the benefits, try to even things out. Otherwise, your offer may end up too lopsided to be successful.

The new media brand Hulu, for example, does a great job of recognizing that it has three types of customers, and it makes every benefit decision in a balanced way. According to CEO Jason Kilar, “I’m not saying it’s easy, but we constantly live that delicate balance between our three customers and not sacrificing one out of the three or two out of the three. If you ever stop by the office, I think you’d feel that advertiser focus. You’d feel that user focus and you’d feel that content provider focus.”¹²

Likewise, the Disney offering needed to deliver benefits to the partners (retailers), the buyers (parents), and the users (kids) at every point where a customer could possibly interact with it. Take, for example, the point of purchase.

For the kids, the benefit was seeing their favorite characters on the packaging and being able to interact with the boxes and products at their height. That sounds obvious, but standard shelving units (in anything other than a toy store) are too high for kids. For parents, it was learning about how multiple components worked together. For example, the products shipped with two remotes: the one for the kids had very few buttons, while the one for parents was as functional as most standard remotes. We conveyed this benefit by creating a looped DVD reel that demonstrated 16 different products in action as used by a family. All of this helped retailers achieve one of the highest “attachment rates” of TV and DVD player sales in the industry, meaning that parents bought them together instead of separately—a real rarity in consumer electronics.

Your search for benefits should take into consideration how the ideas will be implemented (through existing channels and operations?), and the consequences of implementation (will the full benefits come through in months, years, or decades?). Consider also when and where the idea will be used. What will happen at those key touchpoints in the short term, medium term, and long term?

Write down every possible benefit you can come up with—not just the obvious ones. And be prepared to make some changes to make those benefits more obvious.

What Are Your Disruptive Ideas?
(Getting Past Stumbling Block 3)

Talking about ideas—as opposed to documenting them—keeps them general and abstract. And an abstract idea is harder to understand and remember—both for you and anyone else you might want to share it with. Showing ideas, on the other hand, makes them specific and concrete, which in turn, makes them easy to share, understand, and remember.

So, after you refine your three ideas by blending the bits and the benefits, you need to create a one-page or slide overview of each idea, accurately describing it in words and pictures. If you decide you want to further develop an idea into a solution for the market, having documented your ideas in this way will make it easier to get critical feedback from consumers. Use the following list as a guide for putting together your one-pager.

• Name: Giving your idea a name is the first step toward making it concrete and easily graspable by others. Pick a name that accurately represents the idea and makes it stand out. It should be short, memorable, and credible. Finally, make it easy to pronounce and easy on the ears when it’s spoken. Look to the marketplace and examples of your favorite brands for inspiration: BlackBerry, PayPal, Under Armor, FedEx. All strong names.

To make the name of your idea stand out, remember that people have a better chance of remembering something unique than something common; that’s just the way our memory works. So, once you have a name that you think accurately represents the idea, give it a twist—deliberately misspell it, mess with the grammar, collapse two words together, or add additional letters. Quentin Tarantino did this with his 2009 movie Inglorious Basterds.

If you need a little guidance on naming, there’s plenty to learn from the movie industry. Consultant and former MGM Executive Stephanie Palmer once asked a client, “Can you imagine seeing a movie called 3,000 Dollars? Can you identify the genre?”¹³ According to Stephanie, that was the original title of Pretty Woman, and the $3,000 was the fee Julia Roberts’ character charged for her services.

Although you can’t overestimate the power of a great name, don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on it. We’re not talking about a public-facing brand, so 10-15 minutes should be plenty of time. Right now, the name’s sole purpose is to help the people you share it with understand and remember it.

• Describe: The next step is to concisely describe the central message you want to communicate. How concise? One sentence. You want to capture the following:

• What it is (label).

• Whom it’s for (user).

• Why they should care (benefit).

• How your idea will deliver that benefit (method).

When you’re ready to try putting together your description, use this template:

A___________ [label] that allows___________ [user] to___________ [benefit] by ___________[method].

Let’s examine the four components of the one-sentence description in more detail. (And yes, I see the irony in taking two pages to describe how to craft one sentence.)

• Label: The label you assign to your idea refers to the category the idea will be associated with, and how broad or narrow you want that association to be. A label is a trigger feature—that is, when people encounter a new idea, they have a tendency to respond in terms of what they already know. The label you give an idea cues people toward a particular set of associations. For example, imagine that you’ve got a new idea for how people can clean their teeth. You could use either “toothbrush” or “oral care device” as a label. The difference is significant.

“Toothbrush” is specific and carries a hard-edged association, so everything that you’re presenting about your new idea for “cleaning teeth” is now filtered through the listener’s mental image of how a toothbrush should look, function, be used, priced, sold, distributed, and so on. On the other hand, the label “oral care device” is broader and carries a wider set of associations (mouthwash, floss, whitening strips, and so on). A toothbrush may pop into people’s minds, but they’ll generally be more open to alternative ways of thinking about the cleaning of teeth.

• User: Although this solution may benefit many different groups (such as producers, buyers, and suppliers), who is the primary end user or consumer you’re trying to reach?

• Benefit: What’s the one key benefit that the user derives from the solution you’re proposing?

• Method: This refers to the specific ways your solution will deliver the benefit. A toothbrush, for example, is a handle with a head of bristles that holds toothpaste.

Coming up with a one-sentence description is more complicated than it sounds. One great way to give yourself a little practice is to spend some time looking closely at the products and services you see every day. Try to extract the four components and describe them in one sentence.

Example: A digital music system that allows people on the move to carry 1,000 songs in their pocket by synchronizing a portable device with an online music store. (iPod)

Example: A point-and-shoot video camera that allows anyone with Internet access to figure out, in seconds, how to record and share videos with low-quality footage and stripped-down features. (Flip Ultra)

To refine your description, ask yourself, “Could this describe anything else?” If the answer is yes, your description is too generic. Look for ways to further customize it to your idea. It’s usually not a matter of making the description longer. Instead, look to make each of the four terms in the sentence more specific.

• Differentiate: It’s important that you emphasize the differences between your disruptive idea and any competing offerings that may be floating around in the same industry or context. But, being different isn’t enough. Your idea must be different in ways that are valued by and relevant to potential customers. Being different means making tradeoffs in the features and functionality of your disruptive idea.

Here’s how journalist Robert Capps describes the tradeoffs that Pure Digital had to make to differentiate its Flip cameras from other camcorders:

It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, Panasonic, and Canon were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi-def. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn’t even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.¹⁴

As it turned out, these differences were highly valued by customers. Pure Digital sold more than a million units in the first year and quickly captured 17 percent of the camcorder market. In the years since, Sony, Canon, Panasonic, Kodak, and others have come out with similar cameras.

• Visualize: The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is just as true in simple situations as it is in complex ones. Try, for example, to describe the physical process for filling a water glass. Even the most basic systems quickly start sounding awkward.¹⁵ “When I fill a glass of water, there is a feedback process that causes me to adjust the faucet position, which adjusts the water flow and alters the water level. The goal of the process is to make the water in the glass rise to my desired level.”

A drawing of the system, or a visual representation of the process, is much easier to digest.

Consider the process of making a movie. Sure, a script provides a verbal summary of events. But, the storyboard that goes along with the script is far more powerful and efficient. Simple pictures and sketches of each key scene communicate to a diverse set of people working on the set. One simple picture can provide direction to dozens of cast and crewmembers. It can show the set designers what to create, the camera crew where to position the camera, the costume designers what to design, and the actors how to relate.

Your disruptive idea needs to be visual to concretely describe its components, features, and functionality; in other words, how does it work? For example, if you have an idea for a new set of music headphones with a retractable microphone for cell phone use, you need to show people how it would be worn and used. It is not enough just to list features. Visualizing how your idea works ensures that everyone you show it to will see it the same way.

Elizabeth Diller, New York architect and co-founder of Diller Scofidio and Renfro, once advised a student, “It’s not enough to say the screens will show digital information.” This leaves matters at a far-too-general level. ‘What digital information will they show?’”¹⁶

One final word of advice: Don’t worry about getting your visualization perfect or let yourself get locked-in to whatever details you’ve included. The details you give when you visualize your concepts aren’t necessarily in their final form. In the next stage, we’ll run your idea through all sorts of refinements and changes. But at this stage of the process, any visualization—no matter how rough or approximate—is better than none.

Think Outside the Socks! The Disruptive Idea

Having discovered the opportunity, Jonah and his partners needed to generate some ideas for how to brand and sell mismatched socks. They broke the opportunity down and started with the challenge of how to stand out in a crowded market. Jonah knew from his experience with consumer product retailers that corporate buyers have different price points for similar products. Items classified as “licensed” (think Disney, Nike, Dell, Harley-Davidson) command a higher price than products classified as “general merchandise” (think generics and store brands).

In Jonah’s mind, there was no reason this same logic couldn’t work for socks. This led to the idea of creating a catchy name and a character that would appeal to tweens and set the brand apart from the clutter. They came up with several other ways of setting their new brand apart from the generic competition. Perhaps the most important was the idea that the socks shouldn’t be packaged and sold in the traditional way. Socks sold in pairs are expected to match. What would suggest that the socks intentionally did not match? Socks sold in sets of three.

As we talked about in this chapter, sketching things out is critical. In this case, they needed to get down on paper a vision of the brand’s character and what the mismatched socks would look like. They sketched a graphic of Little Miss Matched herself—a tween girl with a knowing smirk—that became the face of the brand. To help visualize the mismatched socks, one of the partners created a versatile color and pattern palette that was both fun and sophisticated. She then created watercolor drawings of 133 style combinations, with none of them matching (but, because of the clever palette, they all looked good together).