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CHAPTER EIGHT

ITERATION AND INNOVATION
ARE PERSONAL

If you were a product, how would you iterate yourself to be more innovative? Seriously, what simple “iterative” changes would you make to yourself so that you had the potential to be more innovative? Most people never look at themselves this way. Similarly, most people think that in order to be wildly successful in their career, they need to hit the proverbial “home run” all the time. That’s almost statistically impossible.

In this chapter, let me give you a better approach to embracing iteration and innovation in your personal life; then you can use that mindset, knowledge, and perspective to create some real impact in your professional career, too.

THE SIMPLICITY OF ITERATION

Most of the world’s new products and services come from iterations of existing products and services. Why? It’s just easier to incrementally improve something we already know from our memory or that we can physically touch or see. It’s really hard to come up with something totally new that the world has never seen before. So, in order to embrace fully the notion that iteration can lead to innovation, let’s look at how you could bring the concept of iteration to yourself. You have limited resources and need to manage them effectively. Here are four powerful suggestions that if you adopt will “iterate” a more innovative you:

1. Simplify your life. You have limited resources (time, energy, money) and if you invest in fewer but more strategic life elements (commitments, goals, changes, etc.) you can get so much more focused. To do that, simplify or eliminate elements of your life. Here are a few suggestions: Watch less screens. Downsize your expenses. Do things in bulk (e.g., cook multiple meals at the same time or check email two or three times during the day rather than all the time). Don’t work on weekends (refresh yourself). Learn to say no more often. . . . You see, productivity is not about doing more; it’s about doing things well.

2. Little things matter. Just as with products or services, incremental changes are easier to get done. So, look at the key elements in your life and look at where you can make simple “iterative” changes. It’s too hard to change yourself overnight (via a fad diet) or radically adjust your monthly budget. But it is easy to make a cup of coffee at home and not spend $4 daily for a cup of Starbucks; that $20 a week adds up to $1,040 a year. Make a few little changes that allow you to live simpler and with less clutter and expense.

3. Be more curious. Take stock of your professional life. Do you have an amazing mentor? If not, find one. Could you improve your network by adding people with different backgrounds and perspectives? When was the last time you visited a place you don’t usually go to (e.g., an art gallery)? Read articles and books on subjects that are trending. Try food that is presented in a different way. Go take a drawing class. Look at the things you do in your life that you enjoy and investigate them further.

4. Get things done. As you think about the previous suggestions, don’t just ponder them—start doing them. Don’t be someone that always talks about making changes but never seems to do them. If one of your goals is to run a marathon (big goal), do something small first: Get a subscription to Runner’s World or buy a new pair of running shoes or perhaps go to a runners’ meet up, all before you start running. Do something small and iterative to get going.

It’s not always easy to make changes in our lives. But we are responsible for what we choose to do. So commit to making small iterative changes to your life that begin to shape a more innovative you.

PERSONAL INNOVATION

Hopefully, by now you realize that the notion that some people are just born to be more creative and innovative is just not true. You can intentionally affect your mindset and perspective with regard to innovation. Here are some simple but powerful perspectives on creating that more innovative you:

The innovation switch is always on. Innovation is about approaching your daily work and the challenges you face with an open mind and a creative, can-do attitude. It’s about seeking unconventional solutions to the problems on your plate. At work, it’s looking at everything you do and figuring out where you can do better, in less time, with fewer motions, in a way that adds value to both internal and external customers. Instead of approaching a single task with the attitude, “Okay, now I’ve got to get creative,” the innovator approaches everything in life with this attitude. Instead of looking at “being creative” as something you need to do consciously, see it as something you do unconsciously, like breathing.

Innovation needs to add value. When the global economic crisis hit, everything changed. Four-dollar lattes suddenly became unaffordable luxuries. McDonald’s attacked with McCafé. Dunkin’ Donuts began serving premium coffee. Starbucks was forced to shutter 800 stores, lay off 5,000 employees, cut $500 million in costs, offer discounts, advertise, and look for even more ways to become efficient. Innovation is about more than innovating new products. It’s understanding where you can add the most value where you are every day.

Innovation is needed everywhere. Many times I’ve heard people make assumptions and say, “My company doesn’t want me to be creative. They just want me to get my work done.” The question isn’t whether innovation is wanted and needed in your firm; it’s where and when it’s needed. Be curious when a senior employee or manager tells you why things are done the way they are. Certainly listen to that voice in your head when you see a better way of doing something. And then channel that big-picture, “opportunity- spotting” mindset right back into how you do your work.

Walk the talk. Innovation is about taking action. Like all of us, you could have a good idea and just not follow through with it. And we are good at coming up with excuses. We can blame bureaucracy. We are good at convincing ourselves that innovating a new idea went “beyond our job description.” We could turn the idea over to someone else to pursue. But here is what you need to do: Take action. Overcome the obstacles and get buy-in for a new idea and refuse to take “no” for an answer. Do.

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

By now, you are starting to understand that creativity, and possibly innovation, are directly related to having the right mindset, the right environment, and the right habitat. The word “innovation” might conjure up the thought that you have to have a breakthrough idea to be truly innovative. Wrong. You would be better served to have a mentality of believing that to successfully innovate is to be prepared to iterate like crazy. As Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

We have the mistaken belief that most of the things in the world we know must have been these amazing innovations. Not so. Apple did not create the world’s first MP3 player when it launched the iPod. Google was not the world’s first search engine (about twenty others were created before it). Facebook did not launch social media. Coca-Cola was not the world’s first soft drink. McDonald’s did not create the hamburger. Henry Ford did not create the world’s first automobile. Is Netflix an innovation over Blockbuster? Probably not; perhaps only an evolution of an existing service to a new service. Why does all this talk of iteration versus innovation matter? And what does that have to do with creativity? Because you need to know that you can be creative and innovative by being iterative. Most of the world’s new products or services are derivatives from other existing products or services. It’s hard to create a breakthrough product or service without first examining the current products or services in the marketplace with your problem in mind. You can address a health and fitness problem with a new product from two existing products (fitness tracking + health monitoring = Fitbit). And if you are working on something revolutionary, which will involve innovation (let’s say the Internet), you still need to study the problem from different perspectives. Vinton Gray “Vint” Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet, studied computer-to-computer communications and networking protocols for years before helping to “connect the dots” and create the leap from a government-based network backbone to what we now know as the Internet.

MAKE IT BETTER TO MAKE IT GREAT

Channeling T. S. Eliot’s maxim “Good poets copy, great poets steal,” Steve Jobs once said, “At Apple, we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Our marketing agency worked with Steve at NeXT, Pixar, and Apple and he did not mean “legally” steal. He meant that innovation is simply improving something previously invented, or taking small and powerful iterative steps to make something better.

It’s not about copying. It’s about purposely taking something to another level to better solve a problem. Look at how we have “iterated or evolved” the mobile phone into today’s smartphone. While the first mobile phone was probably revolutionary, the phones following were iterations and maybe an evolution to smartphones today. If you start with an existing product or service and look to improve it in some small way, your iteration might be an innovation. Or better yet, a successful product or service.

THINK SMALL TO GET BIG

When thinking about creating something new or solving a big problem, start with an iteration mentality and perhaps you might create an innovative product or company. You should know that innovation has several stepping-stones. Let’s examine the different spectrums of innovation: incremental (iterations), evolutionary, and revolutionary.

[SPECTRUMS OF INNOVATION]

Incremental innovation involves small but critical adjustments to existing services or products, and I feel like this is what we see the most of in today’s marketplaces. These types of innovations, although small, still matter a lot. So please don’t interpret incremental innovation as a substitute for bad to good or less meaningful to more meaningful. Iterative innovations are vital. They typically do not bring about a larger change in the marketplace. But they can be wildly successful with a specific target market. Examples are a Dropbox product (storage in the cloud versus on your hard drive) or perhaps Facebook, which by improving the interface of the social media platform, rocketed its way to become a dominant leader.

Evolutionary innovation can seem like a massive change. But, at its heart, the “new thing” is still strongly grounded in the “old thing.” A little more dramatic and noticeable than iterative innovations, evolutionary innovations have the potential to lead to larger-scale changes. But, with hindsight, they tend to be an intermediary step along the way to something different. Think of LinkedIn replacing business cards or Netflix moving on from Blockbuster. Both examples involve a new medium and environment, although the product or service, at its core, is not new.

Revolutionary innovation, as one might deduce, truly involves something different that leaves much of the old behind. Using phones as an example, whatever replaces landline phones entirely will be a revolutionary innovation. When the first cell phone was created, it was a revolutionary innovation. You might say the first television, the first zipper, the first chainsaw, the first firearm, and the first sewing machine all were revolutionary innovations that sparked or exploded big marketplaces. What do you see or are curious about that you should investigate?

It’s really hard to create a revolutionary product or service. They usually come about when someone has been studying a problem with an existing product or when faced with a big problem in a marketplace. How do we cut a forest down with an axe or a saw? Is there a faster way or better way? Chainsaw. Don’t start with the notion that you have to create a revolutionary new product innovation. Instead, study a problem in a marketplace where the current products or services are falling short of their customers’ expectations. Therein lies the opportunity.

IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

It may not sound sexy, but starting a new business or division that builds on an existing technology, product, or business model is usually less risky and smarter than introducing something that is completely disruptive and needs customer adoption. Can you afford to educate, nurture, and bring the customers along with you? Maybe, if you have $50 million. There are many levels of innovation that go beyond copying someone else’s idea but stop short of pushing the bleeding edge.

Many of the major businesses that are around today started this way. McDonald’s did not really invent the fast-food model; it simply improved on the cookie-cutter White Castle process. Starbucks did not invent the coffee café; it just improved on creating a friendly place that happens to have coffee. Apple did not invent portable media players, smartphones, or laptop computers; it just made them easier to use.

The advantage of imitation, with incremental innovation, is that it usually gives you a large existing customer base. It also allows you to take advantage of products or companies that have come before you so that you can perhaps move faster with less risk. Let’s examine the advantages of incremental (iteration) innovation:

Eliminates Research and Development: If you can draw on observations, research, and other data from existing products, customers, competitors, and marketplaces, you don’t need to do as much research to quantify a marketplace opportunity. For example, if you knew the pet food segment in the pet industry was stable, that there were 77 million dogs in the United States, and that healthy pet food trends were on the rise, it’s not a stretch to simply deliver organic dog food to the marketplace.

Learns from Early Adopters and Competitors: Smart startups save cost and time by capitalizing on the pivots of others before them. Market research can thus be based on real customers and a previously tested market. Studying and learning from the mistakes of others is the best way to reduce your own risks. Facebook did this perfectly, learning from what Friendster and MySpace had done right and wrong to move more quickly into the social media marketplace.

Drives Progress Through Continuous Innovation: The computer industry and others have used this model for years, so business processes and metrics for innovation are well documented. Disruptive technologies are random and their success is unpredictable. Good imitators, such as McDonald’s, often bypass the original innovator. As an aside, I worked with Amazon in the early days and it was not the first online bookseller. Who was? Who cares.

Looks to Related Markets or Another Country: The world is now an increasingly small place, and startups or new product divisions usually don’t have the resources to saturate all of the markets at once. Imitation with innovation is a great way to jump ahead of the curve. Timing is critical, as is a focus on marketing and meeting customer needs. Remember, competitors can also move quickly, and there may not be intellectual property (IP) to protect you. Amazingly, many startups outside the USA look to Silicon Valley and then quickly create their equivalent of a successful company (e.g., Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo!, Airbnb, or even a new retail product or service) in their own regional markets.

SET YOUR INNOVATION SIGHTS ON MARKETPLACES

People pitch me ideas all the time. In my role as director at the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center, I listen to pitches from students and local entrepreneurs and get to hear lots of interesting ideas. But let’s assume you are a would-be entrepreneur but you don’t have an amazing idea for a startup. Or you are a product marketing specialist struggling to come up with a new product. Here is a thought. Rather than straining to come up with an “innovative idea,” examine a large and/or growing marketplace thoroughly; get to know its workings so well that you might well surface a problem or opportunity. Only then should you try to create that new product or service. Sound backward? I don’t think so. Let’s look at what has happened to the “taxi service/car rental” marketplace in the past fifteen or so years. What was the core customer problem? One, people needed to get somewhere. Secondary problem: They don’t like the service from taxis. However, the only solution in the marketplace was to either rent a car (expensive) or take a taxi. Zipcar was founded in June 2000 to solve that problem. Car rental whenever you need it, by the hour, in your local town. Here comes the competition in 2008 with Car2Go. Similar service with a few “iterative” twists. Let’s say you are looking at this growing marketplace but you don’t have the money to buy a fleet of cars to start your business. What do you do? In our class, we would have had a creative brainstorming session and we would have created an “evolutionary” solution, driven by our lack of funding. What would we have created to solve the problem of getting someone from A to B a little bit easier and better? Uber.

I am a big fan of large, emerging, or disrupted marketplaces. The notion that people just need to come up with new ideas to create a successful company may work sometimes, but I have learned that it’s the marketplace that matters most. You can have an amazing idea, but if there is no clear market opportunity, it might just as well be worthless. So, a better way to look at product or service innovation is to start with the marketplace, then follow with the idea, which usually is a solution to a problem customers are having.

If you are looking for innovative ideas for new products and services, consider them in the context of their marketplace. So, if you generate some creative ideas and you take your best idea and it’s a potentially great product or service, put that idea into the marketplace. But ask yourself these simple questions first:

Does my idea solve a problem in the marketplace?

Can I easily test my idea in the marketplace?

Is the market easily defined?

Can I reach people in the marketplace easily?

Is the market growing?

Does the leader in the market offer this idea?

Will customers value my idea?

Is the marketplace being disrupted?

Is the marketplace fragmented?

With the CreativityWorks Framework in mind, examine some growing marketplaces, take the best one, and either target a favorable market or come up with a low-risk strategy in a potentially unfavorable market. You really can’t put together a product innovation and implementation strategy unless you understand the marketplace and its potential customers. The more you examine that potential marketplace, the more you will learn. Remember, you don’t “need” to create an original, unique solution to create an amazing product or company. You just need to solve a real problem or better meet a customer need.

The next six chapters are shorter and to the point and highlight the six brainstorming tools I use in my Creativity and Innovation course. By the way, I use the same brainstorming tools with the twenty or so business founders I mentor whenever they need to drive some creative solutions or solve a problem. I do eat my own dog food.