My Early Innovation Experiences

I’ve been focusing exclusively on innovation for more than a decade now. In that time, I’ve been a researcher, a writer, a strategic adviser to large and small companies, an entrepreneur building businesses in the United States and in Asia, and an investor in start-up companies. My innovation experience actually predates these experiences; innovation has in fact surrounded me my entire life. I came to learn that my grandfather, who we’ll meet in more depth in chapter 1, introduced a powerful business model innovation in the 1960s. In the late 1980s, my mother launched a business called RelayNet, which was a precursor to the Internet. In an alternative universe, she ended up becoming America Online founder Steve Case, selling RelayNet to Time Warner for billions (unfortunately, in this universe, she transferred ownership to another bulletin board owner for nothing). My mother also pitched a book idea in the early 1990s for a series of books that provided simple, step-by-step instructions for how to use computers under the title Up and Running. The publishers thought the idea wouldn’t sell. Tens of millions of For Dummies copies later … Fortunately for my family’s psychological balance, my mother found a place where she could devote her energy and passion—breeding a line of champion Labradors.

As I was growing up, my family was always an early adopter of new technologies. I remember playing Star Raiders on our Atari 2600, MicroLeague Baseball on our Commodore 64, One on One: Larry Bird vs. Dr. J on our Apple II, and Tecmo Bowl on our Nintendo.⁴ I was active on RelayNet in my teenage years, even writing an application that one poor soul paid $25 to register.⁵

The author in 1995, taking a break from work at The Dartmouth.

Fast-forward to my college years, the setting for my innovator’s dilemma. By day I was an economics major, and I took my studies seriously. By night I was active in The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s five-day-a-week paper. I was an accidental journalist. Honestly, I joined the newspaper because the one commitment I made to myself upon coming to Dartmouth was that I would find a serious extracurricular activity. Although I was happy that I had gotten into Dartmouth, getting rejected as an undergraduate by Harvard and Stanford stung.⁶ And it was pretty obvious to me why I was rejected, as my most serious out-of-school activity in high school was serving as a founding member of the Young John Madden’s Fan Club.⁷

I wandered into the newspaper’s offices in Robinson Hall in the fall of 1992 and almost immediately fell in love. A few years later, when I went to work in management consulting, I would learn that journalism is a lot like consulting. You have a problem that you have to solve in a pretty short time. You gather as much data as you can, synthesize that data, and present it back in an easy-to-understand format. I began spending almost all of my free time at the newspaper, eventually rising to managing director, in charge of the editorial side of the newspaper.

It turned out that my time at school coincided with the beginnings of a technological revolution. On August 9, 1995, Netscape went public, an event that essentially marked the beginning of the Internet economy. Dartmouth was a particularly wired campus—even then, every student was required to have a computer, and almost all campus communication ran through a simple, ubiquitous e-mail program called BlitzMail. Since I was a bit of tinkerer (I had taken a Web site design class for kicks and designed a site to track my fantasy baseball team), the newspaper’s president (my longtime friend Justin Steinman) asked me to come up with a strategy for our Internet operations.

I cringe when I look back at the 1995 article that explains the strategy that I cooked up. The article starts by describing why we ended up being one of the last Ivy League newspapers to go on the Internet. The quote stares out at me: “We have a relatively small staff and it wasn’t high on our list of priorities.” Justin had the article’s last word, noting that we’d update the Web site weekly because, “The D makes a significant amount of revenue from subscriptions.”

What did Justin mean? Too-frequent updating might threaten the core of our business model. In fact, about two-thirds of our $250,000 in annual revenue came from subscriptions. When we first saw the Internet, our first feeling was fear. We were scared of what would happen if we put our content up for free, and we had no idea how we’d charge for it. That fear led to us moving slowly.

We got over that fear, of course. After all, we were college kids who didn’t have to worry about meeting analyst expectations or defending ten-year plans to our board of directors. So what did we decide to do? Did we look at this as an opportunity to break free of the shackles that confined us to the bucolic isolation of Hanover, New Hampshire? Did we say, “Cool, a chance to reinvent ourselves and try to do something different”? Unfortunately, no.

“There will be people going through the Web,” I said in 1995, “who will see the page and say, ‘Gee, I’d like to subscribe to The D.’”

Instead of trying to do something cool and different, we tried to force-fit the new technology into our old way of doing business. My team at The Dartmouth and I had a chance to use the Internet to rethink our business, and we completely blew it. The opportunity was there. And we missed it.

The Cost of Constrained Innovation

Over the last decade, I have come to realize that we were members of a big club—call it the Innovation Wannabes. The club includes people who had the opportunity to successfully innovate, to create exciting new offerings and business models that turn into vibrant, profitable enterprises, and who failed. My mother is a member of the club. Christensen’s research shows how executives from onetime great companies like Digital Equipment Corporation; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; Sony; Blockbuster; and General Motors are in the club. Individuals who have struggled to make the changes that they knew were necessary in their personal lives are in the club.

We all wish we were in another club—call it the Innovation Maestros. A select few, whether by luck or by skill, seem to have mastered innovation. The iconic innovator of our age is surely Steve Jobs from Apple. I have never met Jobs, so I can’t say I have any unusual insight into him. But he is constantly portrayed as a creative genius who just sees things that other people can’t see and then, through sheer force of will, marshals resources to realize his vision. If the only hope for would-be innovators is to possess Jobsian genius, we’re doomed. We will never get past the velvet rope that guards this club.

This rope acts as a significant drag on the world economy. Entrepreneurs feel they have to give a huge chunk of their companies to venture capitalists to have any hope of succeeding. Companies spend literally billions of dollars to advertise products that customers don’t really want. Desperate growth-seeking companies will make Hail Mary acquisitions when the research clearly shows that large acquisitions, on average, destroy value.

Large companies are capable of—and often do—amazing things. But these firms just scratch the surface. The talent of their people, the technologies in their labs, and their global capabilities are constrained, held back by a mix of fear and misunderstanding. Too many would-be beautiful businesses that could reinvent markets and create substantial value live only in PowerPoint documents, never to be launched. And of course, there is huge psychic cost to individuals who want to change—who know they need to change—but just can’t.

Road Map to The Little Black Book of Innovation

You don’t have to be Steve Jobs to succeed at innovation. My past decade of working with companies, entrepreneurs, and government leaders has led to a strong personal conviction that there is tremendous innovation energy within every individual and every company. A precious few realize their full potential. But innovation is within the grasp of many more.

The good news is, to borrow a phrase from the popular 1990s television show The X-Files, the truth is out there. It is in the writings of the academic researchers who have decoded many of the mysteries of innovation. It is in the learning from forward-thinking practitioners who have picked up this academic work and brought it to the field, figuring out what happens in the laboratory that constitutes today’s business world.

Much of this learning is out of reach of the layperson. It is locked up in books that are too dense, or even worse, it is locked up in the heads of individuals. The Little Black Book of Innovation aims to address this issue by providing the tools and giving you the confidence to more reliably turn your dreams into reality.

I’ve organized this book into two main parts. Part 1 provides the book’s foundation. Chapter 1 describes the innovation imperative—what innovation is, and why all of us need to and can get better at innovation. Chapter 2 introduces twelve masters of innovation, whose tools should be in anyone’s black book. Chapters 3 and 4 draw on these tools to detail four mind-sets that empower innovation and seven pitfalls to avoid.

Part 2 introduces a twenty-eight-day innovation program. Each day in the program provides practical tools you can use to answer some of the most common questions facing the would-be innovator. The program is broken into four weeks:

• Week 1: Discovering Opportunities
• Week 2: Blueprinting Ideas
• Week 3: Assessing and Testing Ideas
• Week 4: Moving Forward

Of course, you don’t have to do the program in the specific order that I suggest—each day’s tip is meant to be largely self-contained. The book’s conclusion includes a table that summarizes the program.

This book is not comprehensive, nor does it attempt to provide a unifying innovation framework. Its goal is to give you enough to get started, to make innovation seem more approachable, and to provide pointers to where you can go to learn more.

You’ll get the most out of the material that follows if you have already identified an opportunity for innovation. It could be a project you just started at work. It could be a problem that has been nagging you for years. The problem could be big or small; it could be something at home or at the office. Pick something where you could use some inspiration. As chapter 1 argues, the need to get better at innovation is the imperative in today’s quickly changing world.