The folks at IdeaConnection interviewed me about Innovation mythology, the rate of change, and how progress happens. The book’s been out for six months, but there were some fun questions here I hadn’t heard before. Here’s an excerpt:

VB: One myth you talk about is the one that says today’s technologies are a logical and foregone conclusion of our past. Do you think the potential existed in the past, for our present to be a very different place? If so, could you speculate in what ways and why?

Scott Berkun:
If we believe that we have free will, and that we have the power to make choices in the present, then we have to believe people 20 or 100 years ago had the same freedom to make choices. We could have had steam powered cars: the first trains and automobiles were in fact steam powered. Many U.S. cities regret pulling out their networks of downtown cable cars, as now it’s prohibitively expensive to retrofit cities with much needed public transportation. The rise of both Microsoft and Google depended heavily on the mistakes of their early competitors and predecessors. Had Xerox, Palo Alto Research Centre, Atari, IBM, or AltaVista made one or two different decisions; we’d have a very different world.

You can read the full interview here.

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As part of her Sunday business column on ideas, Janet Rae-Dupree quotes both me and the book a few times in Eureka: it really takes years of hard work.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, creative thinking | 2 Comments »

One of my most popular blog posts ever, how to write a book, generates tons of comments and e-mail every week. Here’s an interesting one I couldn’t help but respond to:

David wrote:

Great article, gave me lots of inspiration and hope. I just submitted a proposal to O’Reilly, and it was rejected within 30 minutes. Very efficient, and very nicely worded, but devastating nonetheless. What do you do if you think you have a great idea, but the world disagrees?

The first rule of creative work: expect to be rejected. Ask anyone who reviews creative work of any kind, whether it’s screenplays, music demos, or book proposals, and they’ll tell you they reject a ratio of at least 20 or 30 to 1. Sometimes it’s 1000 to 1 in the case of movie actors or works of fiction. There is nothing wrong with you or your work simply because you have been rejected. Rejection means you are doing something many others want to do and it’s hard work.

Ask any writer, including the famous, how many rejection slips they’ve seen. They’ll laugh and tell you about how they papered their wall with them. Seriously, rejection is part of the game. I note many of these stories in The Myths of Innovation. The Star Wars screenplay was rejected by almost every major studio. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance was turned down over 100 times. Stephen King, J.K. Rawlings, John Grisham, you name it, they’ve been rejected. Do not give up hope: instead, use rejection as fuel. Prove them wrong. Get better at your craft. Work harder, and when you’re finished, send them a signed copy with your warmest regards.

In some ways how you handle rejection is self selection for creative work - if you cant handle a few rejections from publishers, how will you handle a few bad reviews of your finished book? No matter what you do, if you’re making something, many people won’t like it. In fact the more popular the thing is, the more people who will pick on it and for increasingly trivial reasons.

As I mentioned in the post, one major advantage of living in 2008 is how cheap it is to make things yourself. The only approval you need to create something is your own. You can self publish a book, make a video or a bunch of mp3s for just a few hundred bucks. If the world isn’t behind you, to hell with the world - do it anyway. The only thing stopping you is you.

Posted in Innovation, On writing, creative thinking | 6 Comments »

On days like this when someone famous is honored, I try to dig up something they wrote to compare what I think I know about that person and why they’re famous, with what they actually did and said. It’s always enlightening, but sometimes I find unexpected gems like this:

(yes it’s 3 long paragraphs, but I bet you $50 it’s the best writing you’ll read today).

Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within,” dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

If we believe this, then why is so little of what we talk about when we use the word innovation directed at helping people make, in MLKs terms, internal progress?

Read the full transcript of MLK’s amazing acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, from Dec, 1964.

(hat tip to truehoop)

Posted in Innovation, philosophy | 7 Comments »

This was a special talk for two reasons. First, as my opening story explains, I delivered a special surprise to someone in the audience. Second, the 9am crowd was surprisingly lively and helped me put on a good show.

The talk covers a few topics from The Myths of Innovation, including epiphanies, the problems with innovation history, and many true stories about how great innovations actually happened.

Podcast (70 minutes, 30mb), Slides and description.

(Skip to the 11:05 mark in the podcast to bypass intros).

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, On Tour | No Comments »

There’s a very good piece in Wired on how the i-phone was made. Unlike most coverage of the i-phone and Apple in general, this piece explores the early mistakes that were made, the rejections Jobs and Apple faced, and how they managed to pull off the deal with AT&T. It’s good stuff and avoids most of the easy myths around how innovation happens.

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From all my travels and speaking gigs in 2007, I’m most confident about the following advice: Stop using the word innovation in 2008. Just stop. Right now. Commit to never saying the word again. Einstein, Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, and Edison rarely said the word and neither should you. Every crowd I’ve said this to laughed and agreed. The I-word is killing us.

Here’s why: it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Or more specifically, it means many different things. Unless you are taking the time to make sure everyone is using the word the same way, good communication about ideas and creativity is unlikely to happen.

Four tips:

1. Ask people who use the word what they mean. This is easy. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved the room a ton of time. Often they don’t know: they’re using the i-word as a cop-out for clear thinking.
2. Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas. Great. Any of those short phrases are more powerful and specific than the i-word. Use them instead.
3. Ban the i-word from e-mails and internal documents. It’s one thing for marketers to use innovation in press releases. It’s another to let that word cloud up how people making things think about what they’re making. Force your team to be precise and give up the crutch of the innovation word. Reward people who use the word sparingly and find better ways to communicate.
4. Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do. If you work somewhere that struggles to make a half-decent product, with the morale of a prison, why are you talking about innovation? You have to get the training wheels off before entering the Daytona 500. If you can making something good, that solves real problems, works reliably, is affordable, and is built by a happy, motivated and well rewarded staff, you’ll kick your competitor’s asses. Focus on solving those real problems. If you succeed on those innovation, in all its forms, will likely take care of itself.

At lunch 2.0 I talked more about abuse of the word and alternative definitions. Video and podcast.

Posted in Innovation, Management | 14 Comments »

The talk I did at Lunch 2.0 a few weeks ago at the F5 office in downtown Seattle is now online. You can watch the video, or download an mp3/podcast. It’s an interactive Q&A about innovation and invention, ~45 minutes.

Fun stuff, no slides, and some good questions. One factual error: I claim Swift had the patent for the light bulb, but it’s Swan.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, On Tour | 1 Comment »

Thanks to everyone who sent in articles on geniuses in response to my how to be a genius essay. A few folks mentioned this great two part essay by Joel Achenbach of the Washington post, all about how geniuses have failed.

Here’s one of many choice quotes:

“For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have been stumped by the play. It’s so . . . awful. Mention “Titus Andronicus” to Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale and policeman of the Western canon, and he immediately says, ‘Boy, is that bad. It’s just a bloodbath. There’s not a memorable line in it.’

The Bard, bad? How’s that possible? Isn’t Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of the English language, pulling away from the pack like Secretariat at the Belmont? How could the same guy write “King Lear” and this crappy thing?

Here’s the best explanation: Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world. “

Read the rest of When genius bombs at Achenblog.

Posted in Innovation, creative thinking | 1 Comment »

The new IAC building in Chelsea (NYC) has one of the world’s largest video screens, and this media professor used it to project the film Run Lola Run, as a sequence of hundreds of stills. The effect is like a real time, moving time-line of the movie.

I hope this professor teaches better than he runs the camera, as his frequent movements annoy, but it’s still worth watching.

Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman on Vimeo.

(Hat tip, kottke.org)

Posted in Innovation, movies | 2 Comments »

It’s rare to find a short, well written paper than nails a subject popular books get wrong. If you agree, and care about breakthroughs and managing innovation, especially on software projects, this is the paper for you.

It’s called Managing for breakthroughs in productivity, by Allan L. Scherr (PDF).

The article comes from his experience as a manager of various projects at IBM and focuses on the patterns that make breakthroughs possible. What was most striking for me is how little jargon and theory he requires to make his points.

He identifies:

• Breakdowns. Often something has to go wrong for the opportunity for breakthroughs to happen. It’s at the moment where a project faces a challenge, whether by design or by circumstance, that the opportunity for a breakthrough surfaces. How a manager responds to a breakdown creates, or denies, a potential breakthrough (Do I blame people all day, or use it to create an opportunity?)
• Assertion vs. Declaration . He identifies the difference between work a programmer can prove they can do (Assertion), vs. what they believe they can do (Declaration). For breakthroughs to occur, people must be given a chance to do work than can not be proven: ambition and risk are necessary for breakthroughs. If individuals are not trusted to take risks, breakthroughs are unlikely.
• Team commitment . He identifies that failure on one part of a breakthrough project must be aided by other people on the project. A group where everyone only cares about their own component is unlikely to make a breakthrough, as the high risk guarantees some component of the project will fall behind and how the rest of the team responds (support, aid, advice, blame?) decides the fate of the entire project.

It might be the best 15 pages I’ve read on managing breakthrough projects in a year, much better than most of the books and other commonly referenced sources. The first 3 pages are dry but I promise it gets better.

Managing for breakthroughs in productivity, by Allan L. Scherr (PDF). (Hat tip to Gregg Gordon @ SSRN).

Posted in Innovation, Management | 5 Comments »

I hate most systems of innovation I see or read about, as they fail to directly attack most of core challenges innovators face. But one idea I’m found of is the idea approval index. Here’s how it works:

How many approvals do you need to release something to a customer?

Think it through. It’s probably more than you think. Include informal or implicit approvals. Even if you’re the CEO, can you code the idea yourself? Design it? There are always people to convince or cajole.

The higher the number, the harder innovation is. The lower the number, the easier. It’s that simple. For example:

A) Joe Blogger has an idea for a way to radically improve his wordpress blog. He stays up late and codes it up. The next morning he posts it on his website. Idea Approval Index = 1. It’s just him - he thinks it, makes it, ships it.

B Fred is the engineering lead at Bozotech. He stays up late and codes it up. He shows it to another engineering lead for some feedback. They review it with the Quality assurance manager, who requests some changes, and get their designer to clean up their UI. Finally they show it to the group manager who loves it, and asks them to present it at the next feature review meeting (4 other team leads). Finally, days later, the web team agrees to get it online. Idea Approval Index (IAI) = 10 .

Counting approvals is a rough guide - it tells you how many chances there are for an idea to get killed before it makes it out the door.

Are there problems with this metric? Sure (Feel free to play devil’s advocate in the comments). But as a rough guide it’s handy. If you want more innovation and change, you want to lower the approval index. If you want more predictability and stability, raise the index. If you want both at the same time, on the same project, you’ve got a tougher problem - I’ve got answers: leave a comment if you care and I’ll post a follow-up.

It’s no surprise that the risk taking required to develop a new idea most often happens in small groups or by people working solo - their approval index is low.

Posted in Innovation, Management, creative thinking | 9 Comments »