Observation 3 - Our understanding of how innovation typically happens is wrong

 Here I am writing, or at least I'm meant to be, but for whatever reason it isn't flowing I'm making no progress.  I try several different angles but none seem to help.  Frustrated by the lack of progress I decide to go for a walk on the beach, one of my favorite things.  I do this partly for the pure joy it  brings me and partly because of the expectation that while I am walking on the beach I will get the idea, the insight that I need to make progress.  It surprises me how often I do get the idea I need, I capture the essence of it on my phone, ponder on it for the rest of the walk and when I get back and start writing progress flows.

I reckon we all have some version of this. For you it might be while they are in the shower maybe it's doing housework. Perhaps switching to do some thing completely different or doing absolutely nothing at all. It could be almost anything but most us have had the experience of this moment of insight.  "Eureka"

The eureka moment is the start of how most people relate to innovation.  A genius has a moment of insight, a big idea. That big idea is then taken by the organisation and implemented, this is how innovation happens.  We relate to this as being intuitively true because we have all had our equivalent of the eureka (eg while walking on the beach), but it's not how ideas typically happen.  

Consider this from Clayton Christensen, where he references studies by Amar Bhide, "93% of companies that succeed, succeed with a different strategy than the one they started with."  He reports innovation success has more about having money left over after your first idea fails so you can adapt and go again than it does with having that great idea in the first place. 

Stephen Johnson builds on this saying that while we report ideas as a great moment of insight in reality ideas tend to emerge through interactions between people.  These interactions build on themselves in unexpected ways and evolve and develop.   Johnson continues and describes the emergence of ideas as being more like building a jigsaw puzzle where the moment of clarity is simply putting the last piece in place.  Ideas occur through interactions, they grow and evolve.  As Johnson says, ideas are more normally a slow evolving hunch than an epiphany. 

If you'd like to learn more about the realities of innovation then an easy way to start is to watch Steven Johnson's TED Talk "Where Good Ideas Come From" or read his book by the same name.    For more information consider Scott Berkun's "The Myths of Innovation"

One of my most favorite examples of a slow evolving hunch approach to innovation is the iPhone.  I love this example because it is perhaps the greatest innovation of our time (if the purpose of innovation is to create value which I believe it is) and because we all "know" that it came from the mind of the genius that was Steve Jobs.  But is that really what happened?  I don't think so.

For the purposes of this blog I'm going to trace the start of the iPhone revolution back to the release of the iPod in 2001.  You could argue with some validity that the start was well before this but I need to draw a line somewhere and this is where I have chosen.  The iPod was one of many MP3 players on the market.  It wasn't the first and many would argue it wasn't the best but it took the world by storm and soon enough was the market leader in it's category.

About 18 months later in mid 2003 Apple released iTunes an online music store and music manager.  It wasn't the first and may not have been the best but Apple integrated it with the iPod making managing your online music remarkably simple compared to anything else available at the time and maybe even today.  While the virtual integration of the iPod and iTunes was unique for it's market it was far from unique for Apple.  Proprietary virtually integrated technologies was a hall mark of all of Apples products / ecosystems.

I few years later Apple released the iPod Touch.  The Touch has a special place in our family.  My son had one of the early Touch's, he loved that device and used it for years and years.  Apart from this special connection the Touch is important as it was really the introduction of Apple's touch screen technology and phone format as we know it today.  It was also Apples first step into PDAs (personal digital assistant) with the Touch having PDA capability although still predominantly a music player.  It wasn't however the first PDA on the market and wasn't considered the gold standard, it was the Blackberry that had taken the world by storm.  At the time I was using a Palm Pilot and also carrying around a mobile phone.  I wondered why doesn't someone combine these things so I only have to carry one device, it would be so much more convenient (proof that having an idea is not particularly innovative or valuable ...)

Of course they did combine them. In Apple's case they release the iPhone in 2010.  From an outsiders view the form factor and much of the initial functionality was based on the iPod Touch and they added the mobile phone functionality to this platform.  Since 2010 the iPhone has undergone 14 public releases and major upgrades, many more minor releases and improvements to the public and countless internal cycles of improvements and adjustments and made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world. 

Was the idea of the iPhone genius?  Yes probably but even this highly simplified story shows it wasn't one idea at one time executed by a genius but an evolution over more than two decades and probably much longer.  As Johnson would say the iPhone emerged and evolved through interactions and unexpected turns  to become the product we know today.  It wasn't formed from one big idea.

One other point.  To often when companies are thinking about innovation and what they need to do to be innovative they look to products and services which have been years and decades in the making and say something to the effect of we need to be like that finished product.  They fail to recognise the years of development, the trial and error the successes and failures, they just point to a fully formed product and expect, or hope, to replicate it. 

A few years ago one of the most popular forms of this was "we want to be the Uber of our market".  This was usually said with little understanding of what made Uber Uber, what was required to make it happen or even if it was appropriate for them or their market.  Ultimately this was not innovation this was the search for a big  idea, a silver bullet that would solve all their problems.  Of course it didn't.

So, we relate to innovation as the superb execution of a big idea, usually through a "project" when in reality innovation tends to be emergent, it twists and turns through many iterations and interactions until eventually it succeeds (or is killed off).