Innovation Science

Competition is Why You Play

While I have not been happy with this season’s Michigan Football, and do think that Coach Carr was out-coached by both the Buckeyes and Trojans at the end of last season, I was pleased to see these words from the embattled Carr about the upcoming game with Ohio State:

You embrace the pressure because the competition is why you play. It's why you coach. More than anything else, it's about competing to the best of your ability in a game you love and to try to achieve something with a group of people that you care about.

That sentiment speaks to the attitude found throughout Silicon Valley and provides a clue to its success.

Some people in the Valley simply work for their paycheck, and that’s okay. The top workers in the Valley, however, work for the challenge of achieving success in the face of difficult competition, and for these people meeting that challenge provides much of the satisfaction that drives them in their work. There’s no escaping this mentality in the Valley, it’s everywhere.

Stock options are often the most visible motivators in the Valley and are valuable motivators and rewards for many (just ask this masseuse), but they are often simply apparitions of false rewards that misdirect motivations. The Valley provides the opportunity for ambitious entrepreneurs to pursue their ambitions of competitive success, assuming that those ambitions allow for the success of funding venture capitalists.

One of the qualities that venture capitalists most value, not surprisingly, is a management team that is experienced in the field of their business plan and who display a desire for success and resilience to fight through inevitable difficulties. In the face of roadblocks and problems, those motivated only by stock options will quit and pursue seemingly brighter paths. Those who remain are those dedicated to their field and who find satisfaction in conquering those challenges.

To understand this mentality, all you have to do is spend some time with entrepreneurs at various meetings in the Bay Area to feel their heat and desire to succeed. This is the je ne sais quoi of Silicon Valley—that certain something that continues to allow this region of the country to be so successful in technology. You feel the urge for technological development in Palo Alto as strongly as you feel the urge for filmmaking when in Santa Monica.

People talk and exude their passion for their work here whenever possible—I recall a July 4^th party last year where I ended up talking with Bill Atkinson about his latest work with Jeff Raskin’s company Numenta and their approach to modeling cortical processes. Not your usual picnic conversation about baseball, hotdogs, and Chevrolet—Bill spoke as if this was these were the most critical ideas ever worth discussing. It was the kind of passion that one finds over and over again among successful people in the Valley.

And among top football coaches, which is what got me started on this tangent about worth ethic in Silicon Valley. Even here, though, if you go the equivalent of 1–6 against Ohio State’s latest coach, not even a tier 3 VC would provide bridge funding to keep your entrepreneurial dreams afloat. Good luck on Saturday, Coach Carr.

Individual Innovation

Bill Taylor, blogger at the Harvard Business Review website, has an insightful post on two innovative companies. One of them is 37signals, a company whose products I’ve been using for a couple of years (Backpack, Basecamp) and which is admired by users and Web 2.0 companies everywhere.

If you have any experience with a 37signals product, you know that their two defining features are simplicity and intuitiveness (also defining features of the two most successful tech companies of this century, Apple and Google). During the recent Business Innovation Factory Conference, reports Taylor, the co-founder of 37signals explained their philosophy towards product development:

…if you try to make everyone happy with your products, you end up with mediocrity. Our company has opinions, and we build products based on those opinions.

This statement speaks to two sides of the product development process, whether the product is a movie, a restaurant dish, or an electronics device.

One side is consumer-oriented. Individualization is a theme in almost every consumer product and medical field these days. The more that a company can meet the unique needs of individual consumers, the more they differentiate themselves from companies that produce products for everyone that excite no one.

Taylor expands upon the thoughts from the 37signals co-founder:

If you’re going to do something original, something distinctive, something great, then almost by definition you’re not going to be right for everyone.

Disruptive technology, as described in The Innovator’s Dilemma, begins by meeting the niche needs of a select group of customers, technology that is initially deemed unwanted by the majority of traditional customers. The Long Tail is an extreme of this model of meeting the unique needs of individuals rather than a general product for everyone. Mainstream companies, however, are also embracing this approach (consider Nike’s consumer customizable shoes). Tivo, YouTube and independent films are all variations of this theme: either providing unique offerings for unique customers or allowing consumers to create their own customization.

Addressing the unmet needs of a unique group of potential customers is one road to product innovation.

The other side of the 37signals statement that I referred to earlier is the company side. The way that companies choose to develop their ideas and products is critical to the innovation development that will drive their marketplace differentiation.

I’ve always felt that design by committee produces a lowest-common-denominator result. Take several brilliant chefs/authors/directors and ask them to create something together, and the result will be significantly less creative and satisfying than what each could produce individually. Creativity and innovation require risk and the execution of a unique vision, both of which get diluted and ground down through compromise.

I’m not saying that collaboration and interacting with others is detrimental—on the contrary, this is one of the best ways of developing new ideas—but ultimately a singular vision has to be created that the company follows, whether everyone is in agreement or not. Jobs is brilliant at this, and even when his ideas fail, as with NeXT, they still demand the respect of having achieved innovation at the highest level (of course, much of what NeXT developed was ultimately integrated successfully into the remake of Apple).

I’ve got a strong feeling that the concept of entropy, which in information theory is a measure of uncertainty in a signal, can be applied to these concepts. High entropy systems are less predictable and embody more originality in its signals than low entropy systems. The most innovative companies/ideas/people would be quantized as having high entropy in an information theoretic applied to innovation. Any mathematicians want to give it a go?

They Are Shaken, Shaken

Frequent nasty statements made by one person on a scientific mailing list to which I subscribe have caused considerable distress among its readership—how can a professor and scientist say such nasty things about his colleagues?  Needless to say, he's not very popular among this group. Someone recently suggested an explanation to his offensive behavior by hypothesizing that he was using translation software (he’s European) that was making his posts sound more aggressive than they really were (“You might be in error” mistranslated into “You naive idiot,” for example, or “I disagree with Dr. X” into “I find Dr. X offensive”).

The suggestion that this griefer on the mailing list was an innocent victim to poor translation has some resonance, because I know that text I’ve had translated using AltaVista’s Babel Fish usually has significant grammatical errors and often sounds like something a 4–year old would say. The remote possibility existed that mediocre software was to blame for this seeming miscreant’s offenses, in which case his international reputation was being ruined by a wonky website.

This got me wondering just how good online translation sites are. Knowing that Google recently updated their online translation site Google Language Tools (catchy name!), I was also curious if their site was competitive or was just an unnecessary alternative to AltaVista’s Babel Fish, the site that I have most often used to interpret foreign language text.

So, I decided to conduct a test.

What I did was take English text and translate it to a foreign language, then translate that foreign-language text back into English, and compare the final text with the original text. If the final English text was a respectable representation of the original English text, my conclusion would be that the intermediate foreign-language text was a decent representation of the original’s meaning. On the other hand, if an English to French translator turned “Eat your food” into the French equivalent of “Gobble your goods,” it’s unlikely that the translation from French back to English would return the original culinary command.

This multi-stage translation of English to foreign language back to English—let’s call it boomerang translation—is akin to the creation of the classic Portuguese-English phrase book English As She Is Spoke, written over century ago by someone who didn’t speak English—he translated Portuguese to French and used a French to English dictionary to get to the final translation. The book has some hilarious translations. The top sentences provided in the Familiar Phrases section are:

Go to send for.
Have you say that?
Have you understand that he says?
At what purpose have you say so?
Put your confidence at my.
At what o’clock dine him?
Apply you at the study during that you are young.
Dress your hairs.

Sounds like Babel Fish to me.

For my experiment, I chose as text some of the most recognizable sentences of the 20th Century: quotes from the movie Casablanca.

I piloted this concept by translating “Here’s looking at you, kid” into Dutch then back to English using Babel Fish. The resulting boomerang translation was “Examining you here young young she-goat.”

This was going to be good.

The results from both translation sites are below. The sentences in bold are the original sentences, the sentences preceded by (G) are the boomerang translations from Google Translator, the sentences preceded by (AV) are the boomerang translations from AltaVista’s Babel Fish. While I conducted this test using several foreign languages, the results that I give here were obtained only using English-Italian and Italian-English translations.

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.
(G): Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.
(AV): Of all the gin it combines, in all the cities, all over the world, she walks in mines.

We'll always have Paris.
(G): You always have Paris.
(AV): We will have always Paris.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
(G): I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.
(AV): They are shaken, shaken in order to find that to play it is igniting within here.

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
(G): Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
(AV): Louis, task that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
(G): Play once, Sam. For old times' good.
(AV): Gioc once, SAM. In the interest of the old times.

I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.
(G): I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.
(AV): Me every memory of particular. The Germans have carried the gray, you have carried the blue.

It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
(G): It does not take much to see that the problems of three little people do not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
(AV): He does not take very in order to see that the problems of three small people do not pile to hill of the fagioli in this crazy world.

Here's looking at you kid.
(G): Here you looking kid.
(AV): Here he is watching them kidskin.

As you can see above, Google’s translation appears to be very good—astonishingly good, in fact. I’ve been so used to consistently poor translations from Babel Fish that when I saw that the first few boomerang translations from Google were exact duplicates of my original, I thought that the site might be storing the translated phrases and simply returning the original sentence when it saw a a duplicate of the translated sentence.

So, I decided to make the translation more complicated. I first translated the phrases from English to French, then from French to German, then from German back to French. I only did that with Google, it was clear that Babel Fish would fail miserably. Here are the results.

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.
(G): Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the whole world in which they pénétrera mean.

We'll always have Paris.
(G): We always have Paris.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
(G): I am shocked, horrified to see that the game is happening here.

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
(G): Louis, I think this is the beginning of a friendship.

Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
(G): Playing once, Sam For old times' interest.

I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.
(G): I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.

It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
(G): It may not be much to see that the problems of three little people do not correspond to a hill of cocoa beans in this crazy world.

Here's looking at you kid.
(G): She looks, Here's child.

That’s more like it. Still a ways to go, Google. However, pretty darn impressive, I think. So, if our offensive poster is a victim of some inadequate language translator, he clearly no longer has an excuse with this tool from Google. Buh-bye Babel Fish, hola Google Language Tools (or may I suggest lingua.google.com?).

Negotiation Strategies

I’ve been interested in negotiation strategy for a while. In some ways it embodies many characteristics that are rare in scientific research, with a focus on human interaction and an unambiguous concluding point where success can be measured relatively directly. I can understand why some people thrive on it and why some people are terrible at it. It has more in common with courtroom battles than the scientific method, yet it has significant room for innovation to take play.

There was an interesting article a month ago in the Harvard Business Review on negotiating that caught my eye. The authors outline basic principles from their new book, Negotiation Genius, that provide guidance towards understanding the person/company with whom you are negotiating.

I found this article interesting because it gives more than the basic negotiating advice of understanding your counterpart so that you can drive to a win-win scenario. This basic win-win approach is, of course, an important concept to start with because people often approach negotiations as a poker game where one is trying to win as much of the pot as possible while not reveal any of their cards, with the assumption that the other side is playing the same game and trying to win as much as they can at your expense. The false assumption with this approach is that only way to win is for the other side to lose. The first step towards a successful negotiation is to realize that to be successful, both you and your counterpart must achieve your separate goals—hence, the win-win objective.

One has to understand the objectives of the other side to know what a win-win is, and the authors of this article expand upon this concept by pointing out that often negotiations stall because one side makes incorrect assumptions about the needs and motivations of the other side. The authors provide a few case studies that they have developed to test business students in which the majority of the students make wrong assumptions and therefore drive the negotiations to solutions that cannot succeed:

They are solutions to a problem that has not been diagnosed.

The authors outline how to conduct investigative negotiation, their term for the active pursuit of information about the needs of one’s counterpart in the negotiation. The five steps that they outline are (in their words):

1. Don’t just discuss what your counterparts want—find out why they want it
2. Seek to understand and mitigate the other side’s constraints
3. Interpret demands as opportunities
4. Create common ground with adversaries
5. Continue to investigate even after the deal appears to be lost

The authors provide business case examples for each of these steps that make them more intuitive. They finish with tips on how to get information out of distrustful negotiators who don’t readily explain the reasons behind their own negotiating position. All very useful stuff.

Some of this reminds me of the work of Vantage Partners, a consulting firm with origins at the Harvard Law School when the founders were asked by the Carter administration to help with negotiations between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1979. Their directors have published several books, including Getting to Yes. Vantage stresses the need for a thoroughly understanding of the motivations on the other side, and emphasizes the possibility that each side has a different set of values that is driving their behavior. Vantage has expanded their expertise to business collaborations, explaining with data why collaborations between different businesses typically fail, and providing guidance on how to conduct a successful collaboration. There is a set of white papers from Vantage Partners on these topics that I highly recommend, including a huge set on managing alliances.

Buy the Investigative Negotiation article here from Amazon:

Cognition Boom

In August I spoke at the major hearing aid conference of the year, the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research. What struck me at this year’s meeting was the preponderance of talks on cognitive issues. Two years ago, there were less than a handful of people presenting at these conferences on cognition and hearing loss or hearing aids. Now, it’s starting to become a dominant topic at conferences, and I’m more often hearing from PhD students who are basing their dissertations in this broad area.

I’ve posted before on the emergence of cognition as a major theme in many areas. Earlier this month, I was at a conference on Aging and Speech Communication, where the focus was on how how changes to cognition and hearing from aging affect communication ability. Several research presentations made clear that older subjects are more distracted by irrelevant information and were less able to ignore this information than younger people. When conducting tasks on a computer screen, the older subjects were less able to do the task when there were many items on the screen, and benefited more than younger subjects did by a clean and simple graphical user interface. Similar findings occurred with other modes of information.

This kind of research has huge implications for companies producing products for the older crowd, targeting the aging population of America. Several social networks targeted at the aging population have sprung up (Boomj, where customers must be too old to be worried about the “bj” favicon; Eons, which has the trademarked search engine cRANKy), and Facebook has been invaded by the post-college crowd who probably find the interface a little busy. A company that develops an understanding of how different age groups process information will provide an advantage over competitors that think the only change that needs to be made to such networks is content: Taking a social network designed for younger people and adding an obituaries section and a place to post photos of grandkids isn’t going to cut it. Tools that measure visual clutter or screen complexity could likely identify sites doomed for failure among the older crowd.

Certainly, an understanding of the unique cognitive demands and capabilities of the older population will be necessary for businesses targeting that market. In any business with targeted customers types, I expect that companies will begin to hire cognitive scientists as consultants and employees as they seek to understand their customers better. While User Experience Designer is a hot role in companies today, we could see User Cognition Researcher as the hot position of the future.

Bo on Leadership

I posted at the time of Bo Schembechler’s death on Bo’s leadership ability. and demonstrated his Shakespearean-like inspirational ability through a transcript of his hair-raising speech on The Team. I’m sure that anyone who has played for Bo can attest to his extraordinary ability as a leader (any of those want to comment here?), and the audio on my previous post helps to demonstrate that.

A book co-authored by John U. Bacon on the leadership wisdom of Bo has just been released called Bo’s Lasting Lessons. Books on the wisdom of sports legends are usually a dime-a-dozen (as are books on the wisdom of famous CEOs), but if you believe that Bo’s coaching skills and knowledge can provide insight towards leadership in business—a point that I have made in my previous posts—then this book could be a worthwhile book to read.

Just to be clear, I don’t think that a successful sports coach can automatically be successful as a business leader, but I believe that they both share many similar qualities relating to running and inspiring a group of high-level achievers. Executives ignore the lessons from successful leaders at their peril, regardless of the arena in which those leaders performed. (Of course, this book is also a must for any Bo or Michigan fan, and it will probably help ease the pain of the beginning of the current football season and the end of the previous one.)

The following is an excerpt from the book, part of a larger excerpt posted on the Michigan Today website. It’s difficult to read Bo’s thoughts on respecting the institution that one inherits and not think about the mistakes made by Carly Fiorina at HP and other dominant CEOs who misunderstood the institution that they took over, or other CEOs and acquiring companies who ran roughshod over the history and culture of companies that they had acquired. Bo understood that corporate culture begins at the top, and he understood the need to respect the value of the team members that one works with. Echoes of his “the team, the team, the team” benediction resonates throughout this passage:

It's one thing, when you start in a new position, to throw a bucket of cold water on your people to let them know things are going to be different around here from now on. That's just smart.

But it's something completely different to do the same thing to the institution you're taking over. That's just stupid!

Let me explain. One of the most common mistakes new leaders make—and I just can't for the life of me understand this one—is to ignore the history of the organization they just took over, or even to disrespect it. That, to me, is the mark of a weak leader—and one who's probably not going to last very long.

Let me be as clear as I can be about this: When you become the leader, do not start your reign by dismantling or ignoring the contributions of those who came before. The history of your organization is one of your greatest strengths, and if you're new to the organization, it's your job to learn it, to respect it and to teach it to the people coming up in your company.

Sure, it's easy to appreciate Michigan's football history—the best, I'd say, in college football. But even if I had gone to Wisconsin, they have a good history, too. Ditto North Carolina. In fact, anywhere I might have gone had to have some history, or it wouldn't still exist! And that goes for any organization you might join, too…

I made a lot of mistakes, but one thing I got right, after we started having some success, was never once claiming that I alone had put that team together—because I hadn't. And at no time did I ignore the guys who played here before I arrived, either. It was their tradition, not mine, that I was now in charge of, and I was going to show them I respected what they'd built here. That's why a lot of those guys are my friends today, great guys like Bob Timberlake and Ron Johnson, who kept Michigan tradition alive before I ever showed up.

Remember this: WHEN YOU ARE THE LEADER, YOU ARE THE ORGANIZATION. You are the company, the school, the team. You are it. Now if you want to act like some kind of jerk where guys who worked for the program and led the program and sacrificed for the program are not welcome to come back—well, you're not going to have much of a program. And you certainly won't have a family. But if you respect your history, you'll get a lot more in return.

When I coached at Ohio State and even at Miami, we had really good facilities. When I got here, I was shocked. Our locker room was on the second floor of Yost Field House. We sat in rusty, folding chairs and hung our clothes on nails hammered into a two-by-four bolted into the wall. Those were our "lockers"!

My coaches started complaining. "What the hell is this?" they said. "We had better stuff at Miami."

I cut that off right away. "No, we didn't," I said. "See this chair? Fielding Yost sat in this chair. See this nail? Fielding Yost hung his hat on this nail. And you're telling me we had better stuff at Miami? No, men, we didn't. We have tradition here, Michigan tradition, and that's something no one else has!"

And for those who really want to know what it means to respect the history that one inherits:

After we knocked off the unbeatable Buckeyes in 1969, it was my duty to give away the game ball. I had a lot of good choices. There was Garvie Craw, who ran for two touchdowns. There was Barry Pierson, our senior defensive back, who grabbed three interceptions that day, ran back a punt to the Ohio State three-yard line, and turned in one of the single greatest performances I've ever seen.

But once everyone quieted down, I asked Bump Elliott [the coach immediately prior to Bo] to come up, and handed the game ball to him. Everyone got choked up, including Bump. Some guys were out and out crying—and I don't remember when I felt better about anything I've done in my entire life.

How many people who experience a CEO change or corporate acquisition are presented with that kind of respect for their company’s history and accumulated culture? And how many would have valued their newfound leadership so much more had they seen the kind of tribute made to the past that Bo made?

Read more about Bo's Lasting Lessons and buy from Amazon here:

The Challenges Facing the Hearing Aid Field

The latest issue of the Hearing Review features seven papers from a research summit that I organized and my company hosted in January of this year in Napa, CA. The goal of the two-day meeting, attended by many of the nation’s thought-leaders in hearing aid research and key decision-makers within my company, was to set guidelines for the next 5 years of progress in our field.

The outcome of the meeting was consensus statements on the top issues facing our field today. I’m very pleased with the quality of the papers that resulted and, more importantly, with the value of the guidance that was developed at the meeting and expressed in the papers. I believe that years from now these papers will be seen as important guideposts, if not watersheds, for the direction that our field takes over the next decade.

The following is from my overview paper and provides the motivation for organizing this meeting:

The hearing care field is at a fascinating point in its history. Technological developments are accelerating almost too quickly to follow, and paradoxically, our science has matured to the point where only now do we recognize the vast number of research questions that still remain to be answered. The size of the hearing-impaired population is about to explode, and its demographics are changing in a way that will test our current products, services, and delivery models…this turbulent sea of change in which we find ourselves will have to be navigated with the precision that comes from careful planning, analysis, and dedicated problem solving. Ideally, a course must be charted that everyone can navigate.

The charted courses are provided by the accompanying papers that represent consensus statements from some of the nation’s top researchers, each one summarizing the challenges that our field currently faces and outlining guidelines for how to address these challenges. The issues addressed in the six papers are detailed in my overview as follows:

• [Clinical Validity] Why does hearing aid benefit measured in the clinic often differ from benefit experienced by hearing aid wearers in the real world? Can we align the two to better meet the needs of the hearing impaired?
• [[Individual Differences] How can we better comprehend individual differences in speech understanding ability and subsequently provide improved individualized hearing solutions based on measures of cochlear damage, psychoacoustic performance, and cognitive function?
• [Evidence-based Practice] How can our field implement evidence-based practice and evidence-based design such that dispensing professionals can more effectively meet the needs of their patients?
• [Wireless Technology] What are the challenges that must be addressed for wireless technology to reach its full potential for patient benefit?
• [Aural Rehabilitation] How can our field optimize its use of aural rehabilitation in the hearing health care process?
• [Future of Hearing Health Care Delivery] What challenges from changing patient demographics, changing technology, and changing market expectations are faced by the hearing health care delivery model?

This overview doesn’t begin to hint at the depth of thought provided in the papers, however, so if you are in the least bit interested in any of these topics, I recommend that you read the corresponding papers.

They key to successfully creating such an impressive collection of insight, of course, is to include an impressive collection of people who can develop and debate the ideas and then elegantly crystallize the discussion into the few critical points. I will probably post in the future on other key elements of hosting conferences such as these.

Countdown to Innovation

Jeffrey Pheffer, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, recently wrote a short column in Business 2.0 magazine on the usefulness of deadlines. He gives a couple examples of their usefulness demonstrating how they can be effective at forcing decisions, actions, and agreements.

Pheffer notes that when Steve Jobs set a June release date for the iPhone back in January, he gave a useful deadline to the iPhone development team in finishing the product that forced them to finalize the product—but of course, anyone who works in development knows that product launch deadlines have this effect, Pheffer doesn’t need to summon an iExample to make this case.

An interesting question for this blog, of course, is whether deadlines can apply to innovation. Well…yes and no.

A process and therefore a deadline can be applied to innovation, as has been frequently mentioned with respect to design innovation. A practical example to shed light on this is the application of deadlines to research, to the extent that research represents innovation (a topic for a future post).

Deadlines can and should be applied to research projects. People with no experience with research think that researchers must work in a timeless vacuum, a limbo of thinking and investigating until the researchers discover something brilliant. The reality is that professional researchers—in academia and in industry—base their work around the investigation of hypotheses. Researchers usually have considerable expertise in the area that they are investigating and have a very good idea of the process that they are going to conduct to test their hypotheses. In fact, research grants that fund the majority of university research require a timeline for the research project, with anticipated milestones and deliverables explicitly stated. Any responsible company conducting research will require the same.

There is a difference between research project plans/deadlines and ones for product development, however, and that is that research plans are organic. Due to the nature of research, new information is often discovered that leads to further investigation. This unanticipated addition to the project plan is consistent with the stated goals at the outset of the project and is therefore both valid and valuable to execute, but it is a significant change to the plan that is usually not experienced in product development. Predicting task durations and milestone dates with research is more difficult when the outcomes of the tasks are unknown (the nature of research), but experienced researchers can still estimate them with reasonable accuracy because they have confidence that they know how to get answers to their hypotheses.

So, deadlines can be applied to research and, by association, to innovation.

There are aspects of innovation, however, that cannot given deadlines. The act of creativity cannot be given a deadline to those who are not creative. One cannot be told to have an innovative idea by Friday. Finding connections between seemingly incongruous technologies and concepts, one specific embodiment of innovation, is something that creative people live with and think about on a constant basis—they do not schedule flashes of genius.

Innovation has many embodiments: process oriented ones that make up the majority of innovative breakthrough, but also those “aha” moments where an opportunity is simply discovered. The former represents the majority of corporate innovation and should be executed by every company interested in creative product development, with schedules and deadlines in place. The latter represents key innovations that are not scheduled but result from creating of supporting culture thinking and having the type of employees to who are able to produce such creative acts.

Jobs on Design, Everyone Else on the iPod

I’m reading a book called Sketching User Experiences, which is an interesting dialogue on the philosophy of design, filled with many practical real-world examples. The author, Bill Buxton, has been a part of or exposed to many fascinating design projects over the years that he details in his book.

I want to post a quote by Steve Jobs about design from Buxton’s book:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to ‘get it.’ You have to really grok [understand] what it’s all about.

I feel like a broken record saying this on my blog, but it’s worth repeating, particularly for new readers to this blog. Design is the science of elegant functionality, which is why having a process for design development is so important. Just like research or development—design is also a well defined process.

Jobs’ quote reminds me of what was told to me recently by a friend who is a researcher at Apple’s top competitor. He complained that, more and more frequently on projects, executives at his company were instructing him and his colleagues to, “make it like the iPod—you know, simple and cool.” I’ve heard this complaint elsewhere and it’s obvious that the iPod has become the sole definition of design in many people’s eyes—some Platonic design ideal that everyone is striving to reproduce.

Also because of the iPod, simplicity has become the buzzword of the year, but this is also a misplaced ideal. I hesitate to discuss this, because simplicity has been a mantra of mine since the ‘90s given the unique needs of hearing aid users (my field) and my general philosophy that products should be intuitive. The design success of the iPod is a result of more than just simplicity, just like the business success of the iPod is a result of more than just its design. Perhaps a better buzzword for the future is intuitiveness, from which simplicity is one solution.

My friend’s dilemma was that this demand to mimic the iPod restricted his creativity to the design language of the iPod—he couldn’t treat each project on its own terms with its unique challenges. There’s no surer way to squelch innovation than to tell someone tasked with creative thinking to mimic someone else’s creation. Not only that, the requirements that produced the iPod design may have nothing to do with the design requirements of these other products. The relationship between a product, its use and its user may require a design solution completely different to that of an iPod, but that design solution can still be brilliantly elegant and functional.

While the iPod is currently an icon of design and probably the most written about product with respect to design, I suspect that it may soon become anathema to designers if executives continue to force their design teams to mimic the iPod style. Soon there will be a growing league of ipodoclasts looking to tear down the iPod and force their own design language to the forefront of consumer product design.

What’s ironic is that companies should actually be trying to mimic Apple’s/Ives’ approach to design and learning from his process of iteration and innovation rather than mimicking the product of its/his process. Until they do (and maybe even if they do), Apple will maintain its design lead. Perhaps the iPhone, another product of Jonathan Ives design team at Apple, will be the product to demonstrate that design success can result from intuitiveness rather than simplicity, at which point I suppose executives will be clamoring for products to be made like the iPhone—you know, intuitive and cool.

Travels

I’ve been traveling for almost two months straight, so am enjoying being back in town for a couple of weeks. Traveling so much is not pleasant, but at least there’s the advantage of being able to stay at a place like the Colegio Arzobispo Fonseca in Salamanca, Spain (pictured to the right, taken with my cell phone), built in 1519. Rooms were spartan, but the setting was amazing. I was invited to speak there at an audiology conference—an interesting meeting because Spain does not officially recognize the profession of audiology. The town is beautiful, with a large university that dates back to 1218. Also, I ate gooseneck barnacles, which tasted like tiny mussels, for the first time.

That’s me at the far right of the photo, trying to speak as slowly as I can so that interpreters can translate what I was saying into Spanish for the audience. I enjoy answering questions from an audience more than I do giving talks, so the panel discussion was a lot of fun, particularly when the audience asks insightful questions like this one did.

Too bad this was only a few days of my total travel.