Stupid Innovation
The line between stupid and brilliant innovation is blurred. People have tried to systematize and show the difference in dramatic ways. Guy Kawasaki has a graphical way to illustrate the difference in his “The Art of the Start” book. He points out two dimensions: how novel an innovation is and how much people like the innovation. Presumably, the stupid innovations are the ones that are novel, but nobody likes.
The Art of the Start
The problem with Guy’s illustration of stupid innovation is that it’s static. Both dimensions change over time, sometimes very quickly. We’re familiar with how fickle people’s tastes can be. But the other dimension, the novelty of an innovation, can also change rapidly. As you’ve guessed by now, the reason is our old friend subjectivity. What people consider novel today, they may consider old hat tomorrow.
So what are enterprising folks to do? Shooting a moving target is not easy. And the target is moving fairly quickly these days. A good answer, of course, is our old standby experimentation. The trick is to lower the cost of failure and do as many reasonable trials as possible as quickly as possible. I did sneak in a qualifier here: reasonable. It’s probably best not to try patently silly things, but there are plenty of cases where patently silly things turn out to be exactly what’s needed. So the “reasonable” qualifier is a soft one.
The safe and usual solution has been to copy existing successes. It’s not an approach I like, but I don’t knock it. Empires have been built this way. The formula is: find something that’s been somewhat successful, then tweak and polish it. It’s safe if you can “execute,” hence all the recent spilling of ink about “execution.”
