If you’re doing something truly new and different, don’t immediately seek out the largest addressable market. Look for a “hair on fire” use case, customers who need your product so badly that they almost literally have their hair on fire. Those are the ones who will be willing working to work with you, help you…
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas,” said the computing pioneer Howard Aiken. “If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” The truth is that innovation needs combination and few ideas can make much of an impact alone. So if you want your ideas to amount to…
We’re often faced with complex, seemingly insurmountable problems. One surprising effective technique to get at root causes and start actually solving them is called the “5 Whys.” Watch this video to learn how it works. For more, check out my blog post on Digital Tonto: The Power of Asking Why
At Google’s X division, the company’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is “#MonkeyFirst.” The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you’d better start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal. To learn…
All too often, we only pay attention to innovations when they hit the market and forget about everything it took to get them there. Innovation is never a single event. It’s a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. To learn more, check out my blog post: Innovation Is Never A Single Event
We like to think that success always breeds more success, but often it breeds failure. When we hit on a model that works, we hone and optimize it leverage market conditions. When those market conditions change, we find ourselves vulnerable. The only way out of this trap is to always explore and experiment. Every…