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…
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“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…
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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
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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…
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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
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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…
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We’re entering a new era of innovation! In the years to come the pendulum will to swing from iterating and adapting to new applications to developing fundamentally new technologies. The next few decades are likely to look much more like 1950s and 1960s than the 1990s of 2000s. To learn more, check out my…
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Episode 6: Start with the “Why Not?” Simon Sinek says that we should “Start with the why,” but often we can go further by starting with the question, “Why not?” It is by traveling down unlikely paths, we end up in unexpected places that take us in new directions. To learn more, check out my…
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One of the mantas of the digital age has been, “You need to adapt to survive.” But the truth is that once you find the need to adapt, you are already losing. Notice how nobody talks about how Apple adapted to the smartphone or how Google adapted to the search engine. Great companies don’t…
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Many believe you have to be a jerk to be a great innovator, but in my research I found just the opposite. Sharing ideas and insights helps you build a strong network of others that are willing to share with you. That gives you a much larger knowledge base that you can use to solve…
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