Over the weekend I spent some time fooling around with an iPhone app called ColorCapture Ben.  The way it works is you take a photo of a color you like using your iPhone, and then this app from Benjamin Moore shows you the closest matching color chip from their collection, and then serves up a listing of complimentary colors and so forth.  I found that it works equally well sampling a Barnett-Newman style solid color field as it does mixing across the various colors found in a Seurat-like shot of a lawn.  Even if you're not in the market for some new paint, it's a wonderful source of quiet, adult entertainment if you ever find yourself, say, attending a live performance of music designed for the toddler-preschooler demographic.  As I frequently am.

It's also a great example of Principle 3 at work.  Principle 3 states that we must always ask "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?". If you've ever painted a room in a house, you know that there are many areas that could stand some improvement, and indeed there has been quite a bit of innovation lately in the areas of zero-VOC paint formulations, easy-pour paint containers, and new application tools.  But those are all about the paint or conveying the paint to the wall, and when you think about it, there's so much more to the painting experience.  The beauty of Principle 3 is that, by asking that you put yourself in another human's shoes, it forces you to consider all of the non-obvious aspects that make up an experience:

Another part of the challenge lies in thinking about usage through
time.  We often design for those few moments that make up the core
value proposition.  But what about all the other experiences?  How does
it feel to start using it?  What does mastery feel like — is it
exhilarating or boring?  How does using this expand our human
experience?  How does it influence our environment?  What does it feel
like to extend one's relationship with the offering?  Does it help
someone get to a state of flow?

I don't know about you, but for me, the entire process of choosing a paint color is terrifying.  Mistakes are expensive, and because it is difficult to sample paint colors accurately, iteration in a baby-step kind of way (Principle 10) is also tough.  This is where ColorCapture steps in.  For example, for a while I've been meaning to paint one wall of my bedroom green, but I'd rather go clean my garage than have to choose the right color of green amongst the hundreds of choices available to me — the paradox of choice at work.  With this new app, I can take a picture of my wood floor (the dominant color in the room that I need to play with), and then boom!, I have the green I need, or at least a handful of greens.  And now I can start painting, and to start painting I'll go buy a gallon of Benjamin Moore Natura.

While I don't think Principle 3 is the most powerful of the principles, it certainly is one of the most foundational.  If you can put it in to action, you're well on your way.

Seth Godin has written a really important post:  The hierarchy of success

When it comes to the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, this point is especially important:

As far as I'm concerned, the most important of all, the top of the
hierarchy is attitude. Why are you doing this at all? What's your bias
in dealing with people and problems?… Sure, you can start at the bottom by focusing on execution and
credentials. Reading a typical blog (or going to a typical school for
16 years), it seems like that's what you're supposed to do. What a
waste.

When trying to get something done that's been done before, it's important to look at credentials of execution:  Dr. Heart Surgeon, I hope you've done this surgery many times before, and done it well, and had a chance to learn from your mistakes and those committed by others.  But when faced by the challenge of creating value where none has existed before, what's important?  As Seth points out, it's mostly about attitude and approach.  Those are the lifelines to get you from here to over there when everything is foggy and unknown.  Those are what get you to a viable strategy that makes certain executional tactics more or less relevant.

If you're trying to create the right team to go after something revolutionary, you can't ask "show me all the similar things you've shipped".  You can only ask "how many times have you stepped in to the abyss, and what have you learned about how to do it better?.

For more, see Principle 17

If you're going to reach innovative outcomes on a routine basis, you need to match the right team to the opportunity.  Part of that means understanding Principle 7 so that you know what type of problem you're tackling, the other part involves understanding what kind of experience you need on your team. 

When it comes to answering that last question, the right kind of experience profile depends on whether you're looking at a high or low variance situation.  Examples of low variance situations are flying a 747 from San Francisco to Singapore, operating on a heart, or serving up burgers at In-N-Out.  In each of those situations, we desire a predictable outcome delivered with a low degree of variance from a predetermined standard, and in this context, the right experience is expressed in terms of having done the same thing many times before.  We want a pilot who can fly the 747 on, well, autopilot.  We want a surgeon who has done hundreds of the same operation, and learned something from each one, not a surgeon who has done one hundred different surgical procedures once.  As such, experience is really about tenure in a role, with relevant experience having a direct correlation to years in the role.  

In a high-variance situation, where we are expecting an innovative outcome, but have little to no sense what the right answer might look like, we need a different definition of what "experienced" means.  In this context, we want people who are experienced with the process of innovation — in other words, people who have gone through the "understand – build – test" cycle of Principle 4 many times.  We want folks with a lot of mileage under their belt, in other words, but that mileage need not be strictly correlated with years at work. 

For example, one of the reasons why Honda cycles its production engineers through its various racing programs is to increase their innovation process mileage; designing a new component for a mass market automobile takes several years, so between the time an engineer graduates college and turns 40, they may have only shipped three to four designs to market (if they're lucky).  Contrast that with a race engineer, who faces the challenge of optimizing a race car for a different track configuration every two weeks for eight months, as well as managing an arc of innovation for the entire car over those same eight months.  During that short period of time, they may experience 10, 15, even 20 cycles of "understand – build – test".  So when it comes to picking an engineer to go figure out the future of mobility, which one would you choose, the "I've shipped the same thing to market three times" person, or the "I've done 20 cycles every year for the past  four years" individual?  By my reckoning, in this world an engineer age 26 could have 20 times the relevant process experience as a person 14 years their senior.

Mileage really does matter when it comes to understanding the art and science of bringing new stuff in to the world.  Many of the hottest Web 2.0 apps are springing from the agile fingers of lads barely past drinking age who are in fact hoary veterans of the coding wars, having been engaged in hacking kernels since they were eight.  They have a tremendous amount of relevant mileage under their belt, and have a skillset that's perfectly tailored to the nimble world of innovation on the interwebs.

I'd like to propose a metric for assessing the innovation prowess of an individual or of a team.  It looks like this:

innovation experience index =  [market ships] / [years of practice]

In other words, how many innovation market ships have you experienced over a given period of time?  And of those, what's your profile for incremental innovations?  For revolutionary innovations?

It's all about mileage.

This is number 17 in a series of 21 principles of innovation.  I really welcome your feedback, questions, and ideas.