Given all the challenges we face in the world, we need to everyone to innovate.  Everyone is potentially
creative and able to bring something new in to the world.  The idea that there two types of people: "creatives" and
everyone else, is but a myth, albeit a damaging one at that.  Up and down an organization, everyone needs time to innovate.

If you're sitting at the top of an organization, or in a position with a high degree of gravitational pull, you need time to innovate.  To get the most out of it, your time spent innovating should take the form of helping other people grow and setting things up to be successful.  Your innovations will deal with setting the stage in the right way for the right things to happen, and with architecting systems, teams, and structures so that appropriate behaviors emerge given the innovation challenge at hand.

If you're working on the front lines of an organization (where some might describe you as being at the "bottom"), you need time to innovate.  Because you are doing the critical work of the organization, you're the most in touch with the people who benefit from its offerings.  You can use the tools of design thinking to start making a difference today in how you make those people feel.  Figure out what they need that you're giving them, make some prototypes, and start testing them.  Cycle though that and improve the way things get done.  It takes time, but the potential benefits are enormous.

Note well that I'm not saying that everyone should be creative all the time.  Far from it: we need people to be executing when they should be executing.  Land that 747 safely, mend that broken leg, receive that shipment of returned goods, and file that tax return.  But for the critical questions of how, let's give everyone more time to make it all better.

This is the eleventh of 21 principles.  I really do appreciate your feedback and ideas.

When operating in the realm of the blank sheet of paper, where assumptions about how things might work outstrip the things you know will work, baby steps are a way to learn your way to success.  Granted, a big leap can also get you to your end goal, and will do so very quickly if you're lucky, but a leap into the darkness is very likely get you hurt.  Smaller steps allow you to assess the best path forward as you move forward, recognizing that for trailblazers, the path is of your own design. 

Baby steps are appropriate at the start, middle, and end of things.  This applies equally to individuals, teams, and entire organizations.

As obvious as it may seem, starting something is essential to its completion.  But often times people can't accept the challenge in front of them, and so they find myriad ways to avoid doing something:  budget reviews, scoping meetings, taking sick time, eating pizzas, buffing that feature on your last project, surfing Facebook… all fine ways to delay dealing with reality.  By taking a huge problem statement and breaking it in to smaller chunks, baby steps make it easier to get going.  If you're stuck in foggy, uncharted waters, you can spend a lot of time trying to to shoot the stars to chart a course, or you can raise the sail and move a bit, then reassess and move a bit more.  Baby steps help you get going, fast.

In the messy middle of an innovation initiative, baby steps allow you to quickly explore multiple directions in parallel, rather slaving to polish one idea before you know it is The One, or even The Best One We Have Now.  Big leaps make for expensive bets. Baby steps, on the other hand, are by their nature cheaper to pull off, so you end up spending less money per unit of learning, and that learning comes sooner.  And it's easier to kill off ideas when they're expressed as baby steps, because there's no huge sunk investment tempting you to spend more time and money in order to save the project or your career.  Most important of all, per Boyle's Law, baby steps increase the frequency of feedback you receive, because you can bring  a lot of baby step prototypes to quick meetings.  You learn a lot this way.

Many "overnight" innovation successes are actually the result of years of baby steps which added up to a big leap.  That  E Ink screen in your Kindle is the result of years of incremental innovations in the marketplace that took the technology from something best suited to department store signage to its current form, which is a truly remarkable breakthough. Those years of patient baby stepping at E Ink allowed them to accumulate a huge amount of explicit and tacit knowledge about how to design and make these displays; the more they learn, the harder it will be for others to duplicate their efforts with one big leap.  Baby steps can also lead to capability growth.  If you look at the product launch history of a firm like Honda, you see a steady beat of incremental product launches scheduled with presidential election regularity.  Every time Honda launches a new Accord, they not only put a better product in the market, but their people and systems evolve as well.  Stack all those launches up, and you can see why car companies that default to a "big leap" strategy are not doing so well.  Finally, baby steps can open up unforeseen opportunity streams in the guise of real options.  The folks behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band didn't set out to create the world's biggest ever living room music entertainment system — they were just MIT guys interested in making the music performance experience more accessible to all.  Via fourteen years of patient experimentation and baby stepping, they got there, big. 

Baby steps often lead to big leaps. This is the tenth of 21 principles.  Your feedback, comments, and ideas are most welcome.

So that brilliant idea of yours isn't the only version of it under the sun, but that's okay (Priniciple 8) you're pouring everything you have in to making it real because you believe it is the one and true answer to the problem at hand.

A this point, killing that good idea could very well be a good idea.

It's easy to fall in love with an idea.  And when we're not mindful of process, and spend our energy worrying about whether we'll be successful and on budget and on time (not that those are bad things, they're very important), we can also fall in love too early with an idea, simply out of fear.  The mental or organizational dialog goes something like this: "This one is good, and we're in a rush, so let's go do it.".  Early closure is the enemy of innovation.  Better to move fast through lots of ideas early, throwing most of them out in the process, than to hone down to one in the very early days, polishing it to perfection in the vague hope that it is The One. 

Killing ideas also reserves energy so that there's enough left over to actually bring the very best ones to market.  In work, as in life, you can't do everything, so deciding what you won't do becomes as important as deciding what you will do (while always maintaining a bias toward the doing).  In a discussion about why Apple never shipped a post-Newton PDA, Steve Jobs said "If we had gotten into it, we wouldn't have had the resources to do the iPod.  We probably wouldn't have seen it coming."  At the end of the day, you never want to be low, slow, and out of money or time.

So go look at  your portfolio of ideas, and then kill a few that aren't going to be remarkable in the way they go about making people happy and creating value in the world.  You'll be much more innovative as a result.

This is the ninth of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback and ideas.

Most new ideas aren't.  Someone, somehow, somewhere already thought up the essence of what you're thinking about.

Which is all the more reason to keep plugging away.

Accepting that someone else already had your idea is liberating, because it frees you up to learn.  It moves the focus from what's going on in your head to what's going on in the world.  Much of innovating is actually about stealing ideas from one context, connecting them to other ideas, and putting them to work in another.  Where can you find analogous experiments or successes or failures that can inform your own work? Remember, before Facebook there was Friendster.  And before the iPhone came the Newton.  You can choose to live ignorance of what came before or what is happening in other parts of the world, or you can dive in and embrace all their hard-won lessons as your own.

Best of all, standing on the shoulders of giants is a free activity.

At the end of the day, if someone else has already had your idea, then the goal shifts from having ideas to making them real.  Innovators ship, dreamers don't. 

So what's keep you from making your idea real?

This is the eighth of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback and ideas.

In music there's a big difference between Mick Jagger and Maria Callas.  If you're a pilot, hopping a bush plane around Alaska requires a different skill set you need to grease a 747 on the runway in Hong Kong. 

And so it is with innovation:  it comes in many flavors, and the ability to discern those flavors and proceed accordingly is a foundational of skill of individuals and organizations who are able to achieve innovation outcomes on a routine basis.

This is most easily explained using a 2 x 2 matrix.  I promise this is the only 2 x 2 I will be using in the course of this ongoing discussion of innovation principles:

No matter where you want to go tomorrow, today you and your organization sit at the lower left vertex of this 2 x 2.  So, looking up the vertical axis, you start with the offerings that you currently deliver to the market, and then range up to things that are new to you. Then, looking out across the horizontal axis, you start with the people you know, and out at the end of the axis you have people (or users) you don't know at all.  The four quadrants of the 2 x 2 then fall out as follows:

• lower left:  existing offerings for existing people
• upper left: new offerings for existing people
• lower right: existing offerings for new users
• upper right: new offerings for new users

Three different flavors of innovation are defined by these quadrants:

1. Incremental Innovation: you seek to deliver improvements to offerings you already sell to people who you understand fairly well.  Your capabilities as an organization are designed to deliver these offerings to these people.
2. Evolutionary Innovation:  one aspect of your offering (either unfamiliar people or an unfamiliar offering space) is changing as you seek to bring new something to market, forcing you to evolve away from what you know.  Your mainstream organization will be only partially equipped to successfully innovate here.
3. Revolutionary Innovation:  the proverbial blank sheet of paper.  Everything is new, as you don't have a history with the offerings, nor do you understand the people here.  Your mainstream organization not only is not equipped to innovate successfully here, it won't even see the value in innovating here.

For each type of innovation to work, different organizational structures, metrics for success, development processes, individual skillsets, financial structures, even seating arrangments and reward structures must be put in to place.  Just as you wouldn't take a 747 to reach an Alaskan fishing village, so too you wouldn't try to go after a revolutionary innovation outcome using a team and structure built for incremental outcomes.  But it happens all the time, ergo the need to develop a taste for these flavors.  Innovation efforts are more likely to fail due to flawed architectural decisions made during their genesis than because of a lack of effort or luck on the part of the participants who put that architecture in to action.

There is no value judgment being applied across these three flavors of innovation.  Though "revolutionary" innovation is the flavor which captures the imagination of the public, incremental innovation is what keeps the lights on and your brands relevant in the short term.  But revolutionary innovations are what lead to breakthroughs that build value for the future.  In reality, a healthy organization must maintain a portfolio of innovation initiatives across this landscape if it wants to stay healthy for the long haul.

I am the last person to claim that this is a definitive model for understanding the landscape of innovation.  But in my experience it is simple enough to be used in practice, yet not so simplistic that it yields erroneous outcomes.  For more depth, please reference the following paper authored by Ryan Jacoby and yours truly.

This is the seventh of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback, thoughts, and ideas.

Innovative outcomes result from living life at the intersection.  This is true not only within the confines of innovation initiatives, but also at the level of individuals, teams, and organizations.

Innovation needs to happen at the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility.  These three elements make up the legs of a proverbial stool called "it'll work in the world."  Too many innovation initiatives focus on only one or two, much to their detriment.  For example, creating something without regard for its feasibility out in the world is not unlike designing a bridge without regard to the existence of gravity: it might work, but the likelihood of it being a reliable, safe, means of transport will be greatly diminished.  And while it might be tempting to "really be creative" by ignoring constraints, a wiser approach is to view constraints as liberating.  Look at any bridge by Santiago Calatrava, and you'll see desirability, viability, and feasibility all coexisting in a glorious symphony enabled by constraints.

Calatrava is great example of what happens when an individual lives life at the intersection.  He is a prototypical "T-shaped" person, combining great depth in engineering, architecture, and sculpture with the breadth that comes from a design education and a life lived, well… getting stuff done.  

Teams and organizations engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life need to live at the intersection, too.  A team of experts ("I-shaped people") with no means of communicating will get no where, fast.  A team of generalists ("hyphen-shaped people") with no means of building and executing will suffer the same fate.  Diverse teams of T-shaped people are uniquely able to communicate in ways that support the generative application of their areas of expertise.  The end result is innovation.

This is the sixth of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback, thoughts, and ideas.

Prototyping is the lingua franca of innovation.  It externalizes internal thinking in a tangible form, rendering it more intelligible by others and the world.  The good news is that, though it has its roots in the creation of physical things, when taken as a mindset and a methodology, as a way of finding solutions, prototyping can be applied to any domain.  Anything can be prototyped, and you can prototype with anything.

Anything can be prototyped. Prototypes aren’t just for physical products. I routinely see people
prototyping services, complex experiences, business models, and even
ventures.  Really, anything can be prototyped: before filming Le Mans,
Steve McQueen took a film crew to the French race a
year earlier, shot an entire movie's worth of stuff, and then threw most of the exposed
stock away.  He knew that they best way to learn how to
shoot a great movie at Le Mans was to first shoot a rough movie there.
His camera people gleaned deep insights into camera placements, mounts,
and techniques which put them in good stead when it came time to shoot
the real movie. And the value of the tacit knowledge transfer involved
cannot be underestimated: rather than try to explain to new camera
people what he wanted, McQueen could point to actual film clips and
say, “This is good.”  Prototyping leads to speed as a process outcome.

You can prototype with anything.  You want to get an answer to your big question using the bare minimum of energy and expense possibly, but not at the expense of the fidelity of the results.  It's not only about aluminum, foamcore, glue, and plywood.  A video of the human experience of your proposed design is a prototype.  Used correctly, an Excel spreadsheet is a wonderful prototyping tool.  GMail started out as an in-market prototype.  A temporary pop-up shop is a prototype.  Believing that you can prototype with anything is a critical constraint in the design process, because it enables wise action, as opposed to the shots in the dark that arise from skipping to the end solution because zero imagination was applied to figuring out how to run a create a prototype to generate feedback from the world.

A wise person operates with the worldview that anything can be prototyped, and we can prototype with anything. 

This is the fifth of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback and ideas.

To make change in the world, we must constantly engage in a yin-yang cycle of prototyping.  This implies a commitment to two behaviors:

1. Prototype as if you are right.
2. Listen as if you are wrong.

What is a prototype?  A prototype is nothing other than a single question, embodied.  In a way quite similar to the scientific method, productive prototyping is about asking a single question at a time, and then constructing a model in the world which brings back evidence to answer your question.  In order to believe in the evidence that comes back to you, you need to prototype as if you already know the answer.  A strong belief in your point of view will push you to find more creative solutions to the question at hand.

Once your prototype is ready for the world, it is important to listen as if you are wrong.  You (and everyone around you) must be willing to respect the evidence that the prototype brings back, whether you life it or not.  You must also go out of your way to put your prototype in to the world.  Hiding it in a closet is only cheating the process, and ultimately, yourself.  My colleague Dennis Boyle, who is one of the world's truly great design thinkers and a remarkable product development guru, has a saying which we like to refer to as Boyle's Law.  It goes like this:

"never attend a meeting without a new prototype"

This serves to both push and pull.  It pushes you to prototype earlier and with more frequency, because you want to (and have to) meet with other people in the course of life.  And it pulls you toward a more productive state, because you can't have a meeting without having a new prototype, which means that you spend less time talking in pointless meetings and more time doing productive explorations.  Doing is very important.

There is an important build on Boyle's Law, which goes by the handle of Raney's Corollary.  Coined by another one of my colleagues, Colin Raney, his corollary states:

"you only learn when things start breaking"

The goal of a prototype is not to be right, but to get an answer.  That answer is what allows you move forward with wisdom.

When we engage in both of these behaviors, prototyping as if we are right but listening as if we are wrong, we engage ourselves in a continuing cycle of do-try-listen.  When faced with the challenge of bringing something new in to the world, this cycle leads to concrete results that have a better chance of changing the world, as they are born of lessons from the world.  As such, I much prefer the word "prototyping" (a verb) over the word "prototype" (a noun).  It is about doing.  Prototyping is how things move forward.

This is the fourth of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback and ideas.