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.

Too often we focus all of our energy on designing the thing, and forget about the people who will use it.  As we approach any design effort, we must step back and always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"

Part of the challenge lies in taking an "ecosystem" approach to the human experience.  It's relatively easy to think about the experience of the end user of the thing you design, but what about the experience to be had by the person who sells it?  How could we make that better?  Who will service it?  Who will retire it?  Who will market it?  Who will provide training and education?  A comprehensive look at all of their needs will help (but not guarantee) a better overall experience for the end user.

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?

There are many examples where designing for the entire experience has made for success in the world (here's a list of "well done" vs. "not so well done"):

• Apple Store vs. Sony Style
• Dream Dinners vs. Hamburger Helper
• Trekking in Bhutan vs. in Nepal
• Disneyland vs. your local amusement park
• World of Warcraft vs. Second Life
• Mint.com vs. your credit card and bank statements

As Lance Armstrong would say, it's not about the bike.  We must keep asking "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"

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

If experiencing the world firsthand is about wisdom, then being open to what that world tells you requires cultivating the un-wise mind of a child: open, curious, fun-loving. 

Being open and curious takes practice. 

Having an open mind requires one to suspend (or at least defer) judgment.  This is an acquired skill. 

Curiosity must be fed: when asked by a classmate of mine how we should best spend our time preparing ourselves for a life spent designing stuff, the great design guru Sara Little Turnbull said, "Great designers are great readers."  In other words, you must feed your curiosity, because it grows stronger as it is fed, and the cognitive foundation set by that curiosity is what enables one to recognize patterns and make connections across disparate elements of complex systems.

Having fun (especially as you work) requires energy and time.  But it’s worth it: fun shows ways forward other than the drab grey of the mundane, and it can shake us out of the path of an obvious solution.

Without the mind of a child, one can’t see or act deeply.  We must see and hear with the mind of a child.

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

The signature behavior of people who routinely achieve innovative outcomes is that they constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world. 

Instead of only reading someone else's market research summary, they go in the field and shop across the category in question.  That way they can get a feel for all the intangibles which are lost in translation, as language, photos, and even video are imperfect mediums.  Honda's innovative rethink of the pickup truck came from Saturday mornings spent in the parking lot of Home Depot.

Instead of taking someone else's diagnosis of a problem at face value, they seek a second opinion, and the deliverer of that second opinion is their own person.  When there's a problem on the production line at Toyota, they don't wait for a PowerPoint to circulate with photos and diagrams of the bug in question.  Instead, everyone concerned walks over to experience the bug firsthand.  And then they ask:  why, why, why, why, and why?

Instead of spending sixty minutes talking about what might be done, they build four 15-minute prototypes to immediately jump to the lessons that only come when you start breaking things.  At the Stanford d.school, we hold "Iron Chef" prototyping sessions where small teams receive a problem statement from the audience (show me a way to run fast on the Moon!), and then they prototype the hell out of it for five minutes.  And invariably they get somewhere interesting that would have been unreachable via conversation and hand waving.

Instead of only reading second-hand source or searching on Google, they go to the place and talk to people and see the sights.  Talking to a person living on a dollar a day is much different than reading about it, as important as that background knowledge is.  Experiencing the Mona Lisa in person is something quite different than viewing it on your MacBook.  In order to understand what was really going on in Dubai, Joi Ito picked up house in Japan and moved there.

To truly start living as a design thinker, experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.

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