Combinatorial Innovation
There are so many new technologies today: tablets, geolocation, video chat, great app frameworks. It is easy to cherry-pick off “combinatorial” innovations that seem compelling, and can maybe even be monetized readily.
But all those innovations are inevitable. If our technologies afford a certain possibility, they will occur. “That’s not a company, that’s a feature,” is one criticism I’ve heard of many “startups.”
These combinatorial, feature-oriented “X for Y” endeavors are often attractive because they can often be built quickly.
Startup Weekend events send an implicit message that a meaningful business can be fleshed out in just a couple of days. And I argue that is not true. That might be a good forum to get practice with building a quick combinatorial technology and working with others, but a real innovation, much less a meaningful business, takes real time.
I think people are often looking in the wrong places for innovation, often because they don’t really take the time to do the homework, observation, and deep reflection necessary to arrive at a true insight. We want things to be quick and easy.
Changing Minds, and Behaviors
The biggest innovations require asking people to change their beliefs, habits, and behaviors.
iPhone: “why would I want a smartphone without a physical keyboard? It’s too expensive. I can’t install apps.”
Twitter: “what is this for? Why would anyone do this? Who cares what I had for breakfast?”
iPad: “an expensive toy. Could never replace a real laptop. Can’t run real office applications. The enterprise will never adopt it.”
Foursquare: “only hipsters and bar hoppers would ever do this. They are letting people know when to rob them. I don’t want people to know where I am.”
And these innovations have taken years of constant attention to bring to their current state. And they are not done.
One Innovator’s Story
Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, was in the room at Wherecamp in 2007 where I was giving a talk about location check-in habits via Twitter (a subject I knew well because of my Twittervision service, which allowed this.)
Dennis, of course, also founded the precursor to Foursquare, Dodgeball, which he sold to Google in 2004 (they promptly killed it.)
But Dennis wanted to see his vision come to pass, and he knew it would someday be possible — though at that point the iPhone had not been released and it would be nearly two years before it supported GPS location technology.
But there Dennis was, doing his homework in 2007, studying user behavior to figure out exactly what behaviors he would have to encourage to make Foursquare work.
He asked me, “so, people are really putting their home and work locations formatted inside tweets in order to update their location?”
“Yep, a few thousand times a day,” I replied.
“That’s cool. That’s really cool stuff,” he said. And from that, and years of similar evidence-gathering and study, Foursquare would be born.
So, creating Foursquare took about five years. (I could have “stolen” the idea and built Foursquare myself. But I didn’t execute on that; it was his vision to pursue.) Dennis did his homework. He was prepared. And his vision preceded the technology that enabled it.
Why, not How
Real innovation doesn’t come from a weekend. It comes from passion, years of study, understanding deep insights and the “why,” and persistence in seeing something new to market, along with the marketing and cheerleading that will make it successful.
The iPad owes much to Steve Jobs’ love of calligraphy. He cultivated a sense of aesthetics because of that initial interest. He didn’t set out to “make money” but rather dedicated himself to changing the world for the better using the entirety of his humanity. Time studying art wasn’t “lost,” it was R&D for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Many of today’s entrepreneurs could stand to do less “hustling” and more reading, exploring, reflecting, and gathering input — and when it is time to make stuff, set their sights as high as possible.
There is more to this world than money, and there are countless opportunities to make it a vastly better place. Rather than using our CPU cycles just playing with combinatorial innovations, let’s devote ourselves to making the world as amazing as possible. Try to take time to reflect on how you can make the world better, and not just on what current technology affords.
38 comments ↓
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An innovation that is bound to be long term takes time to come to life and really benefit consumers.
Innovation can not be attain in just one night. It requires a long period of time to accomplish, just like change.
Technology had changed the world so much. From the simple life that our ancestors had lived, it had been modernized as the time goes by. It is really a big factor for us to have this time because of the great advantages that we’ve got from it.
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I agree with you, innovation takes time. It’s not gonna happen overnight .
Now a days is a era of technologies. There is no any doubt that Steve Jobs really give us a nice evolution in electronic gadgets. I like Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod.
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Wow, amazing…Great writing…
off course, real innovation take time but it also need proper consideration.
How about the Amazon Kindle? It basically made paperback books obsolete. Real innovation can replace products.
How about the Amazon Kindle? It basically made paperback books obsolete. Real innovation can replace products.
Totally agree with you! Innovation also impact the employment industry.
If you have a lot experience in a specific field then you are able to bring innovations.
totally agree
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Innovation is the engine for growth. Innovation comes from ideas. Ideas take time to develop. Ideas tend to change as they grow. Ideas need to be prototyped and that takes time.
absoutly one hundred percent right,real invention take time,but it need proper team and considiration.
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Innovation is the engine for growth. Innovation comes from ideas.
Ideas take time to develop. Ideas tend to change as they grow. Ideas
need to be prototyped and that takes time.
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Every serious innovation take some time.
You have a point on that, indeed it’s very important and every work you take seriously will indeed takes time and will definitely be successful.
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Such a great though for the reader to ponder. And absolutely that will make each readers to think.
It’s like someone said “Great ideas are considered as jokes unless someone proves it”. Every innovation or ideas take time for people to adopt it until then it is considered as waste. We must have patience in order to prove our ideas.
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