3 Important Reminders for Leaders of Innovation

Show Notes Highlights

Companies aren’t born in garages, companies are born in companies.

Anchor & Twist: If you’re presenting a new idea, we crave to break the mold, but making something is different from explaining it. From a communication standpoint, similarities are your friends. It’s best to anchor it into something people already know, but then add a twist. (EG: iPhone – the phone is the anchor, the “I” is the twist, Lumineyes anchors itself in LASIK, but its purpose is so different it carries a powerful twist: it’s like LASIK, but it makes your eyes blue.)

When you’re creating or evaluating the next big idea, ask this question: What job is it designed to do? Most successful innovations perform a clear duty. When we craved on-the-go access to our music collections, we hired the iPod. When we needed quick and effective searches, we hired Google. But what “job” did Segway perform? No one was interested in employing a $5,000 walk-accelerator. What about the Apple Newton, the first widely hyped PDA back in the 1990s? It was clearly applying the right job—to give us mobile access to our calendars and to-do lists. But it was a lousy employee, with notoriously poor handwriting recognition and a limited attention span (from low battery life). PalmPilot got the job a few years later.