Simple Creativity

We have discussed the issue of creativity extensively in our class. Sometimes we may be driven in a direction that forces us to think about complex solutions in an attempt to be creative.

Here is a clear example of how simple creativity can be (via Johnny Chung Lee's blog) when you are truly inspired.
 

Pico-Innovations

I have been giving some thought to whether the nature of innovation has changed. You still have innovation processes in large organizations designed to help them develop new products efficiently. Majority of those efforts end in failures (partly because of the nature of innovation itself and partly due to the impossibility of overcoming political hurdles within organizations). But all is not lost.

Companies such as Kickstarter and others have developed new platforms that permit what I am calling "pico-innovations".


The term "nano-innovations" has been cornered by nano-technologists and "pico" reflects my feeling that these are by themselves very small innovations but collectively amount to a sea change in evolution of innovation processes. Perhaps, as in the natural world, the very small innovations, that need very few resources, may be the ones that might be the most prevalent in the future. Humans may have lost theirs but the pico-innovation process seems to be developing a long, robust tail. 

MINIMAL Inc.

MINIMAL Inc came to my attention because of their kickstarter project the LunaTik Touch Pen, a combination of a pen and a stylus.

Their philosophy of combining design with attention to quality seems to set them apart. They have taken an existing high quality product and created a new way of using it. Also, check out their "TikTok+LunaTik Watch"

Though there might have been many who may have thought about similar concepts, the execution of the concept and the ability to realize it elegantly is rarely a given.

MINIMAL Inc. seems to be very good at getting execution right. Worth watching to see what else they might do.

The genius of Hubspot

Hubspot is a concept more than a company. It is a vision executed with relative perfection. It serves as the best example of what a properly implemented inbound marketing plan and vision can do for a company's success and growth.

Through the careful use of blogs that seem authoritative, use of words like founder, expert, guru when referring to the founders, by linking blogs about other people who may be known as founders, experts, gurus, hubspot has become the premier example of how to successfully practice what you preach.

But what do they really deliver for their customers? Are many of the blogs their partners write truthful and free of conflict of interest? As an example, here is a blog post by a company Kunocreative that talks about why you should upgrade to Hubspot Enterprise.  To quote the author:

"Maybe "Enterprise" should be called "Turbo" instead, since these tools can help your company rapidly expand sales volumes and reduce time-to-sale significantly."

But is this an unbiased view from a company that has used Hubspot technology to increase its own sales? Not really. Kunocreative is a "Hubspot Certified Partner" which benefits if a customer buys Hubspot Enterprise product.

Hubspot is a collection of ideas and concepts. It is overhyped and overblogged. It may be useful as long as it does not detract companies from being focused on developing their core technology.

It may seem to promise manna from the heavens through inbound marketing but caveat emptor.

If you are not careful, then only thing that will be inbound will be a bunch of bills from Hubspot & its partners rather than customers.

20 Innovative Startups

The business insider article on 20 most innovative startups was puzzling and inspiring at the same time. The choice of the title "most innovative" was puzzling - since the criteria for how they were selected was missing. Secondly, all the startups were from the US - I would be willing to bet that if you truly were going to look at 20 most innovative startups, then there perhaps - just perhaps may be some outside the US.

What was inspiring is that many of the startups did seem to have a fair amount of success and chance for continued growth. Some like H.Bloom may wilt over time and some like Taskrabbit may be cloned or reinvented into oblivion but there were others that seemed like they could give established players a run for the money.

I was particularly drawn towards those that seemed to offer a platform for enabling/accelerating innovation as opposed to a single innovation (admittedly Sphero was pretty cool). These platforms included

a) Kickstarter - permits anyone to be an angel investor (with checking account rates of return) in products that truly believe in.
b) Kaggle - Disseminates some fairly difficult problems to researchers around the world ; Kaggle is not the first to leverage crowd-sourced research; Innocentive has been doing it for a while. Their model however appears to be more democratic.
c) Skillshare - A platform for replicating the model of community-center courses but on an expanded scale. The  students of ETR500 may want to check out this skillshare course on Business Model Generation

Others like Quora appear to leverage the networking ability of their founders and may still have a chance at developing into useful services. The ones looking at simplifying banking may have a better chance at profitability  but they also carry significant risk.

Overall, the article had some good picks but also had a slight whiff of venture manure. Do sniff around, but carefully.

iPod business model

iPod business model - note that iTunes was released after the iPod was released. iPod's development was supervised by Apple, aspects of the UI were supervised by Steve Jobs personally. The hardware and user interface were built using pre-existing platforms by non-apple partners. 

Steve was reportedly disgusted with the existing music players and their extremely unfriendly user interfaces.

In visible pain, hidden opportunities: the many roads to disruptive innovation

In a recent article, Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog Design, argues that you can't find opportunities to innovate simply by watching for glaring problems and fixing them. Rather, you have discern more subtle problems that hide in plain sight. 

'Instead of large pain points, you should spend your time looking for--and addressing--something much more subtle: small “tension points,” the things that aren’t big enough to be considered problems. The challenge, however, is that tension points are usually hard to spot, because the symptoms are easy to overlook. They’re not screaming for attention the way “real” problems are. They’re typically little inconveniences that people have grown complacent about.' - L. Williams. 

A simple but classic example of this is the disruptive innovation that Dutch Boy created in the area of paints - not with a new paint formulation but with a new paint can design.

This helped them leap-frog their competition due to their seeming ability to look at their customer's latent need for a container that homeowners (not house painters) could use.