Innovation Engine

by Tina Seelig

  Steve randomly selected three hundred of the most recently received cards and started calling these customers himself. He asked them what businesses they were in, how they used the graphics boards, what the boards’ most important attributes were, how they could be improved, and how much the customers would be willing to pay for an improved version. He learned a tremendous amount from each call, and the collective information allowed him to make decisive choices about product positioning and pricing, with great confidence that these choices would work. Within a short period of time, Steve overhauled the advertising and promotion of the company’s product line and increased prices. As a result, the company’s market share increased from 10 to 70 percent. This would never have happened if Steve had not paid attention to the little pieces of paper others had ignored. To those who didn’t understand what he was doing, Steve looked fearless.

  As children, we are naturally curious and intensely observant while we try to figure out how the world works. As we get older, many of us shut down our natural curiosity and observation skills. We think we understand the world and look for the patterns we already recognize. As Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing, Handspring, and Numenta, describes in his book with Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence, our brains are natural pattern-recognition machines that are constantly filling in the gaps in our observations with what we think should be there. We become skilled at predicting what we will experience, and then we experience the things we predict.11

  It takes considerable effort to focus our attention beyond what we anticipate, especially when we are dealing with familiar experiences. For example, we tune out when we’re performing repetitive activities, such as driving or walking on routine paths. We also focus predominantly on things that are at our eye level rather than looking around more broadly. In addition, we pay attention to the objects we expect to find and ignore those things that don’t fit.

  We believe we are fully aware of our environment and are paying careful attention to everything that is going on. Yet, magicians and illusionists understand that almost anything can distract us, including a story, a joke, or a gesture of pointing to someone across a room, which draws our gaze away from what is happening in front of us. Most magic tricks rely upon a magician’s ability to divert us while performing a sleight of hand. For example, a magician puts six cards faceup on a table and asks you to select one from the lineup, but not to pick it up. She asks you to memorize that card, keeping this information to yourself. She then tells you that she will read your mind to determine the one card you selected. She picks up all six cards, looks at them carefully, and puts five cards back down on the table, telling you that the card you selected will be missing from the lineup. She’s right. Your card is gone!

  How did she know? If you had been paying careful attention, you would have seen that all five of the cards she placed on the table had changed. The magician didn’t need to know which card was yours. She just had to count on the fact that while you were focusing on one card, you wouldn’t notice the difference between any cards that look similar, such as a king of hearts and a king of diamonds, or a queen of spades and a queen of clubs. Magicians take full advantage of our lack of focus and our ability to be distracted as they make objects appear to disappear, as they cut people in half, and as they pull rabbits out of hats.

  Observation is an active process that takes significant effort. With practice, however, you can effectively turn up your powers of observation. Scientists and artists of all types are the world’s “noticers.” They are trained to pay attention and then communicate what they see and experience to the rest of us. For example, Charles Darwin is credited with the idea of evolution by natural selection. He polished his ability to pay attention during his five-year journey on the HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, and upon his return to England as he studied all the specimens and drawings he brought back from the Galápagos Islands. Tiny differences in the beaks of finches and the shapes of tortoises’ shells served as evidence for his provocative theories. This is a poignant reminder of the power of observation.

  The ability to really notice what is happening is important to success in the design firm IDEO, which is known for its innovative solutions to complex challenges. According to IDEO partner Dennis Boyle, they were hired by the American Red Cross to redesign the experience of giving blood, with the goal of encouraging individuals to donate blood more frequently. The obvious solutions involved rethinking the flow of people through the blood-donation process and redesigning the tables, chairs, and equipment used at each donation site. IDEO addressed these issues by creating custom equipment that all fit together, making donors feel more comfortable by giving them a consistent experience.

  The IDEO design team didn’t stop there.

  They continued to observe all aspects of the donation experience and, by paying careful attention to the details and talking with those who were donating blood, they gained unexpected insights into the donors’ motivations for giving blood. It became clear that each person who donated blood had a moving story to tell about the reason for doing so. These personal accounts, which would have been invisible to those who did not talk with the donors, were a critical part of their blood-donation experience.

  The designers captured the donors’ emotions by taking individual photos of them and asking them to write a short story titled “Why I Give.” The stories were then displayed on boards at the donation sites, encouraging others to donate too. Now, when you go to the American Red Cross website, the home page has a large photo of a donor and a short story about his or her reason for giving blood, plus links to nearly a hundred other stories. This insight and opportunity would never have been uncovered without careful attention to those things that are typically outside our field of view.

  Focused observation is a powerful way to acquire valuable knowledge about the world. That knowledge is the starting point for all your creative endeavors, because it provides a toolbox for your imagination. You can practice polishing your powers of observation by actively looking at the world with fresh eyes and seeing the “water” in your environment.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ATTITUDE

  Due to a marked increase in curiosity about creativity, there are many more applicants for the course I teach on creativity and innovation at Stanford than spots available. Therefore, each year the teaching team has to whittle down the applicant pool from over 200 to 40 students. Following the decisions last year, I received a note from a student who hadn’t been admitted, asking for an explanation. I sent him a polite response about the challenges of picking students when all the applicants are qualified. He wrote back again with an unusual request. He said that he never gets into the courses he wants. He begged me for more specific feedback, saying that he is a hardworking student who was admitted to the school on an academic scholarship.

  I felt his frustration and wanted to help out. I thought carefully about how to respond and sent him the following message: “If there is a course that you really want to take and you don’t get a spot in the class, then just keep showing up. Spots usually open up during the first week, as students drop the class for a variety of reasons. If you’re there, you are almost guaranteed the spot.”

  He wrote back, “Thank you for this advice. I assume that won’t work for your class.” I stared at his e-mail for several minutes and then responded, “Yes, you’re right. It won’t work.” I had handed him the ruby slippers and he didn’t take them.

  This is in sharp contrast to another student who wrote to me the same day. She didn’t get into the class either, but her approach was completely different. She said, “Thank you so much for the first class. I really enjoyed it and learned a tremendous amount. Would it be possible for me to attend just one more class? I know it will be incredibly valuable.” I agreed to let her come to the next class, and as predicted, someone dropped the course and she was admitted.

  These two students are both intelligent. The difference between them is their attitude
. The first fellow was convinced he wouldn’t get into the class and didn’t even see the possibility when I placed it in front of him. The second student created a way to get what she wanted. In fact, believing that there is a solution to your problem is a critical step in finding one. So many people give up long before they find the solutions to their challenges—big and small—even when those solutions are in plain sight, because they don’t have conviction that the problems can be solved. Essentially, if you believe something is impossible, then it is.

  One way to change your attitude is to change your vocabulary. While at Facebook, Randi Zuckerberg told her team that she was changing the name of their group from “consumer marketing” to “creative marketing.” Despite the fact that it seemed like a small change, it had an instant impact on the group. Immediately, they redefined themselves as a creative hub of the company, even though nobody else in the firm knew about the name change.

  Within a few days, the team reorganized their working space, bringing in new furniture and art supplies and designing a media wall to showcase their creative accomplishments. They started coming up with more innovative ideas and suggested new projects that reflected their newly defined role in the company. It became abundantly clear that Randi’s team was incredibly creative, but they hadn’t thought it was their primary role to generate new ideas. The change in their name gave them explicit permission to exercise their imaginations. Of course, creative output takes more than just changing the name of your organization. But, in this case, a change in name served as an important catalyst for unlocking the group’s innate ability to innovate.

  Heidi Neck, who teaches entrepreneurship at Babson College, runs a workshop in which she asks the students to complete a jigsaw puzzle. When they are done, they go into another room to create a patchwork quilt, starting with a crazy collection of different fabrics. When they’re finished, she compares the two approaches and end products. Putting puzzles together requires a fixed goal, and if a single piece of the puzzle is missing, you aren’t able to succeed. On the other hand, making a quilt is an open-ended process in which you can quickly change direction based on the pieces you have available. And no matter what materials you are given, you are able to complete the quilt.

  Heidi shows her students that innovators and entrepreneurs are much more like quilt makers than puzzle builders. They have a mind-set that allows them to respond to the unexpected and leverage the resources available in order to create something of value rather than wait for all the expected pieces to show up.

  Peter H. Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, is a master of this mind-set and uses it when approaching the terrific challenges that face our planet. He identifies the biggest problems in the world, the ones that seem impossible, and then invites others to come together to solve them. Peter provides large incentives by offering impressive prizes to those who succeed.

  Grand challenges and large prizes have motivated many great accomplishments. For example, the 1919 Orteig Prize paid $25,000 to the first person to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. This competition stimulated a number of experiments and eventually led to Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight in 1927. Peter uses a similar approach at the XPRIZE Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to inspire radical breakthroughs that have a huge positive impact. Seventy-seven years after Lindbergh’s flight, the first XPRIZE paid $10 million to a team led by Burt Rutan for developing a private spaceship. Their challenge was to create a spaceship that could be used repeatedly for civilians who want a chance to experience space travel. It would have to carry three people—the equivalent of a pilot and two passengers—up to an altitude of a hundred kilometers and be able to repeat the flight twice in two weeks. This challenge inspired twenty-six teams to take part, resulting in an enormous investment of their time, energy, and creativity.

  Tapping into powerful emotions is yet another way to increase drive and motivation. Many artists and entrepreneurs are propelled forward in their pursuits not by their intellectual curiosity but by strong feelings, including anger, sadness, joy, or frustration. Creativity isn’t entirely a cerebral act, but rather it’s augmented by strong emotions that fuel fresh ideas. A wonderful example comes from Chicago, where Brenda Palms Barber started a business to employ former prison inmates. She initially ran a not-for-profit company dedicated to helping former felons get jobs, which was a challenging proposition since few employers were willing to hire these people. Her innovative solution was to start her own company to employ the former inmates herself. The new company, Sweet Beginnings, makes honey and honey-based skin products. The employees raise bees, manufacture the honey, manage the company website, and work in sales and customer service. With these jobs on their résumés, 85 percent are able to find other jobs after working there.12 This business, fueled by a passion to help those who are starting over, is considering expanding to other cities across the country.

  This story is a sweet reminder that in order to find creative solutions to big challenges, you must first believe that you’ll find them. With this attitude, you see opportunities where others see obstacles, and you are able to leverage the resources you have to reach your goals.

  Outside

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HABITAT

  The spaces in which we live and work are the stages on which we play out our lives. As such, they have an important impact on our thoughts and behavior. Kindergartens, for example, are filled with an abundance of brightly colored books, games, and toys, and the furniture is designed for flexibility, so kids can work independently, in groups, or as an entire class. This type of space stimulates children’s imagination and enhances their creativity. As they get older, their classrooms get less and less stimulating. Eventually, in high school and college, the desks and chairs are usually lined up in rows and bolted to the floor, facing the front of the room, where the teacher lectures while students passively take notes. Sadly, students graduate from an environment designed to stimulate the imagination to one that inadvertently crushes it. And when they head off to work, many of these graduates find themselves in offices with row upon row of sterile cubicles.

  When you enter any space, you are immersed in a narrative and become an actor in that story. You know your role and what is expected of you. Each space compels you to respond differently. Therefore, if you are creating an office, classroom, or family room where you want people to be inventive, you need to keep in mind that the design of the space really matters.

  Architects are extremely aware of this as they design a new building. Jeanne Gang, a renowned architect from Chicago, who won a MacArthur “genius” award in 2011, told me that her company Studio Gang Architects, consciously designed their workspace to be slightly “out of control,” filled with myriad objects that encourage imagination. There are found objects from all over the world, such as rocks and minerals, building materials, musical instruments, fabrics, and crafts that offer inspiration for the projects on which the staff are working. The building is intentionally outside the city center, in an old bank they gutted and made their own. It is a relaxed environment on the inside and the outside.

  In addition to their open studio space, they have three unique meeting rooms, each consciously designed for different types of creative work. The rooms are different sizes and shapes, and the furniture reflects the goal for that space. The orange room is designed for all-day workshops; it has soft chairs and one big round table for group work. It opens onto both the model shop and the kitchen, for easy access to prototyping materials as well as food. Another room, predominantly white, is designed for formal presentations; outfitted with a rectangular wooden table, this room opens onto a garden. The silver room is designed for talking, not prototyping. It is an intimate space with a white round table and views of the activity in the street. Overall, Jeanne has built an environment where people aren’t worried about making a mess, where everything is flexible, and where the space—both inside and outside—reflects the goals of those who work
there.

  By accident, I discovered how powerfully space contributes to creative problem solving. I was running a simulation game in my creativity class and had divided the room into two ecosystems, so that two completely different games were going on at once. Each ecosystem had four teams, each of which was challenged to complete a jigsaw puzzle in the shortest amount of time. For each ecosystem, I mixed together three one-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzles and then distributed one-fourth of the pieces to each team. Since there were fewer puzzles than there were teams, they had to figure out how to get all the pieces they needed from the other teams in their ecosystem in order to be successful.

  One ecosystem was set up on one side of the room with a small table for each team, but no chairs. The other ecosystem was set up on the other side of the room with chairs for each team member, but no tables. The first time I did this, the arrangement of the team spaces was not intended as a variable in the simulation but just a way to differentiate the two ecosystems. However, this ended up being the key variable that affected the outcome of the game.

  Remarkably, the students in the ecosystem on the side of the room with chairs (but no tables) almost instantly started to collaborate with one another. Within minutes, the chairs were rearranged into one large circle or pushed aside altogether, and they worked on the puzzles on the floor. They figured out that by working together, they earned the maximum number of points for the game. On the other hand, the teams on the side of the room with tables (but no chairs) anchored themselves to their respective tables. They did not collaborate at all and thus ended up limiting the number of points each team earned. The participants are always shocked when I point this out to them. They think they have been making well-thought-out, strategic decisions and are blown away by the realization that the space dictated what they did.