Trend spotter Faith Popcorn describes an innovative entrepreneur this way:
“To be where the consumers are just before they get there and offer them what they didn’t know they wanted.”
This ability to see change before it happens — or to imagine change and create it — can result in billions of dollars. We know the legends well:
Bernie Marcus was fired as CEO at Handy Dan, a small home-improvement chain. Together with a colleague who had also been axed by the board, he developed a customer-centric supersized chain known today as Home Depot.
Jerry Perenchio co-purchased Univision television network for $500 million in 1992. Since that time, Univision Network grew to become one of the top five networks in the country in any language, and in 2006, Perenchio sold Univision for $13.5 billion.
Howard Schultz was an executive at a housewares manufacturer when he noticed that a client was ordering an unusually large number of specialty coffee machines. He visited the client, a four-store operation called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice — and today he oversees more than 3,300 stores worldwide.
Ted Turner bought two failing TV stations in the Southeast and launched a revolution in the way we watch and receive the news. In 1970, he believed that a 24-hour all-news network would turn a profit and transform the news business. By 1980, that vision became CNN.
In all of these, it’s easy to see that innovative thinking was critical in their success.
But can we be taught that? Or is innovation instinctive?
While you consider your answer, I asked experts on the topic to weigh in:
Tom Kelley:
Kelley is the author of The Art of Innovation and general manager of IDEO, the award-winning design and development firm that produced the Apple mouse, the Palm V and the revolutionary and deceptively simple Shimano Coasting bike. Kelley’s work deconstructs the practice of creativity and examines the genesis and execution of an original idea.
John Maeda:
Maeda is from MIT’s Media Lab and soon will assume the reins of the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a world-renowned graphic designer, artist, computer programmer, educator and theorist. Esquire magazine named him one of the most important people in the 21st century. I.D. magazine selected him as one of the year’s 40 most influential people in design.
Bernd Schmitt:
Schmitt is executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at CBS and has written about the limitations of traditional corporate culture, the need to promote creativity and innovation and the unique challenges of establishing and cultivating a powerful brand.
What do you think? When it comes to entrepreneurship and innovation, what can and can’t be taught?
More...
“To be where the consumers are just before they get there and offer them what they didn’t know they wanted.”
This ability to see change before it happens — or to imagine change and create it — can result in billions of dollars. We know the legends well:
Bernie Marcus was fired as CEO at Handy Dan, a small home-improvement chain. Together with a colleague who had also been axed by the board, he developed a customer-centric supersized chain known today as Home Depot.
Jerry Perenchio co-purchased Univision television network for $500 million in 1992. Since that time, Univision Network grew to become one of the top five networks in the country in any language, and in 2006, Perenchio sold Univision for $13.5 billion.
Howard Schultz was an executive at a housewares manufacturer when he noticed that a client was ordering an unusually large number of specialty coffee machines. He visited the client, a four-store operation called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice — and today he oversees more than 3,300 stores worldwide.
Ted Turner bought two failing TV stations in the Southeast and launched a revolution in the way we watch and receive the news. In 1970, he believed that a 24-hour all-news network would turn a profit and transform the news business. By 1980, that vision became CNN.
In all of these, it’s easy to see that innovative thinking was critical in their success.
But can we be taught that? Or is innovation instinctive?
While you consider your answer, I asked experts on the topic to weigh in:
Tom Kelley:
I absolutely believe that innovation can be learned. And the good news is that everyone has that innovator’s mindset already inside them, so the challenge is not so much to learn innovation as to recover some of the open-minded creativity of youth. Baudelaire said “Genius is childhood recalled at will,” and the innovator’s challenge is to tap into that latent talent hidden within their team.
Kelley is the author of The Art of Innovation and general manager of IDEO, the award-winning design and development firm that produced the Apple mouse, the Palm V and the revolutionary and deceptively simple Shimano Coasting bike. Kelley’s work deconstructs the practice of creativity and examines the genesis and execution of an original idea.
John Maeda:
It is this basic question the innovator asks herself, “Am I normal” or asked another way: “Am I different?” Innovators are born when they choose to leverage their mind to the fullest — when they flip the simple switch in their mind from “normal” to “different.” Keeping the switch flipped ON while the pressures of the world keep flipping it OFF — now that’s the hard part and the real challenge: how to stay innovative for life. That’s the greater question in my mind.
Maeda is from MIT’s Media Lab and soon will assume the reins of the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a world-renowned graphic designer, artist, computer programmer, educator and theorist. Esquire magazine named him one of the most important people in the 21st century. I.D. magazine selected him as one of the year’s 40 most influential people in design.
Bernd Schmitt:
Many view innovation as technical innovation; that’s a narrow engineering mentality. From a customer-oriented perspective, innovation is anything that improves customers’ lives in product design, but also communications, shopping environments, on web sites, etc. Think Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty (the message and the innovative You Tube ads); think Abercrombie’s hip retail space; think Facebook. And that type of innovation can certainly be learned and taught — just like technical innovation. In my marketing courses and in my writings I equip students and executives with tools that marketers can use to challenge marketing and communications assumptions (the sacred cows), look outside the industry for inspiration (outside-industry benchmarking) and examine the core of a strategy and take it to an extreme (strategy stripping).
Schmitt is executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at CBS and has written about the limitations of traditional corporate culture, the need to promote creativity and innovation and the unique challenges of establishing and cultivating a powerful brand.
What do you think? When it comes to entrepreneurship and innovation, what can and can’t be taught?
More...