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Spirit of Innovation

As seasoned veterans of this game we well understand, there is no magic formula for success. Nor, for that matter, is there any guarantee that sheer diligence or hard work will even be rewarded. Sure, you can experiment with brand extensions or tweaks on existing product categories, but that’s not real innovation. Repackaging your widget may stimulate interest or lead to a quick spike in sales, but that is not innovation.

True innovation leads to what we like to term “a new way of doing,” as in when Netflix decided to build a business model around eliminating movie rental late fees, something that must have struck many analysts at the time as patently absurd. At a bare minimum, authentic, successful innovation requires two critical factors for success. And then there is a third factor that we believe most fail to ever fully consider.

1) A new way of doing

First, innovation requires a “new way of doing” that doesn’t quite fit within an existing paradigm. These “new ways of doing” need not be wildly different or outrageous, but just different enough to stand outside the current realm of understanding and practice. In 1989, nobody could have guessed that the majority of Americans would soon begin paying $3.00 for a cup of coffee. But as innovative as Starbucks may have been, it was still about something we all knew well — coffee.

The Dvorak keyboard, considered by most to be much more efficient than our conventional QWERTY keyboard, is another such example. Odwalla juice — ultra-fresh, super-premium juice in a 16-ounce bottle — was surely a “new way of doing” when it arrived upon the consumer landscape in the early 1990s. Similarly, in the mid-1990s, a company called Clearly Canadian produced an equally innovative beverage named Orbitz, whose bottles of clear, fruit-flavored waters resembled a lava lamp and featured floating, edible balls of wax. Finally, the digitizing of music, and the resulting compressed formats such as MP3, represent a “new way of doing” that somehow dominates our contemporary discourse, especially with regard to the music industry. All of these “new ways of doing” seemed peculiar upon their initial appearance.

2) Cooperation, what we like to call “collective legitimacy”

More importantly, though, innovation requires significant cooperation from the rest of us in the world to recognize this “new way of doing” as somehow legitimate. Without that cooperation, the innovation typically disappears. That happened in the case of the Dvorak keyboard. Because so many of us had grown up under the spell of QWERTY, the “new way of doing” faced insurmountable opposition upon its initial introduction in the 1930s. We just didn’t care enough to learn a new way of typing at that moment in time, even if it was more efficient. Orbitz faced a similar fate. Consumers simply had no interest in, or apparent need for, a lava lamp-inspired beverage offering “waxy balls of goodness.”

And yet other innovations have inspired our cooperation, often in droves. Starbucks’s enrichment of the coffee experience, Netflix’s mail-based delivery of rentable videos and Odwalla’s refinement of the fresh juice paradigm have all generated enthusiastic cooperation. Ditto for the digitizing of music, which — propelled by compression schemes such as MP3 — has generated so much cooperation (i.e., file sharing) that record stores and record companies are busily restructuring their business models in attempt to stave off bankruptcy.

It’s worth mentioning a couple of caveats here with regard to cooperation’s role in innovation. Firstly, one might be tempted to mistakenly think of cooperation as simply “marketplace success” or consumer desire. In truth, cooperation is much more than that, for cooperation requires that we all (a) collectively understand and (b) recognize the legitimacy of the innovation. We need not purchase Starbucks coffee, Odwalla juices or subscribe to Netflix, but we do need to understand “what they are about” for the innovation to be legitimate. Conversely, marketplace success is hardly innovation. Taco Bell may someday score a hit with one of its countless iterations of tortilla shells, meat, cheese and sauce, but there’s no real innovation there. It’s not as if generations of Americans will gradually incorporate something called a “Chicken Gordita” into their cultural heritage.

Secondly, it is crucial not to fall into the trap of assuming that successful innovations are somehow “better” or “more efficient” than non-successful innovations. In truth, our collective decision to cooperate with some innovations and ignore others is highly arbitrary and capricious. As we’ve witnessed in recent dialogues regarding oil prices and global warming, there are innumerable methods of fueling vehicles, we just happen to be stuck on gasoline. Likewise, there are quite literally hundreds of methods of refrigerating food, many much more efficient and practical than electricity, but for a host of historical reasons we’ve settled on electric-powered refrigerators for home use.

Thus far, we’ve suggested that innovation requires a “new way of doing” as well as cooperation, but there is something else rarely discussed with regard to innovation, it is something we call the “spirit of innovation.”

3) The spirit of innovation

It is often a hard thing to get a handle around, but the most successful innovations always seem to involve a certain spirit — what others have described with the word Zeitgeist, which translates to “the spirit of the times.”

Whether by happenstance or luck or design, Trader Joe’s seemed to stumble upon this spirit when it began marketing low-cost specialty and ethnic foods to Californians in the 1980s via employees dressed like Jimmy Buffet fans. There was just this “feeling in the air” that folks wanted to begin experimenting with new food flavors and cuisines, and they could do so affordably at Trader Joe’s. To this day, legions of (very) loyal consumers find great difficulty in describing what Trader Joe’s actually is and, instead, defer to descriptors such as “cool vibe” or “a cool place that seems to get it.” These terms are much more in line with a certain kind of spirit than with more traditional taxonomic understandings of what constitutes a grocery store.

How The Who (perhaps accidentally) invented rock and roll

Thinking in terms of innovation, rock and roll depended upon a similar spirit in order to become a true, fully realized “way of doing” — to transition from musical curiosity to a culturally legitimate form of artistry. Interestingly, the fledgling musical genre hobbled along for nearly 20 years before encountering the “spark that ignited the spirit.”

As most scholars describe, rock and roll evolved from elements of blues, rhythm and blues, country and western, and other indigenous American musical traditions, but at its foundation was a steady boogie-woogie blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat. Laid above this steady rhythm was a variety of vocal and lyrical styles that, while they might have insinuated teenage rebellion, differed little from their Tin Pan Alley ancestors. This was pop music, plain and simple.

Most of its early practitioners, from the lesser-known regional acts to the more successful acts like Bo Diddley, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and even The Kinks and the early Beatles, strayed little from this style. While Elvis Presley may have frightened many a parent with his hips, his music was not particularly innovative. It was simple country and western with a driving beat. For that matter, most of the early Beatles repertoire, while wildly melodic, was not particularly innovative. Before 1965, there was no sense that rock and roll was anything more than a pop music curiosity designed to sell 45 RPM singles.

All of that changed in 1965 with the release of the first single by the British rock group The Who, “I Can’t Explain.” The song itself is straightforward enough, almost a carbon copy of The Kink’s hit “You Really Got Me.” But the one thing The Who had that nobody else to that day had ever experienced was a drummer by the name of Keith Moon. Lacking any classical training, members of the band were initially unsure of Moon’s presence in the lineup. But as biographers have pointed out, what Moon may have lacked in talent he more than made up for with his maniacal energy, his spot on sense of timing and, well, his insanity.

So the song starts out easy enough with a steady beat: dum, dum, dum-dum, dum. Note that the lyrics themselves foreshadow the soon to be unleashed “spirit of the times” that would soon transform rock and roll forever:

Got a feeling inside (Can’t explain)
It’s a certain kind (Can’t explain)
I feel hot and cold (Can’t explain)
Yeah, down in my soul, yeah (Can’t explain)
I said ... (Can’t explain)
I’m feeling good now, yeah, but (Can’t explain)

Dizzy in the head and I’m feeling blue
The things you’ve said, well, maybe they’re true
I’m gettin’ funny dreams again and again
I know what it means, but...

And right there, at this precise moment before transitioning into the chorus, rock and roll was born. More precisely, while transitioning between the verse and chorus, Moon rattles off eight staccato smashing drumbeats, seemingly out of nowhere, which shatter all existing understanding of “ways of doing.”

In more simplistic terms, Moon goes freaking hog wild crazy on his drum kit, but somehow it all seems to hold together.

Here — with Moon’s spirit of unbridled energy and desire to dismantle existing convention — rock and roll finally came into its own as a “new way of doing.” Interestingly, 1965 also saw the release of the Beatle’s first “concept album” Rubber Soul, which was seen as something more high-minded than a mere “collection of singles.” Shortly thereafter, The Beatles retired forever from touring to explore their newfound role as “recording artists.”

And 1965 was also the year Brian Wilson quit touring with The Beach Boys so he could devote all of his time in the studio crafting Pet Sounds, an ambitious effort that culminated in the release of “Good Vibrations,” a single that utilized more than 50 musicians and animals, 900 hours of studio tape, and cost in excess of $50,000 to produce(which in 1965 was an absolutely insane amount of money). Suddenly, in 12 short months, rock and roll had moved from “pop music” to a culturally legitimate art form. And, as many scholars have argued, it all came together with Keith Moon’s insane drum breaks.

The point here is that very often “new ways of doing” can hobble along for years before a certain “spirit of the times” propels them into culturally legitimate innovations. And while it would be foolish to believe one could somehow control, shape or direct this spirit, we do believe one can keep a trained eye on its emergence.

Microsoft’s disaster that is Zune

In one sense, Microsoft got one thing very, very right with Zune.

That is, the current “spirit of the times” that is driving new ways of doing is the consumers’ unbridled desire to share their music with their peers. If you think about it, the desire to share music with one’s peers is really a very primitive urge, certainly one that predates most modern societies. And now, through the magic that is digitization, we are finally able to indulge that urge without having to lug boxes of records, tapes or CDs around wherever we go. But for (understandable) reasons, most involved with the music industry (especially Zune!) are obsessed with fighting that spirit with a variety of tactics that fall under the rubric of digital rights management (DRM). It is, of course, understandable that the music industry is so worried about file sharing (much of which can be viewed as piracy), but at the end of the day, this concern is only hampering the winds of innovation. In the case of Zune, its much-touted “share” feature is so crippled by DRM as to make the feature, as well as the player itself, wholly user-unfriendly. To that end, we’ll go on record with the legions of others who predict Zune will prove to be one of Microsoft’s biggest failures.

If the music industry wishes to remain truly relevant in the 21st century, it would be well advised to consider the prevailing winds and cooperate toward innovation rather than fighting against it. For as history has proven, the road toward successful innovation is littered with the legions who’ve failed to garner wide-scale cooperation.

Don’t forget that innovation is always and forever social.

To be fair, in our experience we’ve found that most innovation teams seem to intuitively grasp the first two components of successful innovation, the need for a “new way of doing,” as well as cooperation. Their terminology may be slightly different than ours, but often they appear to be striving for similar goals or outcomes with their process.

While that focus is surely inherent in the descriptions of the first two components above, it is most fully developed in the final component of innovation, that certain “spirit” that propels some innovations to piphenomenon status and leaves others in the dustbin of history. And to reiterate, while none should be so arrogant or foolish as to believe this spirit can be singularly conjured, we do believe this spirit can be understood and intuited by those with a careful ear to the ground or an eye on the horizon.


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