Month / January 2008

by Roger Dennis

Innovation in a recession

It’s been widely covered in various blogs, but I think the message is worth re-iterating. In a recession, you should not cut back on innovation, but increase it. When your competitors are cost cutting and shedding talent, your company should work doubly hard to make the next best thing in your market.

Why?

When the economy picks up again you’ll be very well placed to slay the market.

Want proof? Look no further than Apple. This was pointed out in the BusinessWeek blog in two postings. The first one mentions that “in the last recession, Apple worked on iTunes and the iPod”

The second post quotes the sceptics who – at the time – bemoaned Apples innovation strategies. One commentator is quoted in 2001 as saying “Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently.”

Well worth reading.

by Roger Dennis

Breaking Paradigms

After the holidays, and a long break, here’s one of the more interesting articles I came across while away from the office. It’s about breaking paradigms, and how people who get stuck in their own thought patterns find it astounding when they meet people who do not do the same. It’s from the New York Times.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.

The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?

How does this relate to innovation and product creation?

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”