Last year, when I visited Columbia University for a business case competition, they had arranged for a guest speaker from Frog Design to come speak about innovation. That was one of the best talks I've ever witnessed. Truly awesome. They work a lot technology companies including Apple. The speaker spoke of numerous inspirational observations, and I will attempt to share one of them today. Well the speaker described innovation in a really interesting way. He said, innovation is like telling a joke. You start at point A and build a brief story. Imagine that takes you from the original point A to a point B. There is some suspense built up in the story; some questions arise, but the answer is not obvious. The key to the joke is the punch line, the answer to those unanswered questions, which is point C. Point C is something you would not normally think of, i.e. there’s no direct or obvious progression from point B to ... Read >

Last year, when I visited Columbia University for a business case competition, they had arranged for a guest speaker from Frog Design to come speak about innovation. That was one of the best talks I've ever witnessed. Truly awesome. They work a lot technology companies including Apple. The speaker spoke of numerous inspirational observations, and I will attempt to share one of them today. Well the speaker described innovation in a really interesting way. He said, innovation is like telling a joke. You start at point A and build a brief story. Imagine that takes you from the original point A to a point B. There is some suspense built up in the story; some questions arise, but the answer is not obvious. The key to the joke is the punch line, the answer to those unanswered questions, which is point C. Point C is something you would not normally think of, i.e. there’s no direct or obvious progression from point B to point C. However, the punch line does not work unless it’s somehow related back to the original story. I will attach an image to this group to illustrate. To illustrate the point, here’s a joke (it’s not the funniest joke ever, but hey it works. A man walks into a bar, and as he makes his way to the counter, he stops and talks to everyone in the bar. As he finishes with each group of people, they all get up and leave and go stand outside the window, looking in. Finally, the bar is empty except for this guy and the bartender. The man walks up to the counter, and says to the bartender, "I bet you $1,000 that I can spray beer from my mouth into a shot glass from thirty feet away, and not get any outside the glass." The bartender thinks that this guy is a nutcase, but he wants his $1,000, so he agrees. The bartender gets out a shot glass, paces off thirty feet, and the contest begins. The man sprays beer all over the bar. He doesn't even touch the shot glass. When he finishes, the bartender looks at him and says, "Well, I guess you owe me $1,000, huh?" The man answers, "Yeah, but I bet all of those people outside the window $500 a piece that I could come in here and spray beer all over the bar." The insight here is, the status quo is the established story along the line between point A to point B. In this story, there may be many unanswered questions or unfulfilled needs. There may a number of plausible answers to those questions, but innovation is all about finding a point C that nobody else expected, but that satisfies the construct. To find those possibilities, it is necessary to sometimes just look for random point C’s that are completely unrelated to the story and try to find a connection back to the story. The speaker talked about a number of techniques to finding good point C’s, but that’s another topic. Overall, I really thought this was a great way to think about innovation. It really puts it in a simple and interesting framework. Show Less <