by Robyn Bolton | Sep 14, 2022 | Innovation, Just for Fun, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
Innovation is BIG!
Big ideas!
Change the world!
Go big or go home!
Which makes sense.
Giant corporations need big innovations to move the needle
Entrepreneurs need big ideas to get attention
Investors need big returns to take risks
But innovation thrives in constraints.
And “Go Small” may be the biggest constraint out there.
Here are three stories about small innovations that created big value
Lollipops Reduce Violence
Closing time at the bars is never pretty. It can be downright dangerous. What starts as a few insults shouted back and forth between individuals or groups of friends can quickly devolve into brawls, assaults, and even murder.
Every year, dozens of cities and towns run experiments to find ways to decrease incidences of violence around bars and clubs:
- Closing bars earlier
- Keeping bars open 24/7
- Training bouncers in crowd control tactics
- Pre-positioning taxis
- Better landscaping
And lollipops.
In 2001, various cities and towns in the UK began giving lollipops to people as they streamed out of pubs and clubs. The rationale varied:
- “It’s hard to suck and fight at the same time.” – Leicester, 2001
- “Research shows the sugar content helps to stabilise the behaviour of those who have consumed alcohol.” – West Oxfordshire, 2006
- “[Offering food] can stop people shouting, make them less aggressive and prevent post-alcohol hunger” – Camden Town, 2010
It’s estimated that these efforts, which eventually expanded to include flip flops and cookies, cost “tens of thousands of pounds,” a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of pounds spent each year on police and medical resources to deal with the drunken behavior.
Waffle Maker Saves the Planet
Imagine throwing away 20 BILLION wax-coated bowls and plastic spoons every year.
Imagine that you could keep 12 BILLION of those out of the waste system by doing just one thing.
Giving up ice cream.
Would you do it?
Yeah, me neither.
This is why we should be very thankful to a Syrian waffle vendor at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
Even though ice cream cones were in use as early as the 19th century, it wasn’t until a chance encounter at the World’s Fair that they went mainstream. In the sweltering summer heat, ice cream was a popular treat for the 20 million people visiting the fair. So, it’s not surprising that vendors eventually ran out of serving bowls.
Luckily for us and the planet, one of those popular ice cream vendors was next to Ernest A. Hamwi and his very unpopular warm waffle stand. Seeing his fellow vendor’s plight, Ernest took one of his waffles, rolled it into a cone, and a tasty partnership was born.
Town Crier Out Shares Facebook
On Thursday, August 11, as thousands of tourists arrived in Provincetown eager to begin celebrating the Cape Cod town’s largest summer festival, the sewer system failed. Although only 356 of the town’s 1500 properties were affected, most of those affected were the restaurants, hotels, and businesses at the heart of the town’s tourist industry.
Naturally, officials took to social media to alert businesses and residents of the impact. In a Facebook post, restaurants were told to close, and residents were told they “must reduce water use, including dishwashing, laundry, showering, and only flush when absolutely necessary,”
Ew.
Naturally, such restrictions created problems for businesses and residents alike. But what about the thousands of tourists just arriving who were not subscribers to Provincetown’s Facebook account?
The Town Crier
In 1864, Provincetown created the position of Town Crier as a way to spread news throughout the community quickly. Over time, as technology made spreading information easier and faster, the Town Crier became more of a tourist attraction, responsible for greeting visitors and promoting members of the Chamber of Commerce.
Until August 11, when the 22nd Town Crier was called back to duty.
“All is not well in Provincetown,” the Town Crier proclaimed as he stood in front of Town Hall dressed, as usual, in historical garb and swinging his heavy bell. As Thursday turned into Friday, the Town Crier issued updates, listing the re-opened restaurants and the areas where toilet flushing and showers were now allowed.
“Let us pray to the supreme architect of the universe that the system will have been rectified,” he pleaded. I’m sure town officials gave thanks to the supreme architect of the universe that their small investment in maintaining an old solution was, again, creating quite a lot of value for the town.
Size doesn’t matter
Innovation is something new that creates value, and, as innovators, we naturally want to create BIG value. Heck, we want to change the world!
It’s easy to forget that Small can have a big impact, whether physically small like lollipops, a small distance away like waffle and ice cream vendors, or only able to reach a small audience like the Town Crier.
So when you find yourself obsessing about size, just paraphrase Dr. Seuss, “An innovation’s an innovation, no matter how small!”
by Robyn Bolton | Nov 11, 2020 | Innovation, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
“We are not good at killing innovation projects.”
In the past two days, three people in two different companies across two different industries said these exact words to me.
If Step #1 in solving a problem is admitting that you have one, then my clients should feel pretty good about making progress.
But what’s Step #2?
“Killing the project” is an obvious and fundamentally unhelpful answer. But before we get to the less obvious and helpfully actionable answer, we need to acknowledge a fact about humans
We decide with our hearts, justify with our heads, and require guts to act.
As much as we would like to believe that we, as humans, are logical and fact-driven, we’re not. If we were, we would not be swayed by brands and we would all agree on the best restaurant, music, and political candidate.
Beliefs, values, emotions, and connections (our heart) drive our behavior. We choose things that help us feel a certain way, create a certain perception, or signal our belonging to a certain group. As Clay Christensen would say, we choose things that solve emotional and social Jobs to be Done.
We then find or seek out facts and evidence that justify the decisions our hearts have made. We want to be logical and rational, to make “the best choice,” and to be able to sway people with our arguments. We use our heads to justify our hearts.
But that alone isn’t enough. We don’t do things that we know we should (flossing, eating vegetables, maintaining long-term investments in innovation). We do what we want even though we know we shouldn’t (eat a lot of sugar, drink too much, binge watch anything that starts with “Real Housewives of”).
We need motivation and courage (guts) to translate our wants and our thoughts into action. Perhaps, even more importantly, when our heads and our hearts disagree, we need guts to make the decision and act.
Because without guts, when the head and the heart disagree, the heart always wins.
That’s why you’re not good at killing projects.
Here’s a common scenario: after working for several years on a new product you get data that shows that it won’t “work.”
Perhaps it’s clinical data indicating that the product doesn’t provide the efficacy required. Or market data showing that customers aren’t willing to buy the product at the current price or buy as much of it as expected to justify the investment. Or benchmarking data that estimates that your product will be in the bottom 5% of products ever launched by your company.
Whatever it is, it’s not good and the data and logic all dictate that the project should be killed.
Instead, you deem it to be “strategic” and keep working on it.
This is because, in your heart, you believe in the project. You were part of creating it. You nurtured it from concept to concrete, guiding it through near-death experiences, and celebrating its successes. You love this project.
Your heart says “keep going,” while your head says “make it stop.”
You need guts to make the decision.
It’s hard to decide, but Step #2 makes it easier.
If the first step is knowing in your head that the project is not viable and will not meet expectations no matter what you do, the second step is finding the guts to resist your every instinct and decide in favor of your head.
To find the guts to make the call, you need to acknowledge your heart and the feelings, emotions, and beliefs that are motivating you to try just one more thing.
(If you’re a Very Serious Business Professional and are super freaked out by the last sentence, imagine that I wrote, “you need to acknowledge your cognitive biases like the sunk cost fallacy, not invented here bias, or the IKEA effect” and keep reading)
To acknowledge your heart and empower your guts, you need to say goodbye and create closure.
How to do this effectively is determined by the culture of the team and company, but here are some examples I’ve seen and been part of:
- Write the project’s eulogy
- Hold a funeral (traditional, New Orleans, Irish, or Viking all qualify)
- Have a “Reading of the Will” in which the project bequests mementos and silly awards to team members
- Create a memorial like planting a tree or, taking a cue from Ben & Jerry’s, a graveyard
- Establish an award in its name and give it out every year to a person who has shown the courage to preserve and the wisdom to know when to quit
Yes, I know this sounds silly but so does having funerals for goldfish and we do that. We do it for the same reasons we struggled to kill the project – because we love it, and we will miss it.
Just as we feel very sad but know we did the right things when we flushed the goldfish, you will feel sad but know you did the right thing when you kill the project.
And while it will never be easy, it will get easier and you will get better at killing projects (just like I did after going through 23 goldfish my senior year of college).
by Robyn Bolton | Oct 21, 2020 | Innovation, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
Things we know we should do because they’re good for us:
- Eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables each day
- Floss twice a day
- Get 10,000 steps a day
- Buy insurance
- Consistently invest in innovation
Let’s be honest, the above list could also be titled, “Things we know we should do but don’t.”
Why? Why do we choose not to do things that years of research prove are good for us and for which solutions are readily available?
Because they’re inconvenient, uncomfortable, expensive, and, most of all, because we have not yet been burned by not doing them.
Experience is a better motivator of change and driver of behavior than knowledge. We don’t floss until we’ve had one (or more) painful and bloody dentist appointments. We don’t buy insurance until we have to deal with a break-in. We don’t invest in innovation until we’re desperate for revenue, profit, or growth.
The good news is that, at least when it comes to innovation, we don’t have to wait to be desperate or to get burned before we do what we know we should. We can create experiences that motivate change.
Borrow relevant experiences
Experiencing success, even if it’s vicariously, is key to getting people to do what they know they should. One way to do this is to find proof that the change is possible and do-able. To do this you need to find relevant and recent examples (i.e. not a field trip to Silicon Valley and not stories about Steve Jobs).
Find a company in your industry (or a similar one) that has successfully achieved the goal you’ve set. Tell their story to people within your organization. Set-up a conversation between a current or former member of their team and a key stakeholder in your organization. Buy their product and display it as evidence that success is possible.
Create experiences of success
Innovation takes time, especially if you’re working on something breakthrough. But people lose interest and faith quickly, especially in organizations that are judged by quarterly numbers. As a result, the worst thing you can do is to go into “stealth mode” and try to “fly under the radar” until you have a huge, earth-shattering success to announce.
Instead, spend time learning about your decision-makers’ and stakeholders’ doubts at the same time you’re learning about your customers’ problems. Then, when you prove those doubts wrong, celebrate the win…politely, and publicly.
Does your boss think Legal will never approve your idea? Work with Legal, ask them what it would take to get an approval, and when you do that and get the Yes, tell your boss. Does Finance think no one will ever pay the price for your solution? Open a “lemonade stand” to sell the product and then take Finance out for drinks, using your first dollars of revenue to pay for the first round.
Small and steady wins give people experience with success and buy you the time, resources, and support you need to achieve the earth-shattering ones.
Immerse everyone in the experience
While borrowing and creating experiences can be powerful, nothing is as convincing or compelling as actively engaging people in achieving success.
Involve innovation leaders, decision-makers, and key stakeholders in the hard work of customer discovery, solution design, and business testing. Make them listen in live to customer interviews, hand them the sharpie (or the mouse) during ideation sessions, and “hire” them to staff your “lemonade stand.”
By making people lean in, roll up their sleeves and do the work, they’ll experience how hard innovation is and why it takes longer than they think. They’ll be invested in your work and your results. They’ll feel the rush of the small successes.
Innovation is a Head, Heart, Guts endeavor
People decide what to do with their hearts, justify their decisions with their heads, but it takes guts to take action. Knowledge feeds the head, but it takes experience to have guts.
by Robyn Bolton | Sep 30, 2020 | Innovation, Leadership, Stories & Examples
“How are you doing? How are you handling all this?”
It seems like 90% of conversations these days start with those two sentences. We ask out of genuine concern and also out of a need to commiserate, to share our experiences, and to find someone that understands.
The connection these questions create is just one of the Gifts of Uncertainty that have been given to us by the pandemic.
Yes, I know that the idea of uncertainty, especially in big things like our lives and businesses, being a gift is bizarre. When one of my friends first suggested the idea, I rolled my eyes pretty hard and then checked to make sure I was talk to my smart sarcastic fellow business owner and not the Dali Lama.
But as I thought about it more, started looking for “gifts” in the news and listening for them in conversations with friends and clients, I realized how wise my friend truly was.
Faced with levels of uncertainty we’ve never before experienced, people and businesses are doing things they’ve never imagined having to do and, as a result, are discovering skills and abilities they never knew they had. These are the Gifts of Uncertainty
- Necessity of offering a vision – When we’re facing or doing something new, we don’t have all the answers. But we don’t need all the answers to take action. The people emerging as leaders, in both the political and business realms, are the ones acknowledging this reality by sharing what they do know, offering a vision for the future, laying out a process to achieve it, and admitting the unknowns and the variables that will affect both the plan and the outcome.
- Freedom to experiment – As governments ordered businesses like restaurants to close and social distancing made it nearly impossible for other businesses to continue operating, business owners were suddenly faced with a tough choice – stop operations completely or find new ways to continue to serve. Restaurants began to offer carry out and delivery. Bookstores, like Powell’s in Portland OR and Northshire Bookstore in Manchester VT, also got into curbside pick-up and delivery game. Even dentists and orthodontists began to offer virtual visits through services like Wally Health and Orthodontic Screening Kit, respectively.
- Ability to change – Businesses are discovering that they can move quickly, change rapidly, and use existing capabilities to produce entirely new products. Nike and HP are producing face shields. Zara and Prada are producing face masks. Fanatics, makers of MLB uniforms, and Ford are producing gowns. GM and Dyson are gearing up to produce ventilators. And seemingly every alcohol company is making hand sanitizer. Months ago, all of these companies were in very different businesses and likely never imagined that they could or would pivot to producing products for the healthcare sector. But they did pivot.
- Power of Relationships – Social distancing and self-isolation are bringing into sharp relief the importance of human connection and the power of relationships. The shift to virtual meetups like happy hours, coffees, and lunches is causing us to be thoughtful about who we spend time with rather than defaulting to whoever is nearby. We are shifting to seeking connection with others rather than simply racking up as many LinkedIn Connections, Facebook friends, or Instagram followers as possible. Even companies are realizing the powerful difference between relationships and subscribers as people unsubscribed en mass to the “How we’re dealing with COVID-19 emails” they received from every company with which they had ever provided their information.
- Business benefit of doing the right thing – In a perfect world, businesses that consistently operate ethically, fairly, and with the best interests of ALL their stakeholders (not just shareholders) in mind, would be rewarded. We are certainly not in a perfect world, but some businesses are doing the “right thing” and rea being rewarded. Companies like Target are offering high-risk employees like seniors pregnant women, and those with compromised immune systems 30-days of paid leave. CVS and Comcast are paying store employees extra in the form of one-time bonuses or percent increases on hourly wages. Sweetgreen and AllBirds are donating food and shoes, respectively, to healthcare workers. On the other hand, businesses that try to leverage the pandemic to boost their bottom lines are being taken to task. Rothy’s, the popular shoe brand, announced on April 13 that they would shift one-third of their production capacity to making “disposable, non-medical masks to workers on the front line” and would donate five face masks for every item purchased. Less than 12 hours later, they issued an apology for their “mis-step,” withdrew their purchase-to-donate program, and announced a bulk donation of 100,000 non-medical masks.
Before the pandemic, many of these things seemed impossibly hard, even theoretical. In the midst of uncertainty, though, these each of these things became practical, even necessary. As a result, in a few short weeks, we’ve proven to ourselves that we can do what we spent years saying we could not.
These are gifts to be cherished, remembered and used when the uncertainty, inevitably, fades.
Originally published on Mat 19, 2020 on Forbes.com
