STEVE JOBS WAS A VERY private person, but his commencement speech at Stanford on June 12, 2005, marked one of the few times he opened his heart in public. Jobs, then CEO of both Apple and Pixar, told the story of dropping out of Reed College after just six months because he felt it was too expensive for his working-class parents.
Rather than abandon his education completely, Jobs lingered on campus, going to the classes he really wanted to attend. During that time, he slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposit, and ate his one good meal for the week at a Hare Krishna temple. But despite all that, Jobs’s time at Reed was invaluable. “Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition,” he said, “turned out to be priceless later on.”
One of those classes he sat in on was calligraphy, which he described as “beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.” Back then, the practicality of learning calligraphy didn’t even occur to him. His goal was not to apply it, simply to learn and enjoy it. “But ten years later,” he said, “when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”
At the time, in the moment, Jobs never could have imagined he’d one day connect calligraphy to the design of a computer he’d develop years later. As he put it, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” What’s more important, he explained, is that you seek out those dots, and trust that you will connect them somehow in the future. Something, he said, “your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever,” will help you make the connection.
Jobs was talking about a different style of learning and a particular kind of knowledge—neither of which fits squarely into a one-size-fits-all educational system or idea of success. He followed his own path, and the insights he had along the way set him up to make surprising connections down the line.
I’d like to suggest that we don’t need to leave it up to fate to make those connections, and that Jobs really didn’t think so either. It is certainly true that serendipity affects how and when we connect different ideas to produce new ones, but there are behaviors we can learn to better facilitate these connections down the line. This kind of “Knowledge Mining” can involve studying what came before, as Jobs did with calligraphy classes, or “mashing up” two seemingly unrelated fields or bodies of knowledge to create something new.
In this chapter I introduce several different kinds of Knowledge Mining. “Embodiment” involves becoming aware of knowledge and skills you may not have even recognized as creative and putting them to use in new and surprising ways. “Immersion” is the kind of knowledge we’re perhaps most familiar with: throwing yourself fully into a topic or culture that interests you, honing a new skill or area of expertise until it becomes second nature. We don’t need to be experts to be knowledge miners; we just need to look around us. Skilled innovators also “mine the past”—looking to the history of their industries and beyond for ideas they might revisit and revolutionize. Like Steve Jobs, they “connect dots”—following their curiosity, trusting that one day it will help them make surprising connections.
Over time, the more knowledge you mine, the more dots you connect and patterns you create, the better you’ll be able to see when something’s missing. I call this “donut knowledge.” It’s a skill that’s not as rare as you might think, though we often call it by different names. We’ll say we have a “hunch,” or feel something “in our gut.” People with donut knowledge are said to possess a “sixth sense,” or they’re called “streetwise.”
All of these strategies would be useless, however, without the final one: an ability to understand what people find meaningful. Together, these skills help us build on knowledge we already have and seek out new knowledge. Sometimes Knowledge Mining means going deep into a subject; other times we need look no further than ourselves. It also means having the confidence to follow what excites you even if you’re not sure how this new skill or body of knowledge will help you quite yet.
Fortunately, you don’t need to wait a decade for your insights to start coming together. Whether consciously or not, you have been accumulating knowledge since birth.
Roommates Adam Lowry, a climate scientist for the Carnegie Institute, and Eric Ryan, a junior ad agency account planner, were both unhappy at their jobs and looking for something else to do.
Lowry was tired of writing research papers on climate change that few people read and which had little impact. Ryan’s most recent project, a campaign for Colgate toothpaste, had him wandering the floors of grocery stores looking at what he would later describe as “a sea of sameness.”
Lowry, meanwhile, was thinking about how the drab look of most green products projected the message that sustainability was about sacrifice. “You’re paying your penance for the Earth that’s dying, and you need to save it,” he said. “I was continually frustrated that you buy these green products and they cost more, they don’t work, they’re not fun to use. It’s like guilt and absolution, instead of living a positive, healthy lifestyle.”
At some point, Ryan told Lowry that even though he knew nothing about cleaning (their apartment actually was pretty dirty), he was thinking of launching a detergent start-up. Lowry jumped at the opportunity and began to devise eco-friendly detergent formulas in his head.
The two used $90,000 that they’d saved and received from family and friends to create a business they called Method. They launched their first product in February 2001, hardly the best time to start a new company, but the young men understood something that Procter & Gamble and other big detergent companies didn’t—most members of their generation didn’t just think about sustainability; they believed in it. It was part of them. Moreover, unlike boomers who viewed sustainability as a kind of punishment, people their age wanted it to be cool. They wanted products that were stylish and beautiful. And they wanted them at the same price as the old stuff. Lowry and Ryan knew all that because it’s what all their friends wanted. And it’s what they wanted. “To us,” Lowry has said, “ ’sustainability’ and ’green’ are just aspects of the quality of our product. They are not a marketing position.. . . I mean everything should be that way.”
So they persevered. The big break came in 2004. Ryan, Lowry, and Josh Handy, whom they hired to run product design for their company, deconstructed the leading soap detergent at the time, P&G’s Tide brand. It was 90 percent water, according to Handy, which made each package of Tide both heavy and large. You could save a lot of energy that went into materials and transportation and cut wastes significantly simply by concentrating the formula and shrinking the container size. Wrap it in a stylish package and voilà: a Gen Y–friendly eco-friendly laundry product. When Method persuaded Target to carry its products, the mass market for eco-friendly well-designed products was born.
In 2007, the company did further research and found that 57 percent of people use twice as much laundry detergent as is necessary. So Handy designed a new pump that delivered just the right amount of detergent as well as a simple stylish bottle that weighed less and cost less to produce. Four pumps for a major wash, fifty washes per bottle: less is more.
The Method story is about the changing meaning of sustainability. For previous generations, going green meant giving up comfort, quality, and design. The phrase “limits to growth,” the title of the groundbreaking book from 1972, sums up the 1960s and 70s feelings about sustainability—but Lowry and Ryan are members of a generation that doesn’t think in terms of limits.
The Method founders built a business model around the values of their generation. “We believe in inside-out branding,” Handy has said. “If we don’t like it, we feel you won’t like it.” Method containers, with their colorful and practically voluptuous look, call to the mind the comic books that so many of their peers would have read as kids. So it’s not surprising that on the Method website Lowry and Ryan describe themselves as superheroes: “And like every great superhero, they gained their powers after being exposed to toxic ingredients. Cleaning supplies, to be precise. But rather than turning them green or granting them the ability to talk to fish, Eric and Adam’s toxic exposure gave them something even better. An idea.”
In their desire for a modern, well-designed product that also happened to be good for the environment, the Method guys embodied the values of an entire generation who believed that sustainability is normal, natural, and cool. Maybe very cool. They understood exactly what members of their generation wanted because they wanted it themselves.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM TELLS US THAT it takes thousands of hours of practice and hard work to become an expert at something. We know that standout athletes like Tiger Woods and Roger Federer trained from the time they were children. We’ve heard stories about violinist Itzhak Perlman practicing the fiddle when he was three. The idea that we must sacrifice so much to build up a domain of knowledge can lead us to doubt our own abilities to ever be creative. After all, for every Perlman, there are millions of people who remember their violin or piano practice with dread.
What we overlook is the knowledge we all possess by virtue of who we are and which “tribes” we belong to, the kind of knowledge gained not from practice, but from life experience. And yet, the ability to recognize the unspoken aspirations of our own groups and cultures and become a means for fulfilling those dreams is a skill that many creative people share.
You can, like the Method guys, learn to embody the aspirations of your generation or your community, or you can embody the dreams of people on a wider scale. Think Steve Jobs with his ability to see that people wanted an ecosystem of easy-to-use digital tools. This may not have been an aspiration of every member of the boomer generation, but Jobs was, after all, a child of Mountain View. As a teenager, he hung out in the garage of his neighbor Larry Lang, an engineer who got Jobs into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club. When he needed parts for a frequency counter he was building for the club, he called HP’s CEO Bill Hewlett directly and spoke to him for twenty minutes, according to Walter Isaacson in his biography of Jobs. One could argue that the Apple cofounder’s early introduction to electronics, his friendships with other techies like Steve Wozniak, and his growing up in a hot high-tech culture were instrumental in his development as a tinkerer and designer of computers.
Embodiment begins with knowing yourself—who you are, what cultures you belong to, and what you want to create in the world. From the Park Slope mom who builds a babysitting sharing site for her community to the young doctors who embrace social networking in their practices, we all have had experiences that, if mined for their true value, can help us customize our careers and lives. We often don’t see this as knowledge because it’s something we understand intuitively rather than something we were “taught.”
Embodiment is certainly not necessary to creating. But it is a pool of knowledge that we often overlook and underappreciate. And in a moment of hyperconnectivity when ideas are only as good as your ability to implement them faster or better than anyone else, it makes sense to start where you are. You can save yourself a lot of time researching “unmet needs” and a lot of money doing extensive ethnographic research by taking a good look at yourself, the cultures you belong to, and the beliefs and values you embody—perhaps without even realizing it.
When it comes to embodying the values of a generation, a gender, a culture, or even a region, you can’t be an immigrant. Sure, you can learn many of the facts, but except for the rare individual who, like a nonnative speaker, gets the accent just perfect, your level of nuance will rarely be as deep as the native’s. That doesn’t mean that you can’t participate in the rituals of a culture or create a piece of art or a product that is embraced by people outside your generation or network, but accept your outsider status and be willing to partner with people whose insider knowledge exceeds your own.
Take Internet culture: If you’re in your fifties or sixties, you’re every bit as much an immigrant to the new technology as you would be if you moved to France with no knowledge of the language or local customs. You can teach yourself a lot about it, you can immerse yourself in it, but most boomers will never “get” what their kids and grandkids understand about the latest technology and the culture that comes with the technology.
Of course, just as there are some people who master languages with ease, others are adept at navigating Internet culture. The fact that over half of all adult social networking site users are over the age of thirty-five proves that boomers and older Gen X-ers are hardly averse to diving into the new world. But the majority of us will simply not be as skilled at using these new tools as the people who’ve grown up with computers as their main form of communication and tool for learning. Lest boomers feel alienated by this, lots of my Generation Y students tell me they can’t understand their younger brothers and sisters—neither their slang nor their preferred modes of communication. They are already using technology in a different, “cooler” way than their older siblings. The acceleration of change is that fast.
But this shouldn’t dissuade us from learning something new. The key is awareness: about your skills, your knowledge, your beliefs—and the gaps in your experience that might make it difficult for you to really “get” a new group or audience right away.
Taking a look at your life to assess what you already embody can provide you with new levels of creative confidence. First, step back, taking a moment to be aware of just what you embody—and what you don’t. I recently talked with a woman applying to the fashion school at Parsons. It’s one of the top two or three fashion schools in the world and many of us know it through the TV program Project Runway, which is often shot on location at Parsons on 37th Street, near Times Square in Manhattan. The woman came from a small town in New Mexico and had watched the show for years. It was her motivation for becoming a fashion designer. But she had kids and a husband and worried whether she could compete against the young kids applying for admission at the fashion school.
What she didn’t realize was that she had already developed a key skill in her time as a mother. She made most of her children’s clothes and in fact had been making clothes her whole life. While she had traveled to New York to see the exhibit on Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, she didn’t know that she shared a skill with the designer known for the “savage beauty” of his clothes. It was a skill McQueen had picked up as a young apprentice cutting and designing men’s suits in London, a skill that this woman had learned from her mother, and a skill that most of her young competitors did not possess: the ability to sew a perfect seam.
Knowing what you know is critically important. Because embodied knowledge is tacit, we have to consciously make an effort to understand and value it. Students, for example, are often desperate to get great summer internships at companies and non-profit organizations to get “experience,” network, and possibly get a leg up in being hired when they graduate. But what do they offer managers in return (beyond a willingness to fetch coffee)? What value can they present when they’re only eighteen, nineteen, or twenty?
A great deal, as it turns out. Members of Gen Y “get” open-source technology and are comfortable sharing in ways that older people aren’t. They have experience building online communities. They grew up in a visual culture and can manipulate images and videos with ease. They are naturally participative and jump into new platforms without thinking.
When you’re born into a culture, whether that culture is a generation that lives on the Web or a community that lives on an island off the coast of France, you’re sensitive to the local customs, the rituals, the taboos. When you’re an immigrant, everything’s new, often exciting. But it’s harder to understand what’s really going on below the surface. It’s more difficult to put things in the proper historical or cultural context. You have to work at it. That’s where immersion comes in.
It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to embody the dreams and aspirations of every culture. But not all of us want to remain in the culture we were born into. We want to explore new places, meet new people, and try out new ways of life. For every Mark Zuckerberg who built a new company upon the values of his generation, there are creative individuals who left their worlds behind in order to gain new skills in new areas. Howard Schultz was not born in an Italian coffee culture but traveled to Italy to learn what made it so special and then brought it back to the United States and built the coffee experience into what we know it to be today. For every Method, there are stories of companies that relied more on research than personal experience to connect with customers. For those of us who don’t already embody the values of a group we’re trying to reach, we can team up with those who do, or immerse ourselves in learning about that group’s beliefs and habits.
As one of China’s more innovative privately owned companies, Lenovo has had a history of competing strongly against foreign brands in China. The generation that came of age after the disastrous Cultural Revolution was happy to buy what was offered to them and Beijing-based Lenovo provided them with great computers. But as one century turned the corner into the next, China was changing radically, and a new generation of Chinese consumers—one born into prosperity—proved to be much more discerning. Lenovo’s major competitors—HP, Dell, and IBM—were beginning to take market share away by offering lower prices and, because of the appeal of Western products, higher prestige.
The company’s leaders had grown up alongside an older generation of Chinese consumer, and so understood their desires to work hard, advance their families, and give their children a better education and life than they had. But like many successful start-up corporations that grew up within a particular generation, Lenovo didn’t have the internal competency to understand a new consumer base.
So in the early 2000s, Lenovo turned to Ziba Design out of Portland, Oregon, one of the world’s top innovation and design consultancies. Like IDEO, Continuum, Smart, and other firms that began as industrial designers and focused on making consumer products, Ziba had by then evolved into a broader consultancy able to do design research and strategy for marketing and branding.
Ziba knows how to get deep inside a culture. Ziba employees, founder Sohrab Vossoughi told me, represent eighteen nationalities, speaking twenty-five languages. The Portland office has a staff of more than 100 people with more than sixty-two areas of expertise, including Color Specialists, Environmental Designers, Information Architects, Anthropologists, and Cognitive Scientists. This diversity accelerates the firm’s ability to know—to synthesize findings and recognize patterns (or the absence thereof) faster than any one expert could.
Lenovo wanted to compete not simply on price or prestige but on meaning and value, so Ziba went to work identifying those values. Even before they left for China, Ziba’s team of social scientists, design researchers, and product designers surrounded themselves in a distinct project “war room” filled with Chinese billboards where they listened to Chinese rock and classical and traditional music throughout the day. Chinese exchange students were brought in to interpret lifestyle and technology magazines, especially the advertisements. Objects young Chinese used every day—wallets, cell phones, cigarette lighters—were collected and analyzed in terms of the choice of colors and textures and finish.
Once in China, the team split into two groups, and both spent four weeks immersed in three different regions. Design anthropologists, design strategists, and industrial designers talked on cell phones as they commuted on bicycles with Beijing workers. They ate from street carts and dined on pig brain and pigeon in large banquet halls. They walked the ancient Hutong alleyways and sang late at night in karaoke bars. Each team rode buses and trains, wrote text messages in nightclubs, and used notebook PCs in Starbucks. Visual inspiration was drawn from fashion boutiques and electronics stores, from traditional gardens and modern architecture. Ziba’s people even spent time going through closets in young people’s apartments to note fashion tastes.
Ziba also enlisted the help of Chinese consumers. Volunteers were given a camera, a glue stick, and two poster boards and asked to photo-document one work and one leisure day, giving special attention to moments when they integrated technology into their routine. The volunteers then created visual time lines, which gave the researchers a glimpse into daily behaviors and emotions.
When the team returned to the war room in Portland, they distilled the visual worksheets, photographs, and observations from each interview into a single Ethnography Inspiration Sheet. Ziba then used the Inspiration Sheets to identify the aspirations and behaviors of distinct clusters of Chinese tech consumers. “We called these clusters ’technology tribes,’ said Vossoughi. “We found five new tribes in China.”
The tribes included Social Butterflies, Relationship Builders, Upward Maximizers, Deep Immersers, and Conspicuous Collectors, each of which possessed vastly different desires, ranging from the desire to connect with a broad social network (Social Butterflies) to the desire to seek escape through fantasy and immersion (Deep Immersers). These profiles gave Ziba a way to work with Lenovo to gauge the size of each market segment.
Ziba used improv acting techniques to understand how, for example, a Social Butterfly would use a cell phone compared with how a Deep Immerser or a Relationship Builder would do so. The project for Lenovo, called Search for the Soul, led to a new understanding of who Lenovo’s target consumers ought to be and laid the groundwork to create product-line strategies for Lenovo’s desktop, notebook, and cellular platforms.
In the end, Lenovo used the understanding that came with immersion to make three new products—a desktop PC for Deep Immersers, a notebook/tablet PC for Relationship Builders, and a cell phone for Upward Maximizers—that addressed the unique needs of these new customer tribes.
The knowledge gained allowed Lenovo to push back its foreign rivals and increase market share in the Chinese market. In 2012, Lenovo had about 30 percent of the Chinese PC market, ahead of Acer, Dell, HP, and Asustek. ZIBA’s immersion in the Chinese market was also important in Lenovo’s decision to purchase IBM’s ThinkPad division in 2005, bringing it neck and neck with HP in the world PC market.
Immersion is the kind of Knowledge Mining that we are most familiar with. As students, we immersed ourselves in history and literature and science in order to understand them. But rarely do we view immersion as a creative competence. We don’t always see the knowledge we’ve gained as the result of deep study or practice as a resource that can be mined to generate creativity. And we should.
The story of Ziba’s work in China illustrates that immersion can be instrumental. This can take time. In order to understand Chinese youth culture, Ziba sent twelve researchers around China for three months, spending a combined 205 days, or nearly five thousand hours, gathering and analyzing data and formulating personas to represent their findings. A similar project Ziba did for Li Ning, China’s rival competitor to Nike, took nearly nine thousand hours. For a nuanced understanding of complex and rich subjects such as national and generational cultures, this kind of deep immersion is very important.
Immersive knowledge can’t be shallow, but it needn’t be quite so deep. Sometimes taking a single class or doing a little research about a topic you’re interested in is all it takes. Alexander McQueen might not have known that studying his Scottish roots would shape his breakthrough runway show in London—the controversial “Highland Rape” show that would establish his position and fame until his suicide in 2010. Steve Jobs had no idea that when he wandered into that calligraphy class he was about to learn something so important that it would shape the design of the user interface for Apple computers and, eventually, all digital products.
The class had an enormous impact on his life—and all our lives. But it didn’t take a lot of time. There is a critical distinction between knowledge that makes you an expert and knowledge that allows you to be creative. One takes a very long time. The other doesn’t necessarily have to take so long. We can all immerse ourselves long enough to build up a knowledge base that we can mine for creative purposes.
If creativity is your goal, it may be a better strategy to spend less time practicing to become the best in a particular field and more time learning many kinds of knowledge. Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Drive, told me in a webcast that the fastest growing major in the United States today is the double major (one popular choice combines computer science with art and design). Students are intuitively expanding the range of their knowledge and as a result boosting their Creative Intelligence.
Nearly all of us love to learn new things. We study, we practice, and we spend time gathering information. We often don’t see the role this learning plays in boosting our creativity. And yet almost everything that we learn may have value in innovating. That class you took, the book you just read, the salon you went to, or even the eighteen-minute TED video you watched can all be jumping-off points for creating something new. Following your own curiosity and immersing yourself in what interests you, not what you think you need to learn, is often what will prepare you for work in an entirely different job or endeavor.
We often think that following our curiosity is a waste of time. We’re told to study hard, get the right answers to the questions, focus. Budgets for music and art and other “extraneous” courses are the first to get slashed; frequently such programs are cut altogether. Yet by immersing ourselves in a wide variety of subjects, we gather more dots of knowledge that are so essential to creating.
Immersion is an open-ended and ultimately liberating activity. We can all choose to learn whatever interests us. We can build as many dots of knowledge as time and effort allow.
In 1990, MIT roboticists Rod Brooks, Colin Angle, and Helen Greiner launched a start-up called IS Robotics. Their first area of focus was space exploration vehicles; they worked on the rovers for NASA that led to the Sojourner exploration of Mars in 1997. According to their website, they soon began developing in other areas, receiving government grants that led to creations like the Raptor, a robotic dinosaur; DARTS, a robot designed to move like a fish; and Ariel, a mine-hunting robot with an organic, biological shape. The company also worked with the toy-maker Hasbro on My Real Baby, a robotic doll that was ultimately discontinued, but not before the team learned how to design for low-cost manufacturing.
But the research on space exploration and toys didn’t exactly make a difference in people’s everyday lives, and one of the founders’ major goals was to make practical robots a reality.
In 1997, the company won a government grant to begin work on robots that could search for victims of disasters. The resulting robots would be instrumental in the search for survivors in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and later funding from DARPA led to the creation of the PackBots, used to search for the Taliban in Afghanistan and to disarm bombs in Iraq. PackBots would also be instrumental in removing debris and measuring radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant following the earthquake and tsunami.
The same year it won the grant to begin work on the robots, the company landed its biggest contract yet: one from SC Johnson Wax to work on the AutoCleaner, a huge automated industrial floor cleaner. After the project, two engineers from the design team connected their new knowledge about cleaning with what they had learned about low-cost manufacturing from their work with Hasbro. The company counts “building on what we know” as a major aspect of its product development strategy, and because its robots are component-based, it can easily take an approach used in one area and apply that to a new technology, rather than build from scratch.
It took a long five years to prototype what became the Roomba, the world’s first vacuum cleaning robot. (The company changed its name to iRobot in 2000 after merging with Real World Interface, a New Hampshire–based robotics company.) Since its launch in September 2002, more than 5 million Roombas have been sold—there’s even a smallish cult of Roomba “hackers” who manipulate features and paint the robots to give them personality.
The story of the Roomba is an example of Knowledge Mining at its best. The company hadn’t really created anything “new”—the technology of the Roomba was utilized in other forms in their many other projects. Nor was the robot the result of a flash of insight. Instead, it took time and hard work—a full decade—for the engineers to connect dots that no one else had dreamed of connecting in order to create the Roomba and make robots, long the love of science fiction writers, a part of everyday life.
Knowledge Mining doesn’t require spitballing hundreds of ideas, a common brainstorming technique. The first step toward building bridges that connect seemingly unrelated islands of knowledge—a way of thinking that’s been called “lateral,” “relational,” or “horizontal”—is often as simple as looking at what you or others have done in the past and thinking about how you might expand on that to create something entirely new. But you do need a strategy.
Early advocates of this approach at Procter & Gamble abandoned their traditional R&D process where all the research took place inside the company for what they called Connect + Develop in 2000. The name speaks for itself. Connect + Develop has generated billions for P&G since the company began requiring all divisions to open themselves up to outside sources of information and inspiration.
P&G may be seen as a mass-market consumer company, but its core culture revolves around chemistry. A brilliant cadre of chemists has, over the decades, developed formulas for cleansers and other household products including Tide, Pampers, and Crest, which are then packaged, branded, and sold around the world by an army of marketers and salespeople. Virtually all of P&G’s products came from its in-house chemists.
In 2000, newly appointed CEO A. G. Lafley broke open this culture and encouraged P&G’s division heads to start looking outside their divisions and even outside the company for new ideas. P&G set up a series of networks: top P&G officers from around the world were teamed up with technology entrepreneurs to mine existing science journals, visit conferences, and meet scientists whose work might be useful to future projects. They have worked with the NineSigma network to facilitate communication with other science-based companies and universities, and have also teamed up with InnoCentive, a network that links companies with more than 260,000 “problem solvers” who are paid to solve challenges posed to them.
The new networks opened up P&G’s silos to product concepts and synergies that managers and scientists could not have come up with on their own. One result was the Crest Spinbrush, which P&G purchased from a group of entrepreneurs led by John Osher in 2001. Others were new combinations of existing P&G brands, such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Olay Regenerist. At least a third of the innovative new products at P&G now come from “Connect + Develop.”
While the idea of building bridges in your own organization or drawing from your own experiences to innovate something new might sound appealing, anyone who’s attempted doing so will tell you it’s not always that easy. With a countless number of choices to consider, where do you begin? In a universe full of infinite dots of knowledge, which dot is the right one?
Casting for Ideas
It’s easy to get carried away in the hunt for ideas; if you chase everything shiny and fast, you risk forgetting what you’re seeking in the first place. In a way, it’s like fishing: It makes sense to get your bearings before you start casting. As any person who fishes can tell you, when you’re casting, there is no way to foretell exactly what you will catch; the key is being open to inspiration from unexpected places. Scientists at the Taiwanese-based Industrial Technology Research Institute discovered this during their search for the most recent holy grail of computer technology: a flexible screen for our iPads, smartphones, PCs, and TVs—one that you can roll up and out, like a scroll.
Scientists at the Institute had been working on a way to get that flexibility, which involved placing transistors onto a flexible substrate that is placed over glass. Transistors are transferred to the flexible substrate and it is then lifted off the glass. The problem is stickiness. It is very hard to lift the flexible substrate from the glass.
According to the Wall Street Journal, ITRI division directors Cheng-Chung Lee and Tzong-Ming Lee found a possible solution after being inspired by one of Taiwan’s favorite dishes: pancakes. As any chef knows, the high temperature used to heat the oil makes it very easy to peel the flexible pancake off the pan. Back in the lab, the scientists were able to replicate the pancake process by placing a layer of nonadhesive material between the substrate and the glass. A flexible display for an e-book reader should be on the market soon.
Casting wide can land you in the strangest of places, but having some kind of anchor—a puzzle you’re trying to solve, a product or process you’re trying to improve, or some knowledge about a new technology or a group you’re trying to reach—can help keep you from floating too far off-course.
We don’t always know what connections will work best, what synthesis of two ideas will be the most effective. That’s why it’s important to keep an open mind about what your casting may bring back. You may have to relearn the joy of surprise, as it is often in the surprise that we find solutions. When James Dyson went casting about for a new technology for vacuum cleaners unlike the standard bag filters, he found it in sawmills, which traditionally use industrial cyclone fans to suck up the sawdust. That spinning cyclone method of picking up dirt became the heart of his Cyclone brand of vacuum cleaners, a successful cast if ever there was one.
You’re not born with a great ability to connect dots. You learn it. Some of us learn it in school, some at jobs, others in life. It’s not a difficult competence, but it is a deliberate one. The anxiety many of us feel about creativity often stems from a belief that we need to create something from nothing. We don’t. The scientists at ITRI and James Dyson began with something they already had—an area of expertise, a skill, a technology they were hoping to update—and went casting for ideas in both new and familiar places. What these innovators share is an ability to harness the serendipity of life to fashion something wholly original.
Mining the Past
When I visited him in Toronto in 2011, Bill Buxton had just finished working on a birch bark canoe using traditional Cree Indian instruments. He was getting ready to follow part of the old fur-trade water route on the Churchill and upper Sturgeon-Weir Rivers to watch the northern lights, but he had the time to launch into an important discussion on context, connectivity, and creativity.
Buxton is a true Renaissance man. Not only is he able to make a Cree birch bark canoe; he has been Chief Scientist at software graphics companies Alias/Wavefront and SGI and a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, and he is now Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Buxton began his career as a composer, musical instrument designer, and performer; after receiving his Bachelor of Music degree from Queens University, Canada, he began designing his own digital instruments. He then got a computer degree and headed over to Xerox PARC, that remarkable innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation that first developed the computer mouse, menus, windows, and graphical user interfaces, all elements of digital devices that we take for granted today.
The day we met, Buxton and I spoke about one of my favorite topics, Apple, a company that Buxton greatly admires. No CEOs, managers, or designers in the corporate world argue with Buxton that Apple is one of the most creative companies in the world and that senior vice president of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive is perhaps one the most successful industrial designers of our time. Yet, Buxton would point out, few of them actually know how Apple and Ive “do” their creativity. Because of this, most companies, particularly in consumer electronics, do design innovation wrong.
People need to do their homework, Buxton argues. They need to take the time to study the history of their field, the successes and failures of the early years. While many CEOs and managers want to be like Jobs and Apple, they haven’t taken the time to study how they work and where their core ideas come from. Young techies can often “listen to Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, or Keith Richards—some of the most influential guitar players of the past fifty years—and know (a) that they are riffing on what the great blues artists did in the past, and (b) recognize the riffs and where they came from,” said Buxton. But they can’t do the same for their own companies or industries. “The prevailing myth amongst those very same wannabes is the notion that creativity and invention is of the instant flash of invention lightbulb variety,” said Buxton.
Buxton can cite four examples of how Ive, Jobs, and Apple riffed off the past to create Apple’s successes. Take, for example, the original iPod. “The iPod quotes the 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio, designed by Dieter Rams,” he said, referring to the great German designer for the consumer electronics company Braun. It’s very Bauhaus, with clean lines, simple functionality, just like the iPod. Buxton even sees the historical connection between the launch strategy of the iPod mini and the marketing of the 1928 Kodak Vest Pocket Camera. Teague, one of the first design consultancies in the United States, launched the Kodak in five colors, “the same five colors later used by Apple,” said Buxton. Not a coincidence.
Strange as it may seem, the most advanced technology in products is often decades old. Buxton’s interest in the history of technology is evident in his collection of interactive gadgets—perhaps the biggest in the world. He has a first-generation Etch A Sketch, an electronic drum set, watches, keyboards, a Nintendo Power glove, and hundreds more. He’s donating the collection to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, formerly run by his old friend, the late Bill Moggridge, who was cofounder of IDEO and a world-famous interaction designer himself.
Buxton’s favorite story about mining the past for inspiration involves a gadget in his collection called “Simon,” a 1993 IBM/Bell South smartphone, the first-ever of its kind. The only physical buttons on the Simon were the on/off and volume buttons. All the rest of the Simon’s functionality was accessed through a touch screen, one that covered the entire face of the phone. Most of us don’t remember Simon nor do we realize that touch screen technology existed two decades ago, but it was known in Silicon Valley when Ive began to work on Apple’s ill-fated Newton, one of the first PDAs. Buxton believes Simon to be a likely inspiration for both the Newton and the iPhone.
Artists, dancers, and writers have long known the importance of mining the past. Vincent van Gogh was inspired by many artists, but perhaps none more so than Jean-François Millet. “I put the black and white by Delacroix or Millet . . . in front of me as a subject,” he said, describing his process of “copying” twenty-one of Millet’s works to his brother Theo. “And then I improvise colour on it, not, you understand, altogether by myself, but searching for memories of their pictures; but the memory, the vague consonance of colours which are at least right in feeling, that is my own interpretation.” Van Gogh believed that his process was more akin to “translating them into another language than copying them.”
Bob Dylan looked to Woody Guthrie as a source of inspiration. According to Caspar Llewellyn Smith, writing in the Guardian, “Dylan started mimicking his hero’s speech patterns and even told the crowd at the Cafe Wha? when he arrived in New York for the first time the following January: ’I been travellin’ around the country, followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.’”
More recently, Lady Gaga’s music, style, and videos reference so much of Madonna’s body of work that a number of articles have been written about whether what Gaga has done is homage or flat-out copying. When asked in an interview with ABC News’s Cynthia McFadden what she thought of Gaga’s song “Born This Way,” which shares a chord progression with the eighties classic “Express Yourself,” Madonna reflected, “It feels reductive.”
“Is that good?’ asked McFadden.
“Look it up,” said the Queen of Pop, smiling devilishly before reaching for her mug and taking a sip.
While perhaps more rare than in the world of art and music, there are those in the business world who’ve learned to mine the past. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, the first private company to send cargo to the International Space Station, has a replica of the Saturn V, the powerful rocket that sent twenty-four astronauts to the moon as part of the Apollo program in the sixties and seventies, on his desk. He no doubt has looked to the Saturn V as inspiration for the development of his Falcon rockets as he seeks to further commercialize space. And, of course, the auto companies are constantly looking back to models that we remember so fondly. BMW bought and revived the British MINI Cooper, a brilliant 1959 design for a new small car that Alec Issigonis developed and Jack Cooper improved in 1961. It is once again one of the world’s top-selling city cars.
Not only does building up a body of knowledge help you see where things came from and where to go next, it also helps you see what’s missing.
I was flying home from a finance conference in Europe in the late eighties, sleeping in an aisle seat, when liquid hit my face. Startled, I jumped up, put my glasses on, and looked around, afraid that the plane was in trouble. After a bit, I could see a small figure far down the plane coming back toward me. As the figure moved, passengers jumped up, startled, feeling their faces as I did. Finally, the figure came right up to me. It was a little girl. She was holding something I hadn’t seen before, a donut-shaped milk bottle with a hole in it. She was able to hold onto one side with her little hand and squirt the adults in the aisle seats and then squirt milk into her own mouth. She was laughing, happy. She could feed herself—and torture adults while doing it. This was empowerment. When I got back home, I wrote my first article for BusinessWeek on design.
It turned out that the girl’s parents were Midwestern product designers; they’d tried conventional bottles, but they were all too big for their daughter to hold. Taking away the middle of the bottle and making it donut-shaped meant that small children could easily hold it. I don’t believe the designers envisioned people getting squirted on planes as a result, but I do think they understood something fundamental to knowledge. Sometimes what’s not there is more important than what is.
Paul Polak has spent his life cultivating a kind of wisdom I call “donut knowledge”—the ability to see what isn’t there.” Since he began his career as a social entrepreneur in the early 1980s Polak has talked to thousands of villagers in Africa and Asia. He’s seen what happens when philanthropists donate money to developing areas—immediate joy followed by disappointment when changes prove only incremental and quality of life remains the same. Polak has also heard a lot about the problems of the developing world—lack of food, water, hospitals—only to learn that, most often, the solution lies in exploring what isn’t being discussed.
When Polak was in Bangladesh in the mid-1980s with his first organization, International Development Enterprises (IDE), he heard a lot about the need for more water for irrigation. Most villages had wells, but it was very difficult to bring it up bucket by bucket by hand. Polak looked for a simple way to tap the well water and found it in a new type of treadle pump powered by leg muscle and the weight of your body that cost around $25.
But after talking to a number of villagers about irrigation and pumps, Polak also learned what was not being discussed when the subject of water came up: income. Sure, people really needed more water for their crops. But the real challenge was to create more income for people in the village so they could climb out of poverty. Polak insisted that all the treadles be made in local factories, rather than in China, so the money paid for them circulated back into the neighboring communities. There are now eighty-four factories making treadles in Bangladesh, with local villagers’ family members bringing home wages, while the farmers are boosting their income by increasing their crop yields. Some 1.5 million treadles have been sold in Bangladesh since 1985.
Decades later, Polak found himself working in a different country but tasked with a similar problem. There are 325 million people living in eastern India in states like Orissa, and 80 percent of them don’t have access to safe drinking water.
We tend to think that the problems of poor countries are due to scarcity: There isn’t enough water to go around. But traveling through eastern India, Polak saw something else. He came to understand two critical realities beneath the conventional wisdom. First, in the state of Orissa, there is plenty of water available in villages, but it is not clean. Human fertilizer in the fields often gets into the water supply. So while the villages have pumps making water available for people (almost always women) to come and carry it back home, it usually contains fecal matter. Diarrhea and other chronic ailments are common.
Second, water reflects political power. Members of the higher castes control access to water where it’s available; in one instance, according to Polak, when someone from the “Untouchable” caste touched a faucet in a village, members of the higher caste insisted that the tank be drained, “purified,” and refilled. Where water is scarce, higher caste farmers call upon political connections to build dams that funnel clean water to their villages.
Polak’s ability to see the hole in the conventional wisdom led to a different kind of solution. The system was rigged and irrigation was expensive, yes, but purification was cheap. He set up a private company, Spring Health, and with the help of Indian design consultancy Idiom designed a business plan: Spring Health pays for a $100 concrete water tank to be set up next to one of the two local kiosks called “kirana shops” that exist in every village. The tank is filled with contaminated local well water and cleaned with chlorine. The shopkeepers then sell the clean water for four cents per ten liters—a day’s worth of water. If you wanted home delivery, as many did, it would cost you five cents. Idiom then designed a local transportation system to deliver clean water to families outside the village and designed a new ten-liter plastic jug and a bicycle “saddle” that could hold six liter-size water containers. For a family living within three kilometers, clean water can be delivered for eight cents a day.
In the first six months of operation, in 2012, village medical expenses for diarrhea and other waterborne diseases dropped dramatically. New income was generated for shopkeepers and new water-delivery jobs were created for villagers.
According to Polak, “Spring Health will generate a cornucopia of jobs in the villages.. . . By the end of the first year, if we are successful, we will be partners with six hundred small kirana shops in villages, whose livelihoods and status in the village will increase. They in turn will hire bicycle delivery and hub and spoke rickshaw delivery people from the villages.” With millions of kirana shops in India, the potential to replicate this model throughout the country is huge.
The Acumen Fund, founded by Jacqueline Novogratz, is now investing in Spring Health to scale it. Polak hopes it can reach 5 million villagers in three years and 100 million in ten. Many, if not most, of the beneficiaries will be Untouchables handling their own clean water, some for the first time in their lives. Polak thinks Spring Health could be the first billion-dollar business specifically designed for the demographic C. K. Prahalad dubbed the “bottom of the pyramid.”
None of this would have been possible without Polak’s deep domain expertise developed over decades of work in the field.
So how do you gain donut knowledge? The simple answer is: time. The more you know the pattern, the better prepared you are to see where it breaks. That can mean leaving the familiar behind, going to places—either physical or intellectual—that are unfamiliar, and sometimes uncomfortable.
While donut knowledge naturally increases with time, there are some strategies you can adopt now to improve your ability to see what isn’t there. I’ve picked them up from my years of birding, but they’ve been just as useful in other areas of my life.
Know the Pattern, Watch for the Breaks
As a birder, I’ve learned to look and listen for what shouldn’t be there. What’s unusual. What goes against popular wisdom. It involves a certain amount of domain expertise—I’m certainly a better birder now than I was when I began fifteen years ago. But even if you’ve yet to amass experience in a particular field, you can still improve your chances of spotting the surprises you may not be expecting.
For birders, it can mean going to strange and sometimes unsavory places. When I was in Singapore for a design conference, I went birding at a municipal waste treatment facility and found a number of birds—including one black swan. It was a rarity in Singapore and a good find. I was surprised, but not shocked. I was, after all, looking for what was not supposed to be there.
Just as good detectives are trained to hear the dog that did not bark—so too are good scientists trained to look, and listen, for what’s not there. In 2012, Jeremy Feinberg, a Rutgers doctoral candidate, was doing fieldwork in the marshes and ponds surrounding New York City when he noticed something strange. He was researching the decline of leopard frogs in the area when he noticed that the croaks of the frogs didn’t sound like any he’d heard before.
According to CNN, Feinberg knew that the frog’s croak was “peculiar,” that its calls sounded “weird.” He also knew what the croaks lacked—the “long snore” and the “rapid chuckle” leopard frogs are known for. Feinberg had a hunch that this frog didn’t fit the pattern. “When I first heard these frogs calling, it was so different, I knew something was very off.” Very off.
As we now know, something was off. DNA testing showed that Feinberg identified a distinct, new species of leopard frog with a range that encompassed New York City. Leslie Rissler, an associate professor curator of herpetology at the University of Alabama, said the discovery was “extremely rare.”
The new species has not yet been named. Feinberg first identified it in the bogs of Staten Island, but it’s now been found in two other states. “I’ve given it lots of thought,” he told the New York Times. “Part of me has always wanted to call these New York leopard frogs, but I think people in New Jersey and Connecticut will protest. I have to balance the politics with the naming.” I think a better solution would be to name it after the discoverer, the scientist who knew the pattern well enough to hear the break. The Feinberg Frog.
Bird the Birders
Another donut knowledge strategy is to “bird the birders.” When I go into Central Park during migration or travel to Central America or the Amazon, I surround myself with better birders. Put many good birders together and the chances of finding a rarity like the red-footed falcon go up significantly.
Whatever your interests are, surrounding yourself with people who know how to look for the odd duck tends to increase your own chances of finding the rarity. You can learn from the experts, see how they operate, and, sometimes, simply tag along.
Universities have long been hubs of creative activity—one reason why Stanford produces so many entrepreneurs and founders of start-up companies is the dense network of people, places, and events that focus on what’s next, what’s different, what’s not there—but now there are countless alternatives that can help you connect with experienced innovators from a wide variety of fields. Seek out the right conferences—for every TED or Davos, there are scores of smaller upstart festivals that might feature the thinkers and creators we’ll all be talking about in a few years—and go to those weekly evening events thrown by people in your field. Even the expensive and exclusive TED conference has expanded to include hundreds of independently organized TEDx events.
Much has been written about serendipity and the creative congestion of cities—but cities, like universities, need to be more than just crowded. The world is full of huge, immensely crowded cities that don’t necessarily generate creativity. Take Singapore, which, for all its newfound prosperity, has a reputation for being boring. Talk to the artists and students from Singapore who have studied in Europe and the United States and they’ll say that conformity and mass consumerism define their culture. People almost always buy established global brands like Prada and Gucci rather than support homegrown designers. The government is making a huge effort to promote creativity in Singapore, and it may yet succeed.
But compare Singapore with New York in 2013 and the differences are vast. Over the past fifteen years in New York City, vast networks of entrepreneurs, incubators, venture capitalists, universities, media companies, and artists have arisen to generate a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurialism. For the first time, New York rivals Silicon Valley in start-ups, concentrating more on content and culture than technology. Dial the clock back to the seventies, and you’d have witnessed a different kind of creative congestion—an art scene was burgeoning in SoHo; rappers, break dancers, and beat boxers from all the boroughs were creating a new kind of music and culture—but it wouldn’t necessarily have been the ideal place for someone looking to start up a new media company that required a thriving network of graphic designers and social media experts. You need to pick your congestion, your cities, carefully.
When it comes to international sports, India is often outclassed by other nations. But recently, India’s female wrestlers have brought home the gold. In the 2010 Commonwealth Games, they won three gold medals. In the 2011 Commonwealth Wrestling Championship in Melbourne, they took home five golds. It’s a remarkable achievement in a country that provides little support for women’s sports—or women’s rights.
Wrestlers of both genders have had to train without much funding, with state support coming in the form of government jobs and cash rewards upon the winning of medals. There are no programs like Title IX to promote women’s sports in schools—and no real government support for women’s sports in general. Though wrestling has had a long tradition in India, it has always been a male-dominated sport, despite recent standout performances by women.
But Usha Sharma, a police officer and the wrestling coach who trained several medal winners, dreams of changing that.
Sharma’s wrestling academy is based in Haryana, the Indian state known for two things. It is one of the country’s most prosperous states. And it is the state with the highest ratio of female feticide. Sons are preferred over daughters in most of India, and the spread of ultrasound technology in prosperous states such as Haryana makes it easier to identify and abort female fetuses, though this practice has been illegal in India since 1971. Haryana has 830 girls per 1,000 boys, compared with the normal sex ratio for children from birth to age six of 952 girls per 1,000 boys. Such statistics are subject to social factors that influence every aspect of the reporting, but they help to guide our understanding of the complex variables at play.
Sharma dreams of building a rural women’s sports league, sponsored by local companies, the state or national government, or perhaps all of them. “I have always wanted to do something for women, especially for rural women, who are given few opportunities,” said Sharma. “My efforts are focused toward seeing women make their mark in this game, win medals for the country, and make their name.”
Social entrepreneurs and philanthropists scour Africa and Asia trying to help the “needy,” but Sonia Manchanda, a cofounder of Idiom, India’s top business model innovation and design consultancy, believes that asking people about their dreams is a much more powerful strategy. Ask people about needs, she said, and they will give you a long list, one that varies from time of day to day of the week. Ask people about their dreams and they’ll give you just one answer, maybe two. It’s not a list but a revealing look into what is truly meaningful in their lives.
In January of 2011, Manchanda and Idiom launched Dream:IN, a program dedicated to empowering people all over the country to achieve their dreams. Manchanda brought in 101 students from design, art, and business schools and institutions across India, trained them in the skills of interviewing and filming, and sent them in teams to talk to people in villages and cities across the country.
The students heard many different dreams but identified only about a dozen themes. “More education” was probably the most frequent response, followed by “more rights for women,” as well as “help starting or expanding a business.” Another dream shared by many of the interviewees was more support for soccer, wrestling, and other popular sports (cricket, despite its popularity, is a sport enjoyed mostly by the rich and middle class).
I joined the process when Manchanda gathered a number of people to Bangalore, Idiom’s home base, to strategize different ways to make those dreams come true. Our team came up with a plan to utilize the Internet connection available at many kiosks that dot the streets so people could plug in, free, wherever they were. Private schools and universities could charge a small fee for online courses or the Internet carriers could pay the schools directly because they would receive higher revenues from people using their service. Government and corporate sponsors also could possibly play a role in transforming cyber-cafés into edu-cafés. We also talked of the possibility of delivering education via cell phones, despite the tiny screen size.
A year and a half later, Sharma still awaited funding for her girls’ wrestling academy. The project of turning cyber-cafés into mini-schools still remains just a business concept. But Manchanda and Idiom are in the process of building an independent Dream:IN network of venture capitalists, funds, and nonprofits to invest in and fulfill the dreams of Sharma and others interviewed in Dream:IN. They already have $50,000 from Gray Ghost Ventures, a pioneer in microfinance and entrepreneurial investment in low-income countries.
It’s not surprising that the Dream:IN model was developed in India—a country where more than 65 percent of a population of a billion people are under thirty-five. Young people, with their lives ahead of them, are full of dreams about the future. But the idea behind the organization is universal. Manchanda’s observations about the focus on needs being too narrow is hardly an Indian problem.
For decades, innovation consultancies, brand strategists, and nonprofits alike have spent billions trying to figure out what people need. American and European innovation consultancies offer new strategies for discovering unmet needs. Conventional MBA programs teach managers to get to know the needs of consumers so they might provide products and services to meet them. In the high-tech sector, engineers tried to expand the functionalities of existing products, adding a button here or a click-through feature there for our every need.
We frame commerce and society—even our relationships—in terms of needs, but that kind of framework is limited. People are much more complicated than a list of needs; we need food and housing and shelter, sure, but what makes humanity unique are the dreams and longings that are much deeper and more complicated than mere necessity. No one needs an iPhone or a Zipcar, and yet these products have become as meaningful to us as the homes we live in or the food we eat.
Mining for knowledge isn’t simply about sifting for data. It also involves an understanding of what people find meaningful. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger connected rhythm and blues and jazz and brought their music to restless kids yearning for change. Method founders Alex Lowry and Eric Ryan brought together cool design and sustainability to create a green product that didn’t require sacrifice.
Of course, what’s meaningful changes over time and varies across different cultures and generations. Facebook is meaningful for twentysomethings and those of us who are a little older and see the value of this kind of social sharing, but the site will be less significant to people who believe sharing means having their grandchildren visit and communicating with their friends over the telephone.
What are the practical steps that people can take to create more meaningful things? What should corporations and organizations do to generate more meaningful offerings for their customers and their clients?
Starting with a broad liberal arts degree and continuing your learning throughout life may be the most important step in gaining the empathy and the context necessary to determine what is truly meaningful to people. In eras of economic and social stability, specialization makes sense as you seek the best niche for your talents. You slot yourself into existing organizations and jobs. But in times of turmoil, when industries and careers are constantly changing, you need the foundation for building your own path. Today, the business degree is the most common undergraduate degree in America, and yet many of the aspects of traditional corporate management—production, accounting, IT, even human resources—are being outsourced to India and China and Latin America. In most business programs, people are learning the specialized skills of the last century. What they need instead is a more general understanding of the world—of its history, culture, art, and science. These are the areas that inspire us to create.
In a talk given to a freshman class at Stanford, writer Bill Deresiewicz cautioned students against getting so caught up in an area of specialty that they lose sight of their ability to make their own paths in lives. “The problem with specialization,” he said, “is that it narrows your attention to the point where all you know about and all you want to know about, and, indeed, all you can know about, is your specialty. The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist. It cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in yourself.”
What we need, perhaps more than ever, are individuals and organizations who are not cut off from but rather intimately connected to the world around them. I’m not talking about superficial connection to thousands of Facebook “friends” you’ve never met, but connections born from a deep interest and engagement with different people and cultures. It’s this kind of engagement that will help us come up with ideas that fulfill our wildest dreams.
I recently had lunch with someone from a consultancy widely known for teaching big businesses how to be more creative. During our talk, she admitted that when younger people would bring in ideas for new products, the experienced people rarely saw the value in them. The prevailing belief was that those who were younger were there to learn and assist but not necessarily to innovate. After an idea would be rejected by older bosses up the management chain, a younger staff member would say, “Okay, I’ll just go to Kickstarter.”
This seemed to me a perfect example of the way established organizations can overlook the tremendous insight employees, especially younger ones, can bring to the creation process. To be sure, recent graduates can lack experience and discernment, but there has to be a better strategy than encouraging young people to wait until they’ve paid their dues to start thinking about implementing their ideas. The cost of losing those ideas can be high. For that reason, companies should be thinking about setting up their own internal venture funds. Or if they don’t have that capability, they should be bringing in experienced venture capitalists who can help turn ideas into new products.
Just as many companies are failing to capitalize on the vast amount of knowledge their employees possess, so too are many of us overlooking our own skills and experiences. At the risk of stating the obvious, I can see no better first step in improving your knowledge-mining skills than becoming familiar with the knowledge and abilities you already possess. Even if you feel you have a firm grasp on areas where you have an edge, you may be surprised at what a formal “audit” turns up. Set aside some time to do a proper “experience, knowledge, and skills” audit—it can be a bullet-pointed list, an essay, or a folder of photographs of your work or areas of interest. What’s most important is that you don’t edit yourself: that mother from New Mexico I spoke to didn’t see her sewing ability as a creative skill, but it certainly was.
Keep in mind that your accomplishments may not seem as glamorous or impressive as those of other people. But they might be. For that reason, you’d be wise to enlist the help of a close friend, a family member, or others who really know you—teachers, coaches, managers, editors. The point of this exercise is to begin to see knowledge and experiences you’ve probably taken for granted as skills that can be applied to new endeavors.
Organizations, too, should have some system of auditing the skills and areas of interest of their employees. This could be an extension of the “20 percent time” policies that many companies have already adopted. Some companies call this “free time,” but giving your employees the opportunity to devote some time each week to projects they feel are important is anything but. It’s a valuable investment in your organization’s Creative Intelligence. 3M was a pioneer of this strategy, launching mandatory 15 percent free time in 1948. It continues to be one of America’s most consistently innovative companies, aiming to derive a significant percentage of profits from new products created in the previous five years, a goal it achieves again and again. Products such as clear bandages, painter’s tape that sticks to wall edges to protect against paint, optical films that reflect light, and sandpaper that is so sharp it acts like a cutting tool all came out of 3M’s 15 percent free time program.
Google has had a 20 percent free time policy since its founding, a program that had been extremely successful in generating different kinds of services—at least until competition with Facebook led cofounder Larry Page to mandate that everyone use his or her 20 percent time to work exclusively on one topic: catching Facebook by building out Google+, a social media site where people can meet and exchange images and information.
Past successes at both Google and 3M suggest that the freedom to focus on whatever employees choose has helped motivate them to come up with ideas they might not have had were all projects simply assigned to them. For managers that are still concerned about the viability of such programs, they can incentivize 20 percent time to encourage employees to connect their passions to projects that actually have a chance at creating value for their organizations. Assess the program’s success six months or a year in: Has it led to any promising developments? If it hasn’t (and I doubt that will be the case), all you’ve lost is a few Fridays that people might have otherwise spent phoning it in, making plans for the weekend, or watching cat videos on YouTube.
Another strategy some companies have adopted is mapping the informal “creativity networks” inside their organizations. Most scientists, engineers, and designers naturally talk and work with people across company boundaries. They often go outside their companies altogether to link up with people doing similar work in different silos. Accepting and embracing these unofficial networks of creativity, even if these teams cross bureaucratic boundaries, can be hugely productive. Companies should be nurturing their “bandito creatives,” men and women who’ve already demonstrated a willingness to break the conventional rules if that’s what it takes to do their jobs creatively. Find them and map their networks. Ask them questions: Who are you talking to inside and outside the company? Who did you work with on this research or project? Who are the most original thinkers that you know of? Where do you go for inspiration? And, most important of all, encourage this “off-the-books” engagement because it just might lead to that new $1 billion product.
Universities need to encourage this kind of creativity mapping as much as corporations. The best new research tends to come at the intersection of two or three established disciplines—think bioengineering, neuroscience, digital fabrication. Mapping these networks and funding the gutsy scientists who reach across disciplines is one way universities can keep at the forefront of research.
On a personal level, we can all implement our own 20 percent strategies, committing to a certain amount of time each week to pursuing areas that interest us, even if we can’t see the clear value of those activities yet. We can spend some of that time “mining the past” of industries that interest us. We should be setting up at least one meeting a week with an expert in our fields and asking: What’s currently on his or her mind? What’s exciting and inspiring these days? What’s worrying?
We can also ask experts what’s not there. What do they think people in their industry are missing? What is everyone getting wrong? What should they be thinking about or focusing on instead?
Cultivating all of this knowledge is a good starting point, but if we want to use it for creative purposes, we need to actually start thinking about how to put it into practice. If you’ve picked up this book because you’re hoping to solve a particularly vexing challenge at work, you would do well to close it right now and go for a walk. Actually, read the next two paragraphs, then go.
These days, people are constantly connected: texting, e-mailing, talking, and responding from the moment we get up in the morning. Try disconnecting for a bit of the day, especially in the morning. Take a walk. Walking alone is an excellent strategy for freeing your mind up so that you’re better able to bring together different areas of knowledge.
You can keep a particular challenge in mind as you walk, or you can just look around and see what other inspirations strike you. Steve Jobs was a walker. Mark Zuckerberg is a walker. IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge talked about walking the High Line in New York to find clarity and creative inspiration. Walking to a local park (or nearby beach, if you’re lucky) or even just around your neighborhood can give you the space you need to start mining the knowledge you’ve accumulated and connecting dots. And finding that neighborhood coffee shop to hang out and just think is important too.
The late Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and professor Donald Murray once wrote, “My writing day begins about eleven-thirty in the morning when I turn off my computer and go out to lunch. I have written and now I will allow the well to refill.” Notice he said his day begins when he turns the computer off. We’ve come to equate time spent sitting down in front of our computers with working when we forget that our minds are still going, learning, making connections long after we’ve left the office. Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget the important role that reflecting, processing, not doing, plays in creativity.
Okay, you can go for that walk now.
The final thing to remember when it comes to Knowledge Mining is that it’s going to be very difficult for all your hard work learning, mining, and connecting to pay off if you don’t spend time thinking about how to connect to what people find meaningful. It’s important to translate your enthusiasm and insight into a narrative that others find compelling and want to engage with. In this economy—in any economy, really—this kind of engagement is key.
And so, in the next chapter, I’ll introduce a competency that’s all about rethinking the many ways we engage, reframing the stories we tell about the world around us, and possibly even reimagining the future.