Blue Dots Partners

I often hear that “Innovation”, with a capital “I” is the secret to growth. You invent new products, new services, new business models, a new customer support approach, new ways to engage with prospects. You turn an industry upside down and the long walking dinosaurs are soon extinct and forgotten.

A few months ago, I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine, Fred Weber, who was the CTO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a large Silicon Valley semiconductor company, for a decade. I was lucky to be on the board of a company with Fred and have always been impressed by his clear thinking, wit and no-nonsense approach. Fred and I were discussing what makes a company grow fast and be successful.

Fred’s view is that it’s all about the product. It is the enablement of success. With no product or a bad product, there are no customers, no revenue, no business. This is certainly true, although while a product that delivers value is a critical ingredient, it does not necessary guaranty success by itself. It’s one of the ingredients of the recipe of the dish called “success.” Chanterelles don’t guarantee that the omelet will be amazing, but they sure make it great of well cooked. Superior products don’t always win. It is also what you do around the product (pricing, marketing, go-to-market, support, etc.) that greatly matters.

What unleashes the birth and the success of a business with an unprecedented level of growth is really driven, not by the product, but by re-defining the User Experience (“UE”). Note that I am purposely not using the term User Interface or “UI”. One can conceive of a new form of interaction where in fact, there is no UI, but a new and unprecedented new UX. For example, one day, we will find an easy, noninvasive and cheap way to read and control some parts of the brain, then keyboards and mice might become irrelevant. This is actually happening right now and is not science fiction. Some labs around the world have demonstrated that a brain-computer interface actually works by implanting a small prosthesis that gives the person the ability to control a computer cursor. BrainGate, for example, has developed a sensor implanted in the brain and an external decoder device, which connects to a computer. In 2002, Cyberkinetics, Inc. was formed as a spin-off from Brown University to develop and launch pilot clinical trials of a first- brain-computer interface (BCI). So, in the future, if I can turn on or off a light in my living room without interacting with a physical switch, but just thinking about it, then the UI is transparent and does not really exist. In other words, there is no user interface. The ultimate and magical UI is when there is no UI. On the other hand, the experience by which I turn the light on or off is radically new, while the fact that I can turn on and off a light is not. It is not better, it is radically different. It is defined by a new UX. These profound UX inflections points in many cases trigger a boom and the creation of a whole new multibillion-dollar industry where the dominant players enjoy explosive growth.

Here are three examples illustrating that phenomenon.

• When the car was invented in 1885 by Karl Benz from Germany, it enabled a new user experience. The car did not invent the notion of travel, it transformed it in a radically new form. People traveled for thousands of miles, way before the car was invented. However, it offered a profound new way to experience that journey.
• In 1946, a housewife from Westport, Indiana, named Marion Donovan invented the disposable diaper. Today 95% of babies wear them and according to the EPA, each baby goes through about 8,000 of them. Donovan explained to Barbara Walters in 1975 that she asked herself “What do I think will help a lot of people and most certainly will help me?” Her original idea was to make a cover into a container and put absorbent paper in it. She named it the Boater. From 1951 to 1996, she was granted 20 patents for her inventions. Donovan changed the user experience, i.e. transforming the bad experience of changing wet and soiled baby clothing in the middle of the night into taking out a diaper, throwing it away and putting on a new one. Convenience drove her invention into a worldwide success.
• When the $399 iPod was launched on October 23, 2001, it was certainly not the first MP3 players. There were several companies already selling MP3 players including Creative Labs, Diamond Multimedia, Eiger Labs, and SonicBlue. In fact, according to IDC, it was estimated to be about a $500 million industry with 3.3 million MP3 players sold that year, threatening the dominance of CD players. However, what made the iPod the iPod was the way people would carry 1,000 songs in their pockets and how they enjoyed their musical experience and how they could acquire these tracks via iTunes. It created a user experience that did not exist before. The Walkman had previously done the same thing: it introduced the notion that your choice of music can now be with you, move and follow you wherever you go. You don’t go where the music is played, near a turntable for example, the music goes with you. This had been done before with the introduction of transistor radios. People could enjoy their favorite types of music although they had no control over the specific songs.

Note that it all cases, it is easy to identify the moment that separates the “before” with the “after”. It was never about being better, it was about being different. It is not about a better user experience, it is about a different, a new, an unheard-of type of UX.

So, when approaching the idea of innovation, the question is not “How can we innovate and beat our competition” but rather “What new, unprecedented and lasting user experience can we create and deliver?”