The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

Everyone dreams of a better future. Some of those dreams are more commonplace, like getting a better job; while others are bigger challenges, such as creating something innovative that will change the world or writing a bestselling book. I believe everyone should dream big. Unfortunately, for some people, achieving those dreams feels impossible from the beginning, and they never see them become reality. Have you ever wondered why some people are able to achieve their wildest dreams, while others never seem to make it past the first step?

Experts Write Down Their Goals – and a Plan for Achieving Them

What if the difference were as simple as writing your goals down? It’s been popular advice for a number of years. As is the way of the Internet, a fictional study concerning the Harvard class of 1979 was used for a long time as an example of how writing down goals could help increase an individual’s ability to achieve success. According to this nonexistent study, the Harvard graduates who had taken the time to write down their goals were earning a significantly greater income ten years later than their classmates who had not written down their goals, and several times the income of classmates who had no goals at all at graduation. While this study has been found not to exist, writing down goals for long-term success is still considered a valid exercise – and there is actual legitimate research to prove it.

According to this study, individuals who each week wrote down their goals for the month were much more likely to accomplish those goals than individuals who were simply instructed to meditate on their goals for a brief period of time at the beginning of the study. However, the study also revealed something else interesting: individuals who wrote down their goals were even more likely to succeed if they also created an action plan (that is, a plan for making their goals reality), shared their action plan with a friend, and regularly checked in with that friend to give a report on their progress since they had started working toward their goals.

Creating innovation goals, therefore, should be handled like any other goal in your life: write it down!

Written Goals Provide Clarity of Purpose

Written goals not only take on a heavier weight in your own mind — after all, why would you write something down if you weren’t serious about it? — they also give you something to refer back to: a guidepost that will help you determine the things that are truly important in your life. A recent blog post by Michael Hyatt, former Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, suggests that your written goals should become the filter through which you gauge every opportunity that comes before you. According to Hyatt, the more successful you become, the more opportunities you will have to let pass you by. Deciding which things to pass on can be a real challenge – but it’s less of a challenge if you already have a clear indicator of success or failure right there in front of you. If the opportunity doesn’t contribute to one of those goals, it’s probably not the right one for you: it’s just that simple.

Writing down your goals clarifies your vision and your purpose. If you don’t know where you’re going,

A music theory book might seem like an unusual place to find inspiration for innovative thinking, but there is a musical principle that provides a useful metaphor for how innovators find inspiration – and also happens to separate the great composers from the mediocre ones. That principle is dissonance.

The Power of Dissonance

In its most extreme form, dissonance is that terrible sound you hear when two notes don’t harmonize, such as when someone sings off-key in a choir. When used in moderation, however, dissonance is powerful, as evidenced by the emotional response provoked almost without fail by the song “Someone Like You,” the singer-songwriter Adele’s masterpiece. In the run-up to Adele’s sweep of the 2012 Grammy Awards, the Wall Street Journal published a piece pinpointing the subtle examples of dissonance sprinkled throughout the song as its secret, tear-jerking power.

Dissonance, by definition, creates tension, and makes listeners crave resolution. Resolution is the natural direction for music to take, and so when it happens, it provides immediate relief without most listeners ever realizing the tension was there in the first place. Though it can be difficult to identify as a layperson, the best composers understand its power and use it consciously to make their music more provocative, by following the dissonance where it naturally leads them.

What can innovators learn from this?

Think of musical dissonance as an “unnatural” phenomenon that must be resolved to allow the “natural” state of musical harmony to return. The problem is, recognizing disharmony in the real world can be much more difficult than identifying a sour note in a musical composition, since we’re so accustomed to seeing certain problems as intractable, or “natural.” When a person can identify the dissonance of these situations, refusing to accept their “naturalness,” it allows them to lean into that dissonance and follow the path it carves to a logical resolution – though one that most wouldn’t consider until it happens, just as most people can’t identify musical dissonance except by the emotion it produces when it resolves.

Two inspiring stories of innovation show us how simply recognizing a problem as an unnatural form of dissonance, rather than accepting it as the natural state of things, can open up new creative paths and vital solutions.

Listening to Unheard Voices

When Shubhranshu Choudhary , a journalist for the BBC, traveled to Chhattisgarh, his home region in India, to cover the escalating guerrilla warfare there, he was troubled by much of the reporting he was seeing. News agencies were portraying the conflict in a two-dimensional, black and white manner. They were overlooking complex problems and misrepresenting the voices of the locals. Choudhary  rejected the narrative that the rebels were all fanatically committed to the opposition Maoist cause. He began asking questions. What was the real reason the people of his home region were taking up arms?

He discovered that rather than a conflict between political ideologies — local communities, even people he had known from his childhood, were resorting to armed conflict to draw attention to severe needs. The civil authorities had been ignoring their problems, and so the people living in small, rural communities saw joining the rebels as the only opportunity they had to make their voices heard.

Choudhary left the BBC to work full time on finding a solution to the problem that ...

When the mantra “innovate or die” is invoked, two companies who are often mentioned as examples are Nokia and Kodak. But in what ways, exactly, did these two companies fail to innovate? and what lessons can we learn from their failures?

Here are 5 innovation blind spots that I identified that ultimately doomed them to failure …

1) They Defined Their Business Too Narrowly

Nokia began life in a small village in Finland, as a paper mill. It branched out into electronics in the 1960s and in 1979 created the first cellular network in the world. Soon after, Nokia launched the Mobira Senator, its first car phone.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nokia was the global leader in mobile phones. Profits were sky-high. The shareholders were ecstatic. No doubt Nokia thought its name would be the Kleenex of mobile phones.

Then, companies who were focused on the internet arrived, with people who understood that data, not voice, was the future of communication.

Fast forward to 2013, when Nokia’s hardware division was acquired by Microsoft. It was the end of Nokia’s glory days.

In a TechCrunch article, Daniel Gleeson, states that Nokia just didn’t grasp the whole concept of software, or the idea of developing an ecosystem around apps. Nokia’s focus was hardware and they got stuck there.

Adam Leach worked with Nokia’s original smartphone platform, Symbian, on projects including the Nokia Communicator, one of the first smartphones ever developed. Talking about his experience in collaborating with Nokia, he said the attitude was “it’s got to be a phone first, it’s a phone, phones sell.”

Nokia’s reluctance to switch from a focus on hardware to one on software left it eating the dust of other companies.

Similarly, Kodak made the monumental blunder of clinging to analog cameras instead of moving quickly to digital — A side note: Kodak invented the first digital camera. The reason, as Forbes notes, the members of the organization were so tied to the idea that their paychecks came from the sale of consumables such as film, chemicals and paper. No consumables, no profit, was their assumption.

So what is the lesson learned? Be careful about how you define your business. Make it broad enough to encompass the possibility of change and deep enough to reach down to the core concerns of your customers.

2) They Forgot About the Customer

George Eastman, founder of Kodak, once said his goal was to “make the camera as convenient as the pencil.” With that attitude, and the development of dry-plate technology, he launched both an iconic American company and the entire practice of amateur photography. The “Kodak moment” embodies the idea of being able to capture special memories, easily and inexpensively. Later, Eastman bet his company’s future on new technology (leaving dry-plate photography behind and embracing film) because he saw how the new would serve the customer better than the old. He similarly jumped on color film early, even though it was inferior to black and white film for a long time during its development.

Somehow, Eastman’s wisdom did not survive. Later on, leadership at Kodak thought only about profit and hung on to outdated technology.

In the 1984 movie “Dreamscape” starring Dennis Quaid and Christopher Plummer , government researchers found a way to have people join another persons dream and then actively participate, and in some case disrupt it. The core of the movie is to use this new found ability to do both good and evil. After I watched the movie, I became enthralled with the idea behind the concept of film – lucid dreaming.

How Does Lucid Dreaming Relate to Personal Creativity?

Lucid dreams happen when the dreamer is aware they are in dream while also being aware that what they they are experiencing is not real life. Most people never experience it to the fullest, but some dreamers are able to take full advantage of lucid dreaming and control what they do and what happens around them. To many people – and to me – this sounds like a lot of fun.

But it’s about much more than fun. As a Wall Street Journal article explains, multiple studies have shown that frequent lucid dreamers are better at cognitive tasks that involve insight and thinking creatively. Intuitively, this makes sense. On countless occasions, I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with the faint memory of a great idea, but I could never quite grab it. Unfortunately, most people are like me and have a hard time realizing when they’re dreaming and then being able to play it back when they awake.

A few months ago, after reading up on the topic, I decided that I was going to experiment with lucid dreaming. Despite my best efforts, however, I found myself coasting through my dreams just the same as I always had, — unable to take control or experiment with my surroundings. I got frustrated.

What was the problem?

The web abounds with instructions – some more metaphysical than others – on how to get into the lucid-dreaming game. The basics include getting into the habit of “reality checks” throughout your waking day such as looking at your hands so that you recognize any changes when you are in a dream state; — keeping a dream journal to get better at remembering your dreams; — and repeating a kind of mantra before you go to sleep: “I will remember my dream tonight; I am going to dream about _____.”

I tried all of these techniques, but found that I was having only limited success. I continued to wake up with the ghost of an idea sliding from my conscious mind, just out of reach. After a few weeks of this, I decided to try a new technique, which has always been a great jumping-off point when I feel stuck: the Socratic Method of using questions.

Essentially, the Socratic Method is about challenging your assumptions, and asking yourself open-ended questions.

Questions have unique power. When you are asked a question, you can’t stop yourself from asking it. For example, If I ask you:

“What is half of thirteen?”

You’re calculated the answer and are now back listening to me. You didn’t consciously tell yourself to solve the calculation, your brain did it automatically — all on its own.

So – could I frame a question just prior to to going sleep and will my subconscious actively try to answer it?

And the answer is – yes. I was gradually able to take more and more control in my dreaming life, using my questions as a catalyst. Once I was able to be consistent in my lucid-dreaming, the opportunities were endless.

If you look up the Merriam-Webster’s definition, it says that innovation is “the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods.” However, in a world of continuous technological and ideological advancement, how much is really new? The truth is we are creative beings, but we don’t create alone. While some will try to make the claim of being the sole creator of an innovation, the majority of our ideas are inspired by things and processes already in existence.

This is true of one of history’s most important innovations: Henry Ford’s creation of the assembly line. This innovation has changed countless industries by altering the universal production process and it came from an unlikely source.

How Did Ford Invent The Assembly Line?

Many people may think it was simply a stroke of genius, but the assembly line actually came about through re-purposing: taking something we already know and altering it to create something completely different. Henry Ford designed and executed the very first assembly line while creating his famed Model T, but the idea wasn’t something that he truly came up with on his own.

Ford found his inspiration in the efficiency of Chicago meat-packing houses. The story goes that in watching the production process at one of these plants, he was mesmerized by the efficiency achieved when the meat was being cut down a line, each butcher executing a different cut as the meat continued its journey. Ford realized it could be reverse engineered: he could build his cars by having each employee place a different part on the car as it moved through the factory. Thus the assembly line was created, leading to one of the biggest increases in productivity in industrial history.

In a more recent example of inspiration, Ford used the idea of “simulation” from the aerospace industry to prototype and test new dashboard ideas. In a podcast from December 2009, I interviewed Dave Watson from Ford and Steve Bishop from IDEO where they shared their co-innovation project on theFord Fusion and the inspiration to use digital cockpits in airplanes as an inspiration for the first all digital digital dashboard for cars.

Innovation Isn’t Just “Ford Tough”

Ford isn’t the only example.

Nike was also born through cross-industry innovation, a field in which they remain one of the leaders. How? They look for unlikely solutions to problems, ultimately finding unique innovations.

Nike originated in the 1960s when Oregon’s coach, Bill Bowerman, was trying to design new soles with better grip for his track athletes. He found inspiration for his solution in a plain old waffle iron (he ruined his wife’s when he made the first pair of Nike running shoes!). Nike didn’t stop there: the company has made innovation and reverse engineering part of their company values. One of their top-selling models, Nike Shox, were designed using Formula 1 race cars as inspiration. While some of Nike’s innovation inspirations seem to come from way out in left field, that’s one of the factors that has differentiated them from the rest of their industry for decades.

Learn to Innovate Like Ford and Bowerman

These two great innovators came up with their revolutionary ideas via unlikely sources in industries seemingly unrelated to their own.