The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

For many innovators, making a splash through social media is the subject of long thought and a lot of trial and error. On the other hand, innovators like Elon Musk tend to have the Midas touch when it comes to combining innovation and social media.

It is amazing how much can be learned about an innovator’s style and thought processes from the confines of Twitter, so I’ve put together my personal list of 12 principles of innovation Elon Musk displays in 140 characters or less.

Download to the Killer Innovations Podcast: 12 Tips on Innovation from Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed S11 Ep6

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Show Credits:

• Elon Musk on Twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk
• Image Credit: Geteverwise
• Music by Bensound

For many innovators, making a splash through social media is the subject of long thought and a lot of trial and error. On the other hand, innovators like Elon Musk tend to have the Midas touch when it comes to combining innovation and social media.

For example — on March 30, Elon made a vague announcement via Twitter that Tesla Motors was coming out with a new product, and it wasn’t a car. Within hours, Entrepreneur magazine wrote an article encouraging people to guess what the product was about, and re-tweets and favorites both surpassed 3,000. Tesla shares rose in response to the announcement, which gained the attention of CNBC and other news outlets.

Innovation Tips Via Twitter

It is amazing how much can be learned about an innovator’s style and thought processes from the confines of Twitter, so I’ve put together my personal list of 12 principles of innovation Elon Musk displays in 140 characters or less.

* Quality Drives Innovation – One of Musk’s latest projects, the Tesla Gigafactory, garnered several tweets as well as a Flickr post. Batteries for electric cars must be high quality, and that need is driving Tesla to build “the largest footprint manufacturing facility in the world.” Innovative cars need quality batteries. Quality batteries drive innovative manufacturing: the cycle goes on.

* Create the Curve – Innovators are always trying to get ahead of the curve, to create new products that people need, before the rest of the market fills the need. For great innovation to occur, you need more than a good imagination and entrepreneurial spirit — you need to engage culture in such a way that the curve naturally follows you. As evidenced by Musk’s recent Tweet — and the buzz it generated — there are ways to use your innovative processes to move ahead of your industry, so that you are no longer trying to find the curve –- you are creating the curve.

* Relationships are Key to Innovation – On April 6, Elon Musk welcomed a Formula 1 Racer to Tesla motors. Relationships are essential to building innovative companies and products. In the fast-paced environment of the 21st century, no single innovator can know it all. Bringing unique individuals with varying experience onto the innovation team is essential.

* Just The Right Information – If Elon Musk had announced the actual product name, category, or other essential information in his new product tweet, then the discussion with be if Tesla will be able to fulfill its product goals. Controlling information gives you the ability to control the conversation and attitudes about your innovative products and services, which can affect their success.

* Keep Your Core Values in Focus – One of Elon’s recent humorous tweets was — “Really should be a rule that oatmeal-raisin cookies can’t look too much like choc chip.” The point of this tweet is that food should look like what it is, and innovators are the same way. Your core values and processes,

Everyone knows of the old saying “Great minds think alike,” usually said as a kind of joke when two people have the same idea at the same time. But just how true is that statement? In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that bigger, better innovations happen when people of wildly different backgrounds and ideas come together and combine their expertise.

The Medici Effect

In 2004, Frans Johansson published his best-selling book, The Medici Effect, a ground-breaking work outlining a phenomenon of the same name that the author had come to recognize in the world of innovation. The theory draws upon the history of the wealthy and sophisticated Medici family of 14th-century Italy. Their patronage facilitated the intersection of a group of artisans from all over Europe, including painters, poets, scientists, and philosophers, who came together and ended up pooling their collective ideas in many ways. This meeting of highly creative and skilled individuals from varying backgrounds and professions largely spearheaded the Renaissance period, which was one of the most innovative and productive periods of human history across the fields of invention, art, philosophy, and science.

So, what exactly is the Medici Effect? In his research, Johansson used the term to describe the idea that the best concepts and innovations are developed at the intersection of brilliant minds from all walks of life – that new ideas are really just new combinations of old ideas. People from different regions, professions, mindsets, industries, and cultures can come together to form some of the best, most innovative ideas and solutions of this century. His theory has been proven time and time again throughout history and into the present.

Associative Fluency

This ability to see the opportunity created by connecting separate ideas together is what is calledassociative fluency. Its the skill to see what “could be” from disparate activities, technologies and ideas. In Serial entrepreneurs, their associative fluency skill is highly tuned to see what others don’t see.

Biomimicry Architecture

One of the most exciting fields where this is in evidence is that of biomimicry architecture – architecture that imitates various qualities of the natural world, bringing engineering, design, and biology together. For example, the architect Mick Pearce was commissioned to design an enormous shopping and office complex in Harare, the capitol of Zimbabwe. The catch: the developers wanted this building to use a passive climate control system, i.e., one that didn’t employ central air conditioning.

While this may sound impossible, Pearce knew that there were already such structures in existence: termite mounds. African termites must keep their mounds at a steady temperature of 87°F in order to grow the fungus that is their primary food source. When you take into consideration the drastic variation in temperature between night and day on the African savannah, it is truly remarkable that they manage to regulate the structures’ temperature so precisely. They do it by outfitting the mounds with a unique ventilation system originating around the base. By opening and closing valves connected to this system, the termites are able to control the movement of air through the structure – hot air ri...

Had enough of Barbie’s Dream House? Ever wonder why dolls and tiaras and pink party dresses fill the “girl” aisles of the toy store?

After one such stroll down the isle with one of my grand daughters, I was reminded about the stereotypical thinking around “girl tech”. In one of my previous roles, a team was pitching me on ideas on how to address the girl or women tech market. After watching a parade of product ideas, I stopped the meeting and chastised the team for thinking that all they needed to do was to “pink it and shrink it”. As a father of daughters and now with two grand daughters, this one meeting stuck with me as proof of how narrow minded the tech industry had become.

Girl Tech

Well — someone else had had enough too!

One of my favorite innovation stories is that of the company GoldieBlox. The founder of the company, Debbie Sterling, had been inspired by a high school math teacher to pursue engineering. She went to Stanford and loved her engineering major, until about halfway through when she struggled in an engineering drawing course and was humiliated in front of the class by the professor.

It turns out this happens to many female students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors. When the work gets more challenging, they start to question whether they really “belong” in the field. Men who experience the same academic challenges are less likely to drop out or change majors because they have stronger support systems and have gotten the cultural message since childhood that these are “male” fields in which they definitely do belong.

Despite the setback, as she shared in her TED Talk, Sterling didn’t give up. She studied hard and earned her degree in Mechanical Engineering and Product Design. After graduating, she did some research as to why she had struggled in the drawing class?

Spacial Skills

The answer: like many other girls, she had underdeveloped spatial skills.

Why is that?

Hint: it’s not genetic.

Girls lose interest in STEM fields as early as kindergarten because the toys they usually get to play with don’t encourage building and spatial manipulation like “boys’ toys” such as Lego’s, Lincoln Logs, and Erector sets. The toys that are marketed to girls – dolls, makeup sets, cooking kits – put them at a disadvantage in engineering skills from very early childhood. Simply put, girls are encouraged to be princesses, not builders.

After graduating from Stanford, Sterling made it her goal to “disrupt the pink aisle” with a toy that would get young girls interested in engineering. Worldwide, women make up only about 14% of all engineers. For Sterling, it was time to change that – to invent the self-rescuing princess. GoldieBlox combines story books with construction sets that encourage girls to solve problems by building simple machines.

Sterling’s idea was initially shot down by many toy stores who thought her product wouldn’t sell. The track record of success for “girl only” tech toys and games is not stellar and like most people in a position to fund new ideas, they relied on the past failures to justify why it wouldn’t work now.

So — instead of taking no for answer, she turned to Kickstarter, and reached her funding goal within days. Clearly, there was a hunger for these kinds of toys among many parents and young girls – and the company’s success has proven it.

From Frustration To Innovation Success

Sterling turned her personal frustration into a success. She recognized the gap in the market that resulted in her struggling...

Do you consider yourself a brave person? A person of courage and conviction in the face of a challenge? Most of us don’t, but as an innovator, you practice bravery every day. Bravery means opening oneself up to criticism and overcoming the fear of failure in order to do something extraordinary – to create a better world than the one we’re living in, or to go further than anyone has ever gone before.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most famous quote, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” belied a deep personal anxiety about showing his own weakness to the nation. FDR contracted polio in 1921 and became paralyzed from the waist down. He was quite sensitive about being filmed or photographed struggling with his mobility, which is why a recently released, rare footage of him walking during a 1937 Major League All Star baseball game is so striking.

Never Giving Up

While most of us know about his disability, what is less well-known is that he basically taught himself how to walk by swiveling his hips with the aid of braces that he kept hidden under his pants. He vowed that he would walk to the end of his driveway, about a quarter of a mile, without aid and although he never accomplished this feat, he never gave up either. And in 1937, he walked – albeit with help – in front of a packed stadium, displaying not only his determination to overcome his disability, but also his courage in revealing it so openly to the nation.

Another FDR quote demonstrates the relentlessly positive outlook and commitment to moving forward that is so evident in that short film clip: “We have always held to the hope, to the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.”

Bravery and Fear

Bravery is more than the lack of fear, it’s about being able to face uncomfortable situations and still persevere in pursuit of that better world. Courageous leaders like FDR invite conflict and challenge: he could have continued relying on his wheelchair and kept his physical struggles hidden from the public eye, but he chose instead to commit himself to the feat of walking again. Similarly, he thought big when attacking two of the worst crises in American history and the world: the Great Depression and World War II. He did not shy from fights — he knew he faced the risk of failure and that there would be strong opposition. Those are the fights where true innovation is born.

One should never fear failure, but rather embrace it as an opportunity to gain a new perspective, and consider better techniques and alternative pathways to success. Failure and opposition are signs that your ideas are new and radical, that you have the chance to truly shake things up. The New Deal was highly controversial, but FDR understood that in the face of such an enormous challenge, a safe plan that garnered consensus would almost certainly do nothing.

Failure Resume

Think of your own life, business or career and how you have overcome obstacles. Where have you failed and in the process learned valuable lessons from your mistakes? To help you visualize just how crucial your failures are to making progress, create a “failure resume.” On the left side, list all of your setbacks, challenges, and failures, and on the right, what you learned from each of them. Even if it was something as simple as learning to let go of unhelpful criticism, that’s an important lesson worth remembering.

Having all your failures listed in front of you will make them less overwhelming. There’s something about writing down the negatives that takes the bite out of them,