Scott D. Anthony - The Little Black Book of Innovation, With a New Preface: How It Works, How to Do It

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First eBook Edition: April 2017

ISBN: 9781633693401

eISBN: 9781633693418

Innovation Lessons from a Milkshake-Drinking, Kite-Flying Shark

On May 25, 2016, I stood before an imposing audience. I was intimidatedcowed, even. The feeling I first felt when in front of a crowd of more than ten people? Nothing compared to this. The moment I completely froze while staring for the first time at the red light on top of a video camera? A breeze.

I took a deep breath and started simply: Good morning.

Good morning Mr. Anthony, replied 290 fourth-grade students, including my ten-year-old son, Charlie, in unison.

I was at Stamford American International School (SAIS) in Singapore, explaining key innovation concepts to Charlies class. SAIS entered the Singapore market in 2009. As part of its effort to compete against the dominant incumbent (the Singapore American School), it made the decision to focus on technology and innovation. The fourth-grade curriculum involves a unit of inquiry in which students focus on innovation. Charlie gamely suggested to his teacher, Ms. R (Vesna Radivojevic), that perhaps his dad could come and share some thoughts with the class.

Presenting the ideas that appear in this and related books to ten-year-olds is challenging. You never want to talk down to children, but you cant assume understanding of basic business concepts like profits, cash flows, strategy, bankruptcy, and so on.

Fortunately, my experiences living in Asia since 2010 served as good preparation for this moment. Over the past few years, Ive shared the concepts described in The Little Black Book of Innovation in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, China, and South Korea with audience members with variable ability to understand English (of course, their English is universally superior to my nonexistent Thai, Indonesian, Hindi, Tagalog, Chinese, and Korean). Those contexts forced further deconstruction and simplification of concepts and augmenting spoken words with vivid images.

Innovation Mount Rushmore, which appears in of this book, was the beginning of this shift, but, while I was preparing for SAIS, it hit me that perhaps there was an even simpler way to communicate the essence of successful innovation: A picture. Of a shark. Drinking a milkshake. Flying a kite.

There are numerous schools of innovation thought: Design thinking. User-centered design. Lean start-up. TRIZ. Disruptive innovation. Each of these innovation schools, naturally, teaches its own language system. A design thinker might talk about customer journeys or abductive thinking. A lean start-up advocate will extol the virtues of a minimum viable product. A disruptive scholar will talk about the job to be done. None of these phrases is completely obvious to people who arent adherents of the respective Discordant language systems result in significant barriers between practitioners.

But, if you get to the essence of these different belief systems, there are many commonalities. At the simplest level, everyone agrees that innovation has three essential components:

1. Find a problem a customer cant adequately solve.
2. Develop a different and better way to address that problem.
3. Execute a series of tests to address key uncertainties.