Luke Hohmann’s Blog

My new book Innovation Games hits store shelves on Sept 1st. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about the publication of the book and encouraged by ongoing debates about the source of invention, innovation, and how these are harnessed to create great products. 

Let’s start with two recent posts about Innovation. David Pollard, in his Fast Company post, argues that innovation starts with a deep understanding of user needs. David claims that one of the motivations for his post is to respond to a post from Kathy Sierra, in which she asserts that we can’t leave innovation up to users, citing the creation of great art (Beethoven’s 5th) and the development of the iPod as examples of things that customers didn’t ask for, but now, can’t live without. 

Except that David uses the iPod in his post as the example of customer-driven, evolutionary innovation that produces breakthroughs. Hmmmmm. 

Both of these people, whom I respect quite a bit, are using the same example to promote their thesis. Summarizing, David appears to be in the camp that innovation comes from a deep understanding of customer needs, while Kathy appears to the in the camp that innovation comes from within, not necessarily in response to user needs, and that you certainly cannot outsource innovation to users. 

I’m in David’s camp on this one. The whole reason I spent almost three years writing Innovation Games is to help provide everyone with better ways to understand user needs. Moreover, I’ve participated in too many sessions with customers in which they outlined innovative solutions to their problems using such games like Prune the Product Tree and Remember the Future. 

But I’m not quite willing to throw out Kathy’s ideas. To understand the discussion we need to tease apart some of the concepts. Kathy seems to be equating art with innovation and creativity. David, in turn, tackles invention and innovation. These aren’t the same things. 

Let’s start with the distinction between invention and innovation. Joan Waltman, President of QUALCOMM Wireless Business Solutions, who wrote the foreword to my latest book describes the difference as follows: 

QUALCOMM is a company renowned for both creating new science and technology (invention) and applying it to solve customer problems (innovation). 

Exploring this distinction a bit more closely, and adding your experience to the exploration, it is easy to see that both invention and innovation are new. Both involve creativity. Both may or may not produce commercially viable or successful results. The difference is the focus of the activity. Invention is focused on creating technology that maybe in the future will have a useful way application (think: creating the transistor). Innovation is focused on solving a user problem (think: creating Google). My experience is that most invention, such as the inventions that power the internal workings of Google’s massive network of computers, is actually driven by innovation, leading you down the path from David’s post to Innovation Games and other similar techniques. 

So where does Kathy’s notion of art come into play in innovation and invention? Sometimes, it doesn’t. “Art” doesn’t have to be associated with anything, especially when the focus is solving the deep and personal human needs for enjoyment, creative expression, or just plain fun. I’ve experienced this a bit myself, when I was a competitive figure skater. Sometimes you just did tricks for fun, accidentally inventing new tricks in the process. It didn’t mean anything, unless you really wanted it to.

But there is another kind of art that is associated with invention and creativity. Rob Austin and Lee Devin discuss kind of art in their seminal work, Artful Marking. Among other things, they discuss the power of collaborative play and emergent, shared knowledge that is associated with creating new things (typically innovations). This is a special, powerful kind of compelling art. One that both Kathy and David agree with, in that in both of their posts they acknowledge the role that you play in creating innovations. Kathy emphasizes that you need to take an active role in this process. David emphasizes that this role needs to start by understanding user needs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 5:11 and is filed under Innovation Games, Innovation, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.