Who’s selling them? What happened to the baby? Why sell them in the first place? Just six words. Enough to evoke all kinds of possible scenarios. There is definitely an intriguing story behind that ad that makes me feel like finding out more. Just imagine what the seller of those little shoes has gone through.

This ad is the shortest story ever written by Ernest Hemingway, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century; a master storyteller who innovated the way stories could be told. The ad was the result of a sort of hackathon decades before the term hackathon was coined by Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park. This hackathon’s challenge: write a complete story in six words. Hemingway won, hands down, and the story of the baby shoes for sale prevailed (Sun Microsystems didn’t).

Here’s an even shorter story. One told in two words. A story that ignited in the birth to Silicon Valley: “Disposable appliances.”

Sounds insane?

You judge: this two-word story was conceived in 1957 by a team of eight entrepreneurs in what was not yet called Silicon Valley. They needed a powerful, sticky story to convince a very smart tech guy that sand could be used to produce transistors. Their goal was to make him feel he would be missing something big if he didn’t sponsor them. These two words made a brilliant, sticky story. Sand, a material so abundant and so easy to get, that electronics made with it would be dirt cheap – literally. In fact, so ridiculously cheap that appliances made with these transistors would be disposable. You know how this two-word story ends, it is still being told through a needy disposable appliance, made from the silicon in sand, vibrating in your pocket, calling for your constant attention.

Six words were enough to make you feel you wanted to know more about the seller of those tiny shoes. Two words were enough to make Sherman Fairchild feel these entrepreneurs were on to something huge he could not afford to miss. He sponsored them: within two years they had invented the integrated circuit and within ten, the first venture capital firm, Intel and dozens of other companies.

Feeling something?

Next time you think words can’t be powerful think again. “The word,” as Assyrian teacher Ahiqar wrote around 700 BC, “is mightier than the sword.” Words become powerful when they make you feel something. For example, think of one word that meant “food” in 1970 and means “cool” today. Think of one word that meant “jungle” in 1980 and means “everything” today. Think of one word that meant “yearbook” in 1990 and means “connected” today.

These three words – do I really need to say them? – displaced the original top-of-mind meaning they had, and became brands because they tell a story that makes us feel something. Apple is the story of beautiful functionality that makes us “feel” trendy and hip. Amazon, the story of an online store so intelligently designed that it makes us “feel” we can get everything there. Facebook, the story of a world-changing idea that makes us “feel” connected.

The stories that these companies have consistently told (and delivered on) give meaning to their “brands” so that Apple with a capital “A” is not a fruit, Amazon is not a tropical forest and Facebook is not a high school yearbook. Brands by themselves, without a sticky story that substantiates them and makes you feel something, are just words – just ask Hillary Clinton.

No luck?

No random incidents of luck made these common words mean something way more than their original meaning. The stories that gave these three brands their “soul” were carefully chosen, crafted and repeated. Take Amazon. In an interview when his company was just a new online bookstore, the interviewer asked CEO Jeff Bezos if he could think of anything Amazon would never sell. His response: cement; too messy, too hard to handle, no margins. Definitely cement. We will sell everything else but cement.

You see, from day one, this visionary entrepreneur knew that the essence of Amazon went beyond books, beyond an online store and even beyond being a retailer. Amazon would sell and deliver everything, everywhere. His company went on to build the “everything” story that is now the Amazon brand. The same is true for Steve Job’s obsession with elegant functionality and Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on bringing people together.

A brand becomes a compass to make decisions and points companies in the right direction. Their brand tells Apple they should only bring to market products that make you feel trendy and cool. The Amazon brand is the compass that points them in the direction of making everything easily available to you. It is the filter that makes it easy for Facebook to focus on only launching features that connect you with the people you care.

Your brand?

Brands are not limited to products. You and I can use the storytelling power of a brand to live with meaning, be consistent, and make sound decisions. Think of brand Einstein: playful genius; brand Obama: tempered statesman; or brand Michael Jackson: eccentric prodigy. They all used their brand to laser-focus their actions and decisions, and they all exploited it to achieve their goals. None of them was ever inconsistent – they were “on-brand” 24/7.

In this way, a personal brand tells and creates your story at the same time. It is as much an external expression of who you are as it is an internal compass to navigate life. No random luck here either: your brand reflects a story you carefully find, then express and keep repeating. Imagine if we found our brand essence at age 20? We could use it as a filter for big decisions, expertly steering our lives towards our chosen path and consistently expressing who we had chosen to be, no matter what. How’s that for personal innovation!

Got it?

Ernest Hemingway used his brand to write stories that make you feel intrigued. The eight Silicon Valley entrepreneurs used their carefully chosen two-word story to make an investor feel theirs was an irresistible idea. Apple uses their brand to bring elegant products that make you feel you’re buying pure “coolness.” Obama uses his brand to act as a tempered leader that makes you feel you trust him. Now imagine how you could use yours to navigate life and to make us feel when we’re around you.

You’d be in-the-zone 24/7, and we would notice.

Photocredit: Christopher Michel

Some of the frequently asked questions we get from our clients at the moment are:

• How do we design and implement an innovation unit?
• What is the future of content?
• What is the best response to the unbundling of banks? And more specifically:

And more specifically:

• Should we sell B2C in addition to B2B or transition completely to B2C?
• Do we need to move from selling products to enabling peer-2-peer marketplaces?
• How can we leverage AI and IoT to deliver data-driven subscription models?

Since technology is cheap and digitalization have democratized access to new markets and financial resources, most organisations have responded by heavily investing in digitalization – unfortunately, digitalization does not necessarily lead to innovation.

In this short article, we propose 5 different ways innovation efforts can be organised today, ranging from Bricolage to Outpost Labs. But in order to present these 5 different ways, we first need to establish what innovation is and how it can be measured.

Innovation is highly relative on an individual level, but innovation in an organisation, as opposed to business-as-usual, means: “Putting into use ideas that create value for users.”

Innovation may require new technology by addressing new user groups in radically different-from-before ways, but at its core lies value creation. To measure value from innovation efforts in organisations, we should focus on the work we choose to undertake, as well as the projects we reject or abandon. Efforts can be further subdivided into two categories: successful and unsuccessful projects (as measured by value creation and/or learning to organisation). Below is an approximative equation describing how to measure the value of innovation:

Very often, we tend to forget to account for the unsuccessful projects we successfully reject and the ones we did not reject or abandon in due time.

As with species in Nature, organisations need to adapt to changes in their environment, e.g. new technologies, business models, competitors, legislation etc. Some species of organisations are better at this than others. In the wake of the financial crisis, most organisations chose or were forced to lessen the type and amount of innovation projects in exchange for fewer low-risk but big-budget projects. The illustration below visualizes two very different reproduction or innovation strategies from Nature:

1) Oysters: 500M offspring/year, low survival rate, no parental care, short gestation and time-to-reproduce

2) Gorillas: 1 infant every 5th year, high survival rate, extensive parental care, long gestation and time-to-reproduce

All industries feel greater uncertainty regarding the future, so a need to build organisational capacity to answer questions fast arises. Using nature as an analogy we should thus increase the oyster-to-gorilla-ratio. How do you do that? By organizing for agile innovation.

Below we have generalized our research and experience into 5 different organisational models. There are no right or wrong models as long as they reflect internal and external conditions 12 months ahead. In general, though, organisations will evolve from left to right with mounting pressure and often end up combining elements from different models to stay relevant.

Bricolage is what happens in start-ups, maker spaces and garages around the world. Resources are limited so you make-do with what’s at hand and care less for processes.

R&D Department-style innovation efforts perform basic research in core business domains to achieve long-term innovation advantages. Less focus on applications and business models.

Intrapreneurs across divisions will seek to collaborate to push ideas into use by bundling resources and skills around common business problems.

The Strategic Innovation Unit is funded by C-level management to run strategic innovation projects, build innovation capabilities and deliver insights from across industries.

Outpost Labs aim to provide self-sustainable and radically new business abiding by very few rules – sometimes detaching itself completely… much in the same way Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies hired Chinese manservant Cato to attack him when he least expected it to keep him alert.

The most important building blocks of any innovation effort are great people and ad hoc resource allocation but secondly, you need formats for producing solutions. We have developed a catalog of innovation formats that you can download here:

AIM Catalogue on Slideshare

Determining how to design the innovation efforts in a large organisation would benefit greatly by assessing which agile innovation must-win-battles are important and to which degree you want to change them in the next 3 years.

If you are considering organizing or re-organzing your innovation efforts, feel free to contact us for an informal meeting. If you already have a killer innovation (or the other way around) program, we would also love to hear from you as we are constantly looking for new cases and best practice. Meanwhile, you can always take a look at our Hackathon how-to guide here.

By: JC Velten, Mads Thimmer and Tristan Thimmer

Every year, a city of 70,000 people rises out of nothing for a one-week existance. Then it disappears again. We’re very happy to be part of it, greetings from our most feeble of locations for Innovation Lab:

Innovation Lab Nevada

3 & Explanade

Black Rock City, Nevada 89412

USA

We do not recommend coming by to visit between September 5 and August 25 – as our office staff, along the entire city, is gone to what people here at Burning Man call “decompression,” a 51-week-long period when the 70,000 citizens suffer “post-burn blues,” coping as best as we can in what we call the “default world” to alleviate the feelings of loneliness and separation from our beloved desert city.

A massive MVP

On the surface, this is no ordinary place, you know that. Underneath, it is even more extraordinary, which you definitely don’t know if you haven’t been here. Just having been was the defining factor for Eric Schmidt as he landed the job as Google CEO because the founders are avid Burners, keen participants of the Black Rock City experiment. This is where you could ride self driving cars – five years ago. And see dwarves juggling pancakes at 7 in the morning as the most natural thing. Some call it a trip into a Dali painting, some say it is a prolonged and weird dream made real. Burners think the surrounding world is the dream and the Playa, the ancient beach or former sea bed that now provides the sandy basis for the Burn, is the only unveiled and true place. The typical BRC greeting is “welcome home”.

Burning Man is a massive MVP (Minimum Viable Product, for the non-techie). Burning Man is an experimental city, whose infrastructure – including streets and an electrical grid – is built in the desert out of nothing, every year for more than 25 years, and taken down leaving no trace. Burning Man is also an experimental economy, based on “gifting” where money or trade is not allowed, yet goods and services exchange hands without friction for the benefit of all. Burning Man is an experimental society with rules that work quite harmoniously based on 10 principles that every citizen takes quite seriously.

Innovation Lab @ Burning Man

We transform the inspiration we get from this massive MVP called Black Rock City into ideas and concepts for innovation. Here are some of the highlights of creative stimulus this transformative spot on our planet has to offer to the rest of us this year:

Morphing skull – “C-FIVE” by Laberge, Prismaticamp

A projection mapping art piece meets you in the dark desert night with a spectacle of changing colors, adornments, and effects. From Hamlet’s Yorick address to Damien Hirst’s diamond studded versions, the ultimate symbol of mortality has had pivotal meaning for humans. Here, death is turning into sheer and playful beauty that stuns you image after image as it morphs to the blasting beats.

Digital Yggdrasil

What more appropriate than to make a full size oak with thousands of LED leaves that change with the music and draw crowds to cuddle up or relax in the antishade of the soft colors against the dark velvet canopy if night. This epic village center apparently still manages to draw contemplative humans to its root base.

Live helium ballooned dancing light wire

Often times the most stunning Playa art is the most strikingly simple. At previous Burns it has been a row of helium balloons pitched against a sunrise, visible for miles around, that has had Burners flabbergasted. In 2017, what looks like a giant light snake lures playa people to its base at what must be the most simply yet effective piece of playa art yet. The allured mob then shakes the LED infested tail base and the effect ripples upwards, causing the ligth wire to dance like a hip swinging sick figure to the pounding beats of general playa blasts.

Flying desert eagle

From afar it looks like a giant eagle swooshes across the desert landscape, flapping its wing ends almost to touch the desert sands. Upon inspection, a rope at its center invites participants to pull it and set the wings in motion as it vividly mimics the natural movements of the majestic bird of prey. Again a piece of extremely impressive art that is lifeless and unimpressive until participation brings it to life. Perhaps a principle of all art but here so much more evident.

Event

The artful experiments at Burning Man go far beyond actual sculptures and installation pieces. From the candidly ridiculous like a class that teaches you effective techniques for yelling at your neighbors to solo weddings that offer you a chance to love till death for certain or workshops like you have never heard workshops before flying banner titles such as Crotch Puppets, Narwhals:Unicorns of the sea, Free lasik laser eye surgery or simply Best butt Olympiad.

But workshops are not just a competition in the ridiculous. The cultural links to Silicon Valley forefront culture is clear. You can learn tricks to startup success, the latest in Blockchain progress or how to unleash creativity in your (working) life from true creatives. All is based on more than one way lecturing. Participation is key. Body and mind coherence is key. A workshop on creative writing attended by several Innovation Lab agents started off with a body dance. Awkwardness overcome, it was an ingenious way to invoke natural participation and paved way for open and well received criticism when participants shared their work

What to take away

In essence, Burning Man is a melting pot of the surreal but also the extremely real, promoting a soon to be rare art of presence. Here, experimentation occurs on all levels and unlimited curiosity is given a free spin. The proceeds in a rare worship of way over destination as most is burned in the end anyway. A middle finger in the otherwise widespread face of goalmindedness, product focus and result hypnosis. The fantastic conclusion is a side effect to a fantastic cooperative effort. Success is a result of presence, devotion, discipline, co-creation and curiosity. It is not the result of a premeditated adherence to plan.

So what to take away from a beach party gone mad for almost 3 decades? In a time of automation and the opportunity to outsource mechanical functions to machines and algorithms, we need to reinvent our own roles as humans. Creativity becomes key, and it will be the new prime parameter for continued relevance. The difficulty is of course, how to be creative, how to innovate? And in the vamped up race for upping creativity, how to be creative amongst the supercreative. Here, you need to train your creative muscles and no better place for that exists in the mind expanding, playful real life experiment called Burning Man. Because it is not just about adding skills, it is about transformation, about acquiring new priorities, about changing as a human and about expanding the capabilities of your personality.

Cover photo courtesy of Christopher Michel

Note from our editor:

Last week, our lively post-millennial interns Diego and Marc wrote about how their generation sees innovation and the workplace; and gave us tips on how to design for them. This week, they focus on their collaborative mindset, with Diego debunking some assumptions companies have about social media and Marc explaining how the new innovation formats fit their work ethic. On this article, Marc explores three formats of innovation that are made for the way his generation approaches life: collaboratively and using technology. And although some of these new formats, like hackathons, have been going on for 20 years, it is not until now, as the new generations take over, that it left the realm of code-only competitions to approach innovation for all kinds of problems. Enjoy the words of new wisdom from our youngest ilabbers

Written by: Marc Velten-Lomelin

Innovation is not what it used to be… thankfully.

Hiring the best minds from the best schools and throwing money at their pet projects no longer produces the transformative innovations that companies across all industries, and even government organizations, need to stay relevant and agile. Even the traditional methods of figuring out what customers want no longer work at ensuring you stay on top of your game. Relevancy has never been more fragile and you know it.

Welcome to the world of technology-enabled collaborative innovation that produces the next big thing and solves the world’s most pressing problems.

• 1. Crowdsourcing innovation

When a startup like Bragi raises $3.4 million from strangers to bring to market “A.I. for your ears,” its success doesn’t have to be predicted by a know-all venture investor. Kickstarter didn’t simply invent a platform for funding ideas using the crowd. They invented the most accurate success-prediction funding model ever. The people who paid Danish inventor Nikolaj Hviid $299 for a pair of earphones that didn’t exist demonstrated real demand with their wallets while funding the company, making Bragi one of the “ten most successful companies built on Kicstarter,” according to Forbes.

In 2015 energy company Tesla used the same crowdfunding model and “pre-sold” the non-existent Model 3 to 400,000 customers who paid $1,000 each, not only demonstrating overwhelming demand for a cheaper electric car, but raising big money towards building the plant to actually manufacture it. In 2006, even before Kickstarter even existed, Doritos transferred the creativity for its Superbowl ads to the crowd – having consumers use their cameras to film their ad entries and other consumers vote for the best – saving millions of dollars and time in creative talent from ad agencies, and most importantly, not having to guess what their consumers wanted to watch.

From raising money for a startup to predicting demand for the next Tesla to coming up with the Superbowl Doritos TV commercials, crowdsourcing as an innovative way to bring about transformative solutions is now pervasive. The new generations actually expect it from you. You’re most likely already part of somebody’s crowdsourcing innovation – comments on social media like “I wish this app could do…” go up to the cloud and into big data systems to help companies like Instagram and Linkedin develop new features people actually want without ever having to ask them. Several companies in Europe are applying crowdsourcing principles internally, using platforms like ProjectPad to foster internal innovation and have their employees come up and promote ideas that other employees pay to work on.

• 2. Incubating innovation

In February, Entrepreneur magazine published an article for entrepreneurs advising them that “You may need funding, but the benefits of corporate incubators and accelerators may do more for your startup than the money.” The benefits go both ways. When dozens of people are already working on the next idea that will make your product irrelevant, the best way to survive is by bringing them in to collaborate with your team while they develop their idea. You can also do the same for technologies that make you more efficient and say goodbye to your traditional vendors before they’re gone.

Incubating startups is a low-risk way to pay-to-play and ensure you’re on top of the next big thing before it is on top of you. Time and again, big companies with plenty of resources to innovate simply don’t, and before they know it, the market is disrupted by a bunch of twenty-year olds working from their basement. This is why AirB&B, and not Holiday Inn or Hilton, is the largest hospitality company in the world, or why you order an Uber before even thinking if taxis still exist.

No matter what you do, odds indicate that if you’re a big company, you will not see transformative innovation coming your way until you’re playing the catch-up game to the next Mark Zuckerberg. Unless, however, you expand your innovation capabilities by incubating startups, inviting those needy twenty-somethings to ruffle some feathers around and show your people unexpected ways of doing things better. Check out some of the incubators we run at Innovation Lab here.

• 3. Hacking innovation

Paradoxically, the marketing team at now defunct server giant Sun Microsystems came up with the term “hackathon” in 1999 as a mash up of the words “hack” and “marathon.” Which is exactly what a hackathon is: a group of people competing to solve one issue in an “impossible” amount of time – usually a few days. Since then, organizations of all sizes run hackathons to tackle problems their internal teams have not been able to crack within their normal environments and timelines. Despite the constraints of time and focus, it is actually a rare occasion when the “hack” problem has not been successfully tackled – no matter what the hackathon was about.

Hackathons are used by forward-thinking companies and organizations to innovate in a myriad of areas. For example, earlier this year, Innovation Lab and Siemens ran a two-day hackathon amongst Siemens’ internal team of engineers to make wind turbines more efficient. Just last week Innovation Lab ran another hackathon for Maersk. This one was with outside teams to source ideas for the future of tankers.

Also last week, fuel cell developer Arcola Energy in the UK ran a hackathon amongst teams of 8 to 18 year-old kids to “hack gadgets, appliances and toys to make them move faster, longer or to take first steps as an animate object,” using hydrogen. This hackathon was also sponsored by Toyota and Shell, two companies definitely interested in things that move and the stuff that powers them.

Energizing innovation

From energy sustainability to education and health, the world needs transformative innovation. Us, the new generations that are taking charge, know that collaboration and sharing, magnified by technology as never before, is the way to get you there. Expect to see these new collaborative innovation models proliferate, and new ones sprout as we take over.

Photo courtesy of friend of Innovation Lab and photographer Christopher Michel.