Endless Innovation

The Future of Visual Storytelling: From The Last Supper to the iPad Tablet

Of late, I've been thinking a lot about visual storytelling and the various ways that the Internet and digital devices like the iPad require us to process information and content. Over the past decade, there has been an astounding rise in the value of visual literacy -- the ability to process information and content that is delivered via images rather than text. When you think about it, all of the most popular forms of new Internet content - whether infographics, casual games or video clips - place a premium on visual storytelling. At the end of the day, the Apple iPad is primarily a device for consuming visual content.

Which is why I've been on the look out for new forms of visual storytelling and new ways of exploring visual literacy. Take, for example, the new Park Avenue Armory exhibit Leonardo's Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, which attempts to encourage a new dialogue between painting and cinema. The show takes place within a full-scale replica of Milan's Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, complete with a "clone" of The Last Supper projected on multiple walls, which is then brought to life over 45 minutes using a manipulation of light, sound and theatrical illusion. As Greenaway (best known as the director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, less so for his 50+ short films and documentaries) points out in the liner notes for the show, the work is a provocation to reconsider our approach to visual literacy in the 21st Century. What happens when the 10 seconds you might spend looking at a masterpiece painting in a museum gets transformed into a 45-minute cinema-like walk-through experience?

"We have had two thousand years of Western painting and only 115 years of cinema. Both are supposedly in the business of delivering ideas by making pictures, by making images. Do they do it well? Do they share the same language? Are they in the same business? [...]

Supposing we try to hold a dialogue between the two? To mingle and share and cross-refer their vocabularies... To use painting to fix and stabilize and limit and frame the image... and to use cinema to make a painting move and change, have a temporal life and have a soundtrack...

That's exactly what Greenaway did - he took DaVinci's famous painting and gave it movement -- through changing colors, changing shadows, different atmospheres, music and even dialogue. The goal, of course, is to discover the multiple layers of meaning in the painting and to explore the techniques used by DaVinci - whether it is the painting's various light sources, the atmosphere and tonality of the work, the relationships between the figures within the painting - even the arrangement of the food and cutlery on the table. Throughout the show, you are free to move about and consider the work from your own unique perspective.

With the arrival and popularity of the iPad and other devices for consuming digital content, are we seeing the development of a new and fascinating era for storytelling that uses video content in entirely new ways?

via: Park Avenue Armory

Big, Wealthy and Bloated is No Way to Go Through the Innovation Process

Bluto Blutarsky might just have something to teach Corporate America. Just as fat, drunk and stupid is no way to make it through life, big, wealthy and bloated is no way for corporations to go through the innovation process. Big, bloated companies with excess budgetary funds tend to throw money at problems rather than devise ingenious solutions to their problems. They do lazy, inefficient things to acquire customers. They over-rely on sales & marketing to "sell" inferior products. And perhaps worst of all, since they are so big and bloated, they feel almost compelled to do something BIG. As a result, they have a blind spot to new, emerging technologies.

Small, scrappy start-ups, on the other hand, are forced to bootstrap themselves with almost no money at all. They find a way to market their products & services in ingeniously efficient ways. Contrary to the popular consensus, resource constraints are actually a great way to accelerate the creative process. (There's actually a whole sub-genre of management thinking out there dedicated to resource constraints on the innovation process).

Perhaps one anecdote (perhaps apocryphal) makes all this clear: during the 1960's, the U.S. space program was desperate to play catch up with the Russians, who had just launched the Sputnik satellite. As a result, the U.S. government was willing to throw dollars at the problem. Millions of (inflation-adjusted) dollars later, the U.S. space program had developed an ergonomically-sound "Astronaut Pen" capable of writing in zero-G conditions. Thrilled, the head of the U.S. space program was eager to show off the new Astronaut Pen to his colleagues. He quickly called a security official within the government: "Tell me, do the Russians have anything close to this?" After a moment's silence, the reply came back: "We already checked... we found out they're using pencils..."

Which is to say, it's possible to produce innovative work with a big budget -- but the path to a simpler, more elegant solution usually doesn't require a lot of money. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

[image: Bluto from Animal House]

Gawking at the Future of Content

When the smartest guy (or gal) in an industry decides to throw in the towel on a business model, it's time to stand up and take notice. This week, the ever-controversial Nick Denton of Gawker Media - the most successful and well-known of all the blog networks that exploded in popularity over the past decade, declared to the Wall Street Journal, "I don't want to be the No. 1 blog network anymore. That's like being king of the playground."

At which point, the Wall Street Journal diligently rushed out and collected quotes from all kinds of social media insiders that compared the art of blogging to the ancient art of calligraphy. Denton pointed out that the nine key blogs comprising the Gawker Media empire would take on a radically new look and appearance in 2011 in an effort to maximize eyeballs and advertising revenue:

(1) Greater focus on original content and reporting (rather than breathless re-blogging and re-linking)

(2) One big "persistent" story per page, rather than a chronological updating of new content as it becomes available (in other words, say goodbye to one of the fundamentals of blogging. See-ya!)

(3) More video -- and more video-based advertising units that will be triggered after a certain number of visitors hit the page

These three major changes, of course, will impact the future of content as we know it on the Web:

"The coming face-lift, which is being tested publicly, is likely to attract the attention of a variety of bloggers and media organizations that have long admired Mr. Denton's technology instincts. Since the launch of the first Gawker site, Gizmodo, in 2002, a number have copied such features as his tools for comments and his elaborate back-end analytics system, which, in the new design, helps power a live visitor counter at the top of each site. [...] "He has been pushing this envelope in terms of using technology," said Om Malik, who has been blogging about technology on Gigaom.com since 2001. He has a talent for "nudging [users] along towards a new usage behavior."

What's fascinating is that within the WSJ feature piece, Denton likens the new Gawker format to a "newsmagazine." WTF? We went through a decade of rapid technological and content change, destroyed and left for dead scores of the most prestigious magazines and newspapers in the world, transformed the profession of "journalist" into something akin to a "social worker," and lopped off billions of dollars of market value of the world's largest media organizations... and we're back to the concept of a newsmagazine?

UPDATE: Ha! I just noticed that my calligraphy provider has a new option for me that I can toggle on and off when adding a blog post -- "keep this post at the top of your blog's home page."

[image (in lieu of video) via Wall Street Journal]

How to Merchandise an Idea to Others

So much of what makes for a great innovator is not the ability to come up with a great idea -- but, rather, the ability to "merchandise" that great idea to others. How do you convey the essence of your innovation to others so that they immediately recognize the brilliance of that idea? As part of an extensive, 12-page profile for The New Yorker, J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler (pictured above left in untucked Oxford shirt, jeans and Alden wingtips) explains to writer Nick Paumgarten exactly what "merchandising" an idea requires:

"More than once, I asked Drexler to define "merchandising." Sometimes he'd put the question to one of his junior merchants, who had perhaps got some of their definitions from the loudspeaker. "It's telling America what to buy," one told him. "It's about investing in something and then selling it," another said. These seemed to strike him as too prosaic or too crass. They made no mention of the eye or the gut or of the throbbing sensation that comes over you when you see something that you are sure will sell, and sell out. [...]

"A merchant is someone who figures out how to select, how to smell, how to identify, how to feel, how to time, how to buy, how to sell, and how to hopefully have two plus two equal six," Drexler told me. "We buy and sell goods. We buy low and sell higher - that's all we do to make a profit. But I consider a merchant someone who has a certain intuition and instinct, and - very important - knows how to run a business, knows the numbers. Does the merchandise speak to you numerically? There's a rhythm. You see goods as numbers. And the numbers have to work out."

Pure marketing brilliance, from one of the leading merchandisers in the business. And also a reason why Drexler hobnobs with billionaires and celebrities; serves on the board of Apple; and owns property in New York City; in the Hamptons (including the former estate of Andy Warhol in Montauk); in the Bahamas; and in Sun Valley, Idaho.

[image: J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler]

Innovative Characters You Need to Know: They're USA Character Approved

In his bestselling business book The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson explained how and why great innovations often occur at the intersection of wildly different disciplines. One of the examples he cited was superstar chef Marcus Samuelsson (pictured above), who combines elements of Ethiopian and Scandinavian cuisine to create stunning culinary creations at places like Aquavit in Manhattan.

That's why I was intrigued to see Marcus Samuelsson recently featured by prolific Chicago foodie blogger Terry Boyd as part of the official launch of USA Network's Character Approved blog. As Boyd points out, Samuelsson is a true "global citizen" who has combined his familiarity with with the culinary traditions of different continents in unique ways:

"As you might expect, Samuelsson takes his influences from many places--including Africa, Sweden, France, Japan, Latin America, the United States -- and he has restaurants in Chicago, Los Angeles and even back in Sweden. But while he considers himself a "global citizen," New York City is definitely his home. He and his wife, Ethiopian-born model Gate Haile, live in Harlem. Samuelsson is opening his latest restaurant, Red Rooster Harlem, in their neighborhood sometime this fall. Named for a legendary Harlem Renaissance speakeasy, it will feature American cuisine, a lively neighborhood atmosphere and live music."

On a daily basis, the USA Character Approved Blog celebrates the people, places and things that are making a mark by positively influencing our cultural landscape. Over ten thought leaders in Art, Food, Music, Technology and Fashion discuss the ideas and trends impacting the cultural landscape around us. In just the past week, Jerri Chou explained how Kopernik delivers high-tech goods to the emerging world, Marc and Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective provided a tribute to screen legend Dennis Hopper, and architecture blogger Chad Smith commented on the design aesthetic of Star Wars Modern. Going forward, the USA Character Approved bloggers will be covering other innovative contributors and tastemakers.

[image: Chef Marcus Samuelsson via the USA Character Approved Blog]

Full Disclosure: The official launch of the Character Approved blog was a client project of Electric Artists for USA Network.

When Innovators are Exiles on Main Street

Of late, I've been fascinated by the "back story" behind the creative process, especially with the factors that drive innovators to succeed with any creative project. With the re-release of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street album today and the upcoming release of the Stones in Exile documentary film (now screening at Cannes), new facts and details are coming to light about that magical one month back in 1972 in the south of France, when the Rolling Stones famously recorded their legendary album at Keith Richards' French villa.

So what can we learn from this creative "back story" of the Rolling Stones in exile? For me, there are several lessons for innovators who, for one reason or another, find themselves exiles on Main Street:

(1) Sometimes your most innovative work takes place when your back is up against the wall. In 1972, the Rolling Stones were fleeing tax problems, looming legal issues and all the complications of debauchery-fueled rock 'n' roll. Yet, they produced some of their greatest work, including some all-time classics, when given some very real constraints. It's a common story that start-up entrepreneurs tell about bootstrapping their business during unforgiving economic periods -- when forced to do more with less, they actually end up producing some of their best work. As we emerge from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, I'm sure we'll see and hear more about these types of bootstrapping success stories.

(2) For inspiration on a particularly tough innovation problem, try revisiting some of your earlier work. In the process of re-mastering and re-releasing the Exile on Main Street album, it became clear that some of the "outtakes" on the album actually comprised some of their best work. Mick Jagger, in revisiting his prior work, expected that the outtakes would be "unfinished and slovenly." What he found, however, was that some of the songs were actually "finished and controlled." Sometimes, it's just the passage of time that gives you a new perspective on your work.

(3) Implementing an elaborate system for innovation may actually reduce the level of innovation in your organization. Many companies attempt to establish rigorous criteria, milestones and stage-gates for any innovation to get to market. What the Rolling Stones did in one month, though, was extraordinary. They threw this kind of caution to the wind. Instead, they took the approach that they'd jam for a full month, see what happens, and then keep only the 10 "best" songs. By some accounts, there was a "24-hour party" going on upstairs at the mansion, while members of the band were trying to work downstairs. Going back through the archives, it turns out that there were at least ten additional songs that now have the potential to become instant classics.

When you attempt to innovate within your organization, sometimes you'll find yourself an exile on Main Street and, quite possibly, an exile on Wall Street. And that's when you may find yourself producing your best, most innovative work.

The Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

Here's something that Deadheads could have told you 40 years ago -- there's a lot the Grateful Dead can teach you about running a business. In the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic, senior editor Joshua Green uncovers some of the management secrets of the Grateful Dead. In fact, as Green writes, "the Dead's influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to - while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite - the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by Corporate America":

(1) Focus intensely on your most loyal fans

(2) Embrace "strategic improvisation" and "flexibility" as core business values

(3) Increase demand for your product by giving it away for free - "If I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced."

Now that the Grateful Dead has finally unlocked decades' worth of commercial recordings, videotapes, press clippings, business records and correspondence into one archive, look for Dead Studies to take off - if only for the novelty fact alone. On March 5, the New York Historical Society will open the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Dead Archive. After that, there are already plans afoot to distribute the Dead Archive to everyone from musicologists to historians to psychologists to management professors. As Joshua Green opines, "it may only be a matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere."

[image: Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead, via The Atlantic Online]

Disruptive Innovations Always Look Like Toys

One of the most misunderstood terms in the business world is disruptive technology. Too many companies -- and the marketers in charge of bringing these companies' innovations to market -- assume that "disruptive" connotes a highly-sophisticated, high-end product with cutting-edge technology that will appeal to early adopters. Actually, however, Harvard's Clayton Christensen argued the opposite in his groundbreaking book on business innovation, The Innovator's Dilemma. As Christensen pointed out again and again, disruptive technologies were exactly those that did not appeal to entrenched market leaders because they tended to under-perform existing technologies and served a less-profitable consumer demographic.

In other words, as Chris Dixon points out in a particularly concise and accurate review of Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation, disruptive technologies initially are viewed as "toys" in the minds of the entrenched market leaders:

"The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”  This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype."

Which is why, of course, so many American business icons go from great to good to also-rans. These companies continually subject new technologies and products to rigorous filters for profitability and performance. When disruptive technologies fail to deliver (at first), these market leaders are forced to shunt them aside in favor of "what works." Kodak's failure to embrace digital camera technology or newspapers' early dismissal of blogging platforms are two examples of a "toy story" that come to mind.

[image: Toy Story via ScionDriver on Flickr]

Innovation for Rocket Scientists in the New Mexico Desert

Two visionaries - billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites - are leading the push for commercial space travel by the year 2011. Last week, the duo unveiled SpaceShipTwo -- the first-ever commercial spaceship for making sub-orbital space flights for everyday citizens. (Well, not exactly "everyday," since the cost of a single flight will likely exceed $200,000 but you get the idea).

Flight testing for SpaceShipTwo could start within the next few months and by the end of 2010, Branson and Rutan hope to unveil a new space port in the New Mexico desert. According to WIRED magazine, already 300 potential passengers have plunked down the advance cash for the chance to make the sub-orbital passenger flight.

The projected dates are likely to change -- think of all the hoopla around the new Boeing Dreamliner and all the concomitant delays over the past two years -- but it's still exciting to think that the next decade may be the decade of private space travel.

[image: Richard Branson and Burt Rutan with SpaceShipTwo via WIRED]

What Shaun White and Snowboarding Can Teach You About Innovation

One of the best articles that I've read about innovation this week actually had absolutely nothing at all to do with business innovation -- at least on the surface. Hannah Karp of the Wall Street Journal recently took a closer look at When Snowboarders Baffle the Judges. Faced with the prospect of judges that are not always on top of radical new snowboarding techniques, innovative snowboarders like Shaun White have a choice -- either keep their innovative snowboarding tricks under wraps until major competitions, or step-by-step unveil these innovations to the judges before the actual event.

For example, snowboard champ Shaun White has been working on snowboarding routines in Silverton, Colorado ahead of the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Instead of keeping these snowboard routines hidden from judges until the Olympics, he's actually been showcasing them to judges (and, by extension, to competitors). The reason? If judges see the snowboard tricks in action without knowing more about their technical difficulty, they are more likely to mark them lower:

"The emphasis on innovation this season has snowboarders grappling with whether they can trust the judges to score their new moves fairly at first sight. Many top riders, including Mr. White, are haunted by the prospect of becoming the next Jonny Moseley, the free-spirited American mogul-skiing champion who failed to medal at Salt Lake City in 2002 despite his debut of a revolutionary trick he dubbed the "Dinner Roll." Though he executed it perfectly and the move has since elicited higher marks for difficulty, he received lower scores for his jumps at the time than his competitors got for their tried-and-true twists.

"Tricks can be deceiving," Mr. Moseley says. "I worked twice as hard to be able to perform that in the Olympics than anyone else." Mr. White says he could have saved his surprise moves for Vancouver to increase the "wow" factor and prevent copycats from stealing his thunder, but he decided it was more important "to educate the judges."

So what does this mean for business innovators? Well, if you're going to be innovative and out-of-the-box creative in the workplace, you may need to give your bosses an early preview of your innovation. Otherwise, your managers may not be able to, umm, understand what you're thinking and what you're attempting to do. They mistake your creative free-thinking for a failure to take the business task at hand seriously. Little do they know that you are breaking the existing paradigm and coming up with a new Jonny Moseley "Dinner Roll."

What do you think? Has there ever been a time when your "innovation" was met with a slackjawed non-response because your bosses had no idea what you were doing?

[image: Shaun White at Silverton Mountain via Wall Street Journal]