Collected INNOVATION thoughts

 I've mentioned Aidan McCullen now in several past posts.   He runs an active blog service, devoted to innovation questions.

Here are some of the pithy comments he's featured in recent weeks

I particularly like this giraffe painting a picture of what he sees, vs. what we all see typically

Doesn't that about sum it up?

Another one from the animal world:  "If you want to know if the elephant has a stomach ache, don't ask the veterenarian, ask the cage cleaner."   Robert Sapolsky

One from an old friend of mine:  

"A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" -- Alan Kay 

Another old friend:

"You must admit that not only you do 'not know' many things, 

but that you 'wrongly know' many things."  Gary Hamel

Some thoughts:

1. "Breakthroughs often come from people you weren't listening to.  People who aren't burdened by the assumptions of the field.   Pay attention to the person who notices the small, strange thing that people step over on the way to being 'busy'."  Srini Pagidyala

2. "We are trained to filter out the noise in the data to find the trends, but the noise, the anomaly, is where novelty lies."   Angus Fletcher, in Primal Intelligence

3. "Real, worthy, problems surface when one spends time doing discovery in the field--talking to users, observing behavior, listening for pain points."     Navin Kunde

4. "Innovation thrives not just on data, but on curiosity about what doesn't fit the usual pattern."  Martin S

5."If everone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking."  George Patton

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Aidan has conducted many interviews of 'innovators' and published them in the public domain, which is great.  What might we learn from his own gleaned perspective?  Here's perhaps the greatest one, that totally fits my own experience at HP, Intel, and Cisco to name a few past leaders of high-tech sectors:

"IN SOME SECTORS OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY, BREAKTHROUGHS ARE NOT DESIRED by the players ruling them at the moment--for whatever reasons, mostly unrelated or even diametrically opposite to each given sector's priorities.  Therefore, such domains become deliberately isolated, beling artificially turned into stagnating silos, and eventually rot down to a complete oblivion, ussless and pitiful."

Now, there's an indictment!  Does that fit the Intel situation today, where the #1 semiconductor company in the world for more than four decades has fallen to #10 (charitably) in ten years?

How about Cisco, betting big on Computer Teleconferencing with both its proprietary Telepresence and acquisition of Webex, only to have the Webes CTO leave in frustration to set up Zoom?

I cannot even stomach describing how HP botched innovation from 1990 onward, betting on failed strategies (e.g. HP RISC on a 'new' OS and instruction set; ignoring 'personal tools' like the iPhone {having done brilliant hand-held calculators years before}; and completely fudging virtually all application software fields {databases ala Oracle, networking ala Cisco, business tools ala Salesforce, securty tools ala Crowdflare..., the list is practically endless}).

It also fits IBM not wanting RISC, which led Birnbaum to HP and the Valley to 'killing' IBM hardware just about completely.

Sigh