Innovation is boring.
Your life may simply offer a warning to others. This may be particularly true of those who must devise and sell disruptive innovation. To others who might follow in these lonely footprints, I offer a mistake that I made for years so that you might avoid it.
At the genesis of a new idea you must not only solve the problem, you must sell the solution. Talk is cheap, but if you are ever to secure the evidence required to prove that your idea is sound and to develop a product prototype you will need money and resources.
Hence, you will find yourself in need of a pitch. You may find yourself in your suit standing before senior decision makers in much more expensive suits. You may find yourself trying to convince them to give you money.
After all, innovations don’t make money, they burn it.
Until you have a viable product and a willing customer, you will be consuming the resources of a business. You will not be a profit making asset. You will be considered a liability.
How do you put together a convincing argument? How do you convince this audience to pursue your dreams? For years I fell back on the most obvious assumption one might make when selling an idea.
Make the whole thing very exciting.
I’m just an engineer, so I am hardly trained in sales. But that’s how advertising works, doesn’t it? Make the idea as thrilling and exciting as possible, and this audience will not be able to resist and fund the proposal.
What else is exciting? Why are exciting things exciting? If I could understand how and why people became excited by ideas, then perhaps I could transfer this excitement into my pitch.
My presentations were filled with cutting edge technologies, attractive graphics, cool scenarios and capability the likes of which the world has never seen. A cornucopia of thrilling technology that no senior executive in his right mind would be able to resist.
And yet, this is not how my audience were making decisions. To understand why this excitement might not land with this type of audience, ask yourself this question.
What do exciting things have in common?
Risk.
Exciting things get the heart beating and the blood pumping because they contain an element of risk. Skydiving, rock climbing, surfing huge waves, swimming with sharks or fighting giant bears with knives are exciting because, if you don’t offer peak performance, you might die.
If there is one thing that senior management don't want to hear about your wild new innovation, is the rollercoaster that you intend to send them on should they decide to fund your idea.
To provoke excitement is the last thing I want to do when pitching innovation.
In a large and well established organisation, those that administer funding will be in that position not because they are risk takers. These decision makers will be the safe pair of hands that the organisation has entrusted with its treasure.
‘I believe starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down — your willingness to jump is your most valuable asset as an entrepreneur.’
You can probably do that of you’re Reid Hoffman. If you’re going to spend your own money, or take the risk upon yourself, or can convince others that your investment idea is a sure thing, then good luck to you.
However, if you are responsible for innovation in a large, well established and carefully organised corporation, this proposal is going to make people very nervous indeed.
Once I realised that my exciting pitches were making the decision makers nervous, I tried the alternative approach. No matter how cool, exciting or cutting edge an idea or a technology, I would make it sound as boring as I possibly could.
Wild ideas would be presented as mundane proposals. Amazing new technologies would simply be the next version of the current mechanism. Exploitation paths to crazy ideas would obviously be the inevitable evolution of our current product line. Innovations would be re-contextualized to form a vital component to our established product portfolio. Unfamiliar new solutions would be the obvious and only next step.
And all this was no fiction. No foul fraud. No deceit, designed to sell a risky idea. The formal pathways employed to exercise innovation were realigned to realise these ends. If you use a formal and logical approach to innovation, you can do this.
If the Innovator’s Dilemma demanded that the business jump from the sustaining product line to some disruptive, unfamiliar and risky alternative, efforts would be made to instantiate that idea in support of the current, sustaining product line. I would attempt to plough the innovation into the established order.
I attempted to make disruptive innovation seem as boring and mundane as I possibly could. No excitement. No risk. Only benefit.
And this does actually work. If you can lay out the logical reasoning for an innovation before the audience, you can encourage them to follow your train of thought.
If your innovation does not require any logical leaps or irrational assumptions the risk management radar may remain silent.
If your innovative idea can offer only benefits, no risks, no excitement but no unknowns, you might be onto a winner.
If you ask for any questions at the end of your pitch, the answer you’re looking for is no.
However, there is one excitement that I have found works quite nicely in a pitch that presents an innovation. This is a pitch in which the innovation might mitigate the excitement of any risk arising at all.
A pitch in which we predict the future, and that future is grim. A pitch in which no action provokes the exciting, risky outcome. A potential new competitor dominating the market with a new idea. A new technology that we must adopt, as it will soon make our current product line obsolete. A legislative restriction on the horizon, that will demand that we transform our business or risk stepping beyond this legal boundary. The excitement here might provoke the following question, which I love to hear.
What’s the risk of not pursuing this crazy new idea?
If innovation appears boring, riskless and inevitable, or results in a risk mitigated and business as usual, then the audience might feel sufficiently secure to say yes.
