Roger Martin on 2 Lessons About Innovation

My innovative clients tend to take other technologies and combine them in new ways to give clients something useful.  The companies that get beyond the start-up and owner stage tend to put their clients in the middle of their business, not their technology. Even though many of these companies are developed by scientific geeks, they understand how to sell. That is innovation - building a technology that goes beyond your client expectations.
Roger Martin does a Competitive report on Canada every year and with his deep background working with business owners, CEOs of corporations and MBA students, he knows how innovation works. His article in the Globe and Mail captures the critical points about innovation:

Innovation, on the other hand, entails starting with users, obsessing about their experience, and being dedicated to creating unique improvements to it that delight them, even if they never asked for or expect them. Xerox PARC invented the mouse, Bill Buxton and others invented the touch screen, and Research In Motion Ltd. invented the smartphone; all inventions that Mr. Jobs cobbled together to make the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad. But they were cobbled together in the most magical ways with the user, rather than the scientist, at the centre of the picture.

The second lesson is that successful innovation actually means trying things that are unproven – optimally that have never been tried before. Apple’s biggest successes derived from doing positively unproven things – like controlling a PC with a mouse, like twinning iPod with iTunes, like twinning iPhone with the App Store, like creating the tablet. Apple couldn’t analyze and benchmark the success of somebody else who had done these things already to demonstrate that the idea would succeed. 

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