THE ESSENCE OF INNOVATION Vlada Myroshnychenko 6 03

THE ESSENCE OF INNOVATION Vlada Myroshnychenko 6. 03. 38. 13. 01

— the essence of innovation is to make something people want.

The "posers vs doers" phenomenon is no different in innovation: there's an immense amount of noise for every bit of signal. the essence of innovation comes down to successfully answering 3 simple (though not easy) questions

1) WHO ARE YOU HELPING? - the vast majority of attempts at innovation are still solutions looking for problems. THE FLUFF Describing an idea in terms of its features instead of what burning problems it solves (huge red flag) THE ESSENCE A clear, validated articulation of who needs your product from as many angles as possible (demographics, profession, income, location, etc)

2) WHAT IMPORTANT PROBLEM ARE YOU SOLVING FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS? - the more important a problem is for someone, the more likely she is to be looking (and willing to pay) for a solution. Your goal is to only solve important problems. THE FLUFF Trying to make a problem seem more important to people than what they consider it to be on their own. THE ESSENCE Getting passionate reactions from people automatically when you simply describe a problem they may have (anger, excitement, revolt). The presence of a “hack” that partially solves that problem today, usually in an “expensive” (time, money, complexity) and non-scalable way (ie. it works for that one person, but not for everyone who has that problem). In my opinion, this signal is problem validation gold and its absence is almost surely evidence that the problem is just a nuisance.

3) IS YOUR SOLUTION MUCH BETTER THAN THE STATUS QUO? - the adoption of an innovation is the product of the importance of the problem times how much better than the status quo the new solution is. THE FLUFF It is defined as the "one more feature" fallacy: if we just add this ONE feature, then the entire product is now way better than the status quo. This is almost certainly not true and if it is, you made poor roadmap prioritization decisions. THE ESSENCE 10 x thinking: a solution so drastically powerful that it shakes up a market or creates a new one. Google ranking search results based on links being a proxy for the popularity of a webpage, Amazon bringing the big box store to the Internet with infinite shelf space, CRISPR gene editing technology to make programming life as convenient as programming computers, etc

As a conclusion. MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT If you can truly, objectively improve people's lives in an area that they consider important to themselves, you have a real innovation. It never ceases to amaze me how often we overcomplicate the simple idea that a business exists to fulfill a customer's need. If you don’t know your customers or can’t fulfill their needs in a way that is much better than their current solution, you don’t have a business (yet).

Thank you for your attention! keep going until you do - the world thanks you for it.