Innovation Fundamentals

Think of your venture as the cure, not just a daily supplement. You want your solution to be indispensable - an antibiotic 💊, not a vitamin. This way it is likely it will be used continuously and not just forgotten about. Chat with potential customers - real people with real problems. What you 'think' they need might not be what they actually need.

When it comes to innovation, playing it safe is the equivalent of standing still - don't box yourself into "safe spaces". Check out if there's a gap in the market, if there is a need of a product, and if you can technologically bridge that gap. As a startup, you're not just solving problems - you're a detective discovering them. As an engineer / scientist, I have the tendancy to work on solutions to well-defined problems. In a startup, you do not define the problems!

This makes things harder because often the solution you have is not designed to solve the problems of your customers. In a startup you need to identify the problems of your customers first and build a solution to that. They don't care how technical your solution is, as long as it solves their problem. When you're passionate about something, it is easy to ignore people. So learn how to listen; an unsuccessful CEO doesn't listen.

As a CEO your day to day work mostly involves dealing with investors, customers, and business partners, as well as hiring the right people, rather than technical work. However, even for a CEO, having strong technical skills may still be valuable when it comes to identifying talent and also when it comes to being respected by your employees. Eventually your technical skills become complementary.

Technological Innovation

These are the different types of basic design concepts we see in technology:

Other Innovation Types

• Open Innovation
  • Take ideas from the wider community and incorporate into your product.
  • Crowd-Sourcing solutions to innovation challenges
  • Platforms for open innovation work on a prize model
• Social Innovation
  • Supply chain for example; what if medicine was delivered with Coca-Cola who already had an amazing supply chain? Piggy-back and distribute the medicine this way. This was the basis of "The ColaLife Anti-Diarrhoea Kit"
  • Hybrid-Business models, with Non-Profit side that instigates local value creation, and then have a profit side which generates money
• Cloning & Copycats
  • Clone a working model into a new context, such as a new country.
  • Caution with different organization processes. Business contexts may differ, replication isn't that easy but is still a method
  • Never be afraid to emulate a good idea. Execution is everything.
• Reverse Innovation
  • Innovation seen or used first in the developing world, before spreading to the industrialized world.
  • Reverse innovation is the process whereby goods developed as inexpensive models to meet the needs of developing nations, such as battery-operated medical instruments in countries with limited infrastructure, are then repackaged as low-cost innovative goods for Western buyers.

Drucker's Discipline of Innovation

Some innovations spring from a flash of genius. But as Peter Drucker points out, most result from a conscious, purposeful search for opportunities. Opportunities can be found in:

• Unexpected Occurrences
• Incongruities (Inconsistencies)
  • inefficiencies, cloning for example, taking things to a new context
• Process Needs
  • Innovations improving on way society works
• Changes in an industry or market
  • Or Anticipating Changes
  • Covid-19 for example, some people were earlier to the change.
  • AI, Nanotech, Genetics 3D printing

Outside a company, opportunities arise from:

• Demographic changes
  • Ageing population
• Changes in perception
  • Human rights & social justice
  • Perceptions around privacy
  • New technology is okay socially
  • More people care about climate change
• New knowledge

These seven sources overlap, and the potential for innovation may well lie in more than one area at a time. Innovations based on new knowledge, of course, tend to have the greatest effect on the marketplace. But it often takes decades before the ideas are translated into actual products, processes, or services. The other sources of innovation are easier and simpler to handle, yet they still require managers to look beyond established practices. Drucker emphasizes that in seeking opportunities, innovators need to look for simple, focused solutions to real problems. The greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say, "This is obvious!" Grandiose ideas designed to revolutionize an industry rarely work. Innovation, like any other endeavor, takes talent, ingenuity, and knowledge.

Find a vision of the future that aligns with your goals, the alignment will push you to innovation and overcoming hurdles.

Opportunity Pipelines

Here are places to look for Inspiration for Ideas and Innovation. Keep Your Eye On The Ball Marked "The Money Is Here". Riding a massive wave, even if you're slightly late, can still provide a lot of opportunities. It’s much easier to fill a bucket of water from a river than a puddle. Just the same, it’s much easier to get rich in a growing industry flush with new cash than it is to get rich in a shrinking one on its way out.

Imperial Tech Foresight - Scan the Horizons

Imperial Tech Foresights (opens in a new tab) interrogate the possible, plausible and probable futures of potential subject areas.

The table of disruptive technologies (opens in a new tab) is designed to make people think. The table consists of 100 potentially disruptive technologies, which we have defined as those capable of significant social, economic or political upheaval.

Each technology is also categorized according to one of five subjective themes (Data Ecosystems, Smart Planet, Extreme Automation, Human Augmentation and Human-Machine interactions).

The Automated Futures (opens in a new tab) visual is designed to show how different AI tools and techniques link together and how they could pave the way to future technologies that have yet to be realised. It is displayed as a celestial sphere to show the evolving space around the topic area. Be inspired and use it to dream about the unimaginable, speculative, and stretchy futures of artificial intelligence, robotics and automation.

The purpose of this visualisation is to help individuals and institutions become inspired about the future of automation and its possibilities. In the map and the accompanying speculative dictionary, we mix prediction, provocation and reality. It is meant to inspire and engage.

On the map, we explore the future around four different nodes: the big white circles showcases the general topics; the smaller white circles point to methodologies and tools; the pink small circles on the outskirts of the clusters show applications both speculative and real; and the large pink circles represent broader applications.

The area of automation and AI evolves rapidly. Therefore, the dictionary and map will never be fully complete, but we hope that it helps you imagine the possible, plausible and probable futures of automation.

Explore the possible impact of high-performance computing across a wide range of applications, from simulation or healthcare, to fintech or engineering. The map of high-performance computing (HPC) is intended to stimulate discussion about what HPC capable of and where it might be heading in future.

There are five key categories of applications: Modelling & Simulation, Healthcare & Medicine, Security, Fintech and Materials, Manufacturing & Engineering. Previously, data was a separate subset, however we removed it as it was integral to the other categories.

The entries are all largely tech-push of course. In the real world, you'd need to overlay things like energy, security, privacy, regulation and human psychology to get a clearer picture of what's next, but it's a start. The primary audience is the global HPC community, but hopefully, it will appeal to anyone interested in computing, Big Data, predictive analytics and perhaps machine learning and AI.

The exciting category to our collective mind at Tech Foresight is simulation and modelling. It brings up ethical and even philosophical questions about how simulations impact reality. For example, if you have data that suggests something will happen, what level of certainty would you require to then act and where is free will and human agency in all this?

Technovelgy

Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy (opens in a new tab), which are aggregated from Sci-Fi books. It is interesting that things like credit cards, live news and Google were initially thought of just sci-fi, but lagged behind reality by 100 years or so. This has been aggregated in this Google Sheet (opens in a new tab). You can extrapolate this and say some of the sci-fi today likely will follow the same trajectory.

Our World in Data

You can visit Our World in Data (opens in a new tab) to explore the world's most pressing problems and the data behind them. This website is a great resource for identifying trends and therefore opportunities in entrepreneurship.

Gadget Flow

Gadget Flow (opens in a new tab) is a website that showcases new products and innovations. It's a great resource for identifying emerging trends and opportunities in entrepreneurship. You don't even have to create the top trending product. If you can catch a wave of 100's of millions, you can create adjacent products that will be successful.

Answer the Public

You can use Answer the Public (opens in a new tab) to generate key questions people have on a particular topic. This is a great way to identify problems people have and therefore opportunities in entrepreneurship.

Identifying the Real Problem

Identifying the real problem is key, and it's supposed to go like this:

1. Discover the right problem
2. Validate the problem
3. Find a Solution
4. Build a minimum viable product (MVP)
5. Achieve Product Market Fit (PMF)
6. Scale and Potentially cash out

You should follow the structured methodology to avoid jumping from stage to stage. Discover right problem first, validate it, then find solutions. Otherwise you'll waste a lot of time & money. Slice a problem. However, real life is messier. You need to slice and dice the problem, validate it, and then tackle it head-on. Otherwise, you're just burning cash and chasing your tail.

Why do you want to slice a problem? It is because you have a lack of resources (Money, Time, Skill, Network) but an abundance of opportunities (User Feedback, Market Need, Technological Progress). What is a good problem to work on? A good problem:

1. Identifies a real obstacle to be overcome
   • Is it a symptom or a root cause? Vitamin or Antibiotic?
   • Identify a real obstacle to be overcome.
2. Is worthwhile
   • Will the solution unlock the desired scale and impact?
3. Is timely
   • Are external factors (political, economic, legal, social, technological) in favor of a solution? E.g. no-one cared about data privacy until a couple scandals, then companies benefitted from that.
4. Draws together a community of solvers
   • Can the problem provoke, incite curiosity and entice a community of solvers?
5. Is one that a funding individual or organization can do something about
   • Do you have or can acquire the relevant 'resources' to do something about it?

Write out your problem statement, so you can validate it and redefine it as you iterate. This helps you find a balance when it comes to defining your problem well, but at the same time, avoid being stuck in a niche. By jumping back and forth, you may even discover a bigger problem to solve. Some tools for slicing the problem:

• Five Whys
• Five W + H
• Edge Based Ideation
• Customer Development

Five Why's

Keep asking "why" to get to the root problem. E.g.

• Statement: 'Aaaaargh, I hate group gifts'
• Why: Group gifts are a lot of work to organize
• Why: A lot of people are involved
• Why: You have to collect the money from all the people
• Why: People do not automatically pay
• Why: There are no automatic reminders

This approach is effective to separate symptoms from causes. However, it may not be suitable for complex problems, is not reproducible or consistent and gives no validation that the root cause is found.

Five W's + How

This approach models the reality of a problem, is user centric and is effective to explore the different influences on a problem. However, it uses the Assumption that all information is available and it can appear aggressive when used with third parties. For example:

• Who is it about? Logistic Companies with critical healthcare deliveries
• What happened? Critical healthcare devices arrived too late for surgeries
• When did it take place? During summer 2018
• Where did it take place? South-West Coast in USA
• Why did it happen? The relevant packages got stuck in a logistic center in South Carolina
• How did it happen? A hurricane hit the west coast

Edge Based Ideation

This approach uses the founder strength focused approach to keep Focus. Think about:

• 🧠 EDGE: What is the knowledge or expertise you have developed that could give you a competitive advantage over other founders?
• 🔮 BELIEVE: Based on your Edge, what do you believe will be different in 5 years-time in that area? What are your most extreme, counter-intuitive, or non-trivial beliefs in that area?
• 💭 HUNCH: If you were to have a hunch about how that belief would be brought to reality, what would that be? If your belief is correct, what opportunities will that create?
• 🎈 TEST: How can you test that hunch? What would be the smallest thing you could do, to see if your hunch had startup potential?

Essentially, at the start of your career, your skills are your best asset. Understand that skill, how you can influence the future and test it. find the most extreme ideas within your scope of expertise and test these ideas that have start up potential. Your skillset becomes your moat i.e. your competitive advantage.

Validate the Problem with Customer Interviews

• Ask the right kind of questions so that you can collect the most useful data about your idea and customer base.
• Don't look for compliments from investors, look for commitment.
• Focus on a small group of target customers, Evangelist.
• Read more about Customer Development: The Mum Test

You can tell you're on the right track if your hypothetical solution doesn't look like an Eierlegende Wollmilchsau. Focus on your solution to your problem that matters, and don't be tempted to just tack anything else on. The more things you focus on, the less focused you are on each individual thing. You don't need a feature firework.

You can also tell you're on the right track if you've faced full desperation. The dunning-Kruger effect of people being overconfident when they are less competent is quite real, and if you feel confident, then that is bad news or you. This is just a quick litmus test.

Overall, your skill, your time and your problem are your most important resource when you plan to start a venture. You can only validate a problem by talking to customers, and the more you invest in understanding & slice the problem, the less you will suffer later.