Why all great products start off looking terrible
Good ideas are commonplace. Good ideas that look terrible are rarer, but they are where the real value is: that's what your competitors are overlooking
What do we talk about when we talk about innovation? The word innovation itself means "the introduction of something new." But that's not what we want: infinite new things are possible, most of which wouldn't make any sense.
Most people at this moment point out that innovation also has to be valuable. A spaceship made out of cookies would be new, in the sense that we aren't used to seeing those, but it also would have no point.
But is "new and valuable" enough? I would argue that it isn't. New and valuable is the ordinary, daily, incremental innovation. That's your yearly new Oreo flavor: sure, it affects the bottom line, but it won't be a case study in Harvard Business School.
So, besides being new and valuable, what does real innovation need to be? It might be counterintuitive, but I hope it will make sense by the end of this article: true innovation has to start off looking terrible.
Why innovation has to look terrible
You'd expect important innovations to look fabulous, wouldn't you? But that's precisely the problem: if something is new and valuable and looks like it is, it's already evident for everyone that this is what they should be doing. All of your competitors are already working on that.
Think about it. An online store with more products and faster delivery? Sure, that makes sense: that's why Amazon and all others are working on it. A phone with more features, a better camera, a higher-resolution screen? Of course. That's why all phone manufacturers are looking into that.
But when something truly innovative comes up, it usually goes against common sense. It looks terrible - at first.
Why the iPhone will bomb
Back in the olden days, in 2007, Apple was set to release the iPhone. It may sound weird right now, but at the time, many people agreed that it would be a disaster. And indeed, making an objective comparison with phones of the time, the iPhone looked inferior¹. Then, you needed to charge your phone every couple of weeks and could throw it against a brick wall without much concern - except, perhaps, for the brick wall. Who would want a fragile piece of glass that needed charging every day? Who would enjoy getting invoices printed over tens of pages for all of that internet usage? That product doesn't make any sense.
That was the feeling of many smart people (and Steve Ballmer). It's easy with hindsight to mock them for their foolishness, but we have to keep in mind that they had a point. The iPhone flew in the face of common sense - and as a result, generated a couple of trillion dollars for Apple. No "common sense" product could ever imagine achieving such success.
“No obviously good idea will generate trillions of dollars for its creator”
The iPhone is no outlier in that respect. Stories of now-successful companies rejected by top-tier VCs are rife. You can find a number of these in an "anti-portfolio" created by historic VC Bessemer Venture Partners, where they explain their rationale for rejecting such bad ideas as Google, Airbnb, Snap, Tesla, and others. And they could very well have been right! These were products that went against common sense in their time, and very smart partners at BVP quickly realized why they would fail.
Some dumb product ideas
At the beginning of this piece, I had mentioned that a faster online store with more products is obvious. So is a phone with more features, a bigger screen, a better camera, and so on. Jeff Bezos agrees with this, by the way:
“It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible.”
But is it? Well, some companies are already challenging Amazon on some "obvious" notions. Brandless bets that people want less and not more choice in a world where everything is available.
In mobile communication, Light Phone sells a device with the promise that it will have fewer features. They even promise that "It will never have social media, clickbait news, email, an internet browser, or any other anxiety-inducing infinite feed."
Can a slow Amazon or an expensive Amazon ever thrive? I don't know. What I do know is that the next Amazon is not going to be Amazon. The next iPhone is not going to be an iPhone. And whatever comes to replace Amazon and the iPhone, they will look dumb initially, as they will fly in the face of many common preconceptions of what these products should be.
That’s disruptive innovation
There is — much like with anything else I write — nothing new or original with any of that. That’s pretty much the definition of Disruptive Innovation, a concept coined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. At its core, the premise of the book is that existing technologies improve with time. Disruptive technologies will come into the market and will initially be inferior to existing solutions — and therefore, it will be easy for incumbents to deride them.
Yet the disruptive innovation will get better and ultimately displace incumbents, and possibly — as with the case of the iPhone — create entirely new segments in the economy.
What this means for you
It’s worth repeating the core idea of this article: the most valuable ideas will sound like trash at the beginning: and that will make them valuable since no one else will pursue them.
As a company or as a person, you have to tinker with these “bad” ideas. You can’t afford to self-censor since anything valuable will be counterintuitive. I have four pieces of advice to enable this:
Create a safe space for new ideas
Encourage sharing incomplete ideas
Say “yes and” instead of no
Don’t get caught up in technicalities
1. Create a safe space for new ideas
It may sound obvious, but it’s worth pointing it out: if your culture promotes shooting down new ideas, no one will have any. And that culture creeps on you very quickly: explaining why something can’t work is an easy way to make oneself look (and feel) smart.
You should keep track of any time this happens and discourage it. Run exercises where people are encouraged to suggest dumb ideas. Have your colleagues come up with solutions to impossible problems. Do whatever you can to create a space where people will not be afraid to share.
My friends at the Dentsu Team B use the “Miracle Word Card” method, where what you’re working on is juxtaposed with words taken at random from a set. So if you’re working on a new phone, you might have to imagine what would be a “phone for adults,” a “night phone,” etc. The intention is to break the shackles of common sense by forcing workshop participants to imagine wild concepts. This kind of exercise is a great “mental stretching” to avoid staying locked in the box.
2. Encourage sharing incomplete ideas
As much as we’d like to think otherwise, an idea seldom appears fully formed, as Athena birthed from the head of Zeus. More often than not, it will start as intuition or incomplete to the point of being unrealistic.
Sharing the idea at this stage may lead someone else to complete it. On the other hand, not sharing it will ensure it will never bear fruit. Coworkers should be encouraged to share their ideas even if they aren’t complete. Others can then build on them, or they may lead the conversation in a different direction.
Incomplete ideas are the easiest to shoot down and the hardest to defend since they won’t be functional even for their originator. That’s another reason to strive to foster a safe, positive culture rather than a negative one.
The coiner of the concept of lateral thinking, Edward de Bono, suggested using the word “po” to introduce such oddball concepts. The reason for sharing these ideas, even if qualified in such a way, is:
“Some […] ideas may be impractical, not sensible, not business-minded, not politically correct, or just plain daft. The value of these ideas is that they move thinking from a place where it is entrenched to a place where it can move.”
In short, these ideas help you move out of a place of stagnation and consider the problem from a different perspective. The Miracle Word Card, and countless other methods, also help train you to think constructively around incomplete ideas so that you can extract their value.
3. Say “yes and” instead of “no”
For incomplete ideas to be valuable, it should be possible to build on them. And to expand on ideas, you need first not reject them.
The rules for productive brainstorming are the same as for improv, and among these is the fact that you cannot say no: a “no” stalls the conversation and kills any momentum.
If you’re doing improv, and your partner tells you, “I’m a hamster,” and you say, “No, you’re a human,” your piece is over; there is no place to go from there. If, on the other hand, you say, “I know you are; we’ve been trying to get out of this wheel for hours!” you’re giving the other person room to move ahead. And who knows where it will lead you?
Likewise, when imagining new concepts, it will be trivial to shoot them down. And if you do, you will just have wasted some time and killed in the bud what could have become a good idea.
Don’t do it! Instead, build on what others suggest. When you hear an incomplete idea, look for ways to complete it, or see whether it inspires some other (unfinished) idea in you. If nothing comes, that’s perfectly fine. But then you need not interject.
4. Don’t get caught up in technicalities
A particularly efficient way to kill good ideas is by explaining why it is technically impossible. Another is to sidetrack the conversation in a sterile debate about a possible technical implementation.
When coming up with new ideas, the question isn’t how you are going to build them. It’s not even whether they are possible: the question is whether a future that includes these new ideas is good and whether one should strive to make it possible.
At some point, at Google, some dude suggested taking pictures of every angle of every street of every city of every country on every continent. Imagine how easy it would be to shoot that down. That’s a positively pharaonic task! Who will take all of these pictures? Imagine the storage required to handle them! Imagine the processing needed to serve them! That’s preposterous!
Sure. That all is true. But that wasn’t the question. The question was: if we had all of this, what could we do with it? Is there a business case for it? Obviously, there was one, and with that in mind, engineers solved the technical issues to make it happen, and now we can all play GeoGuessr.
Some words of conclusion
Once more: the most important, most valuable ideas are the ones that aren’t obvious. So, more often than not, they will look terrible when you first have them. It would be easy to shoot them down at this stage.
But you cannot let that happen, for if you do, you will be outmaneuvered by whoever doesn’t.
To prevent that from happening: create a safe space for ideas, encourage sharing incomplete ideas, encourage building on other people’s ideas, don’t get caught up in technicalities.
But most importantly: keep your ability to dream. You have it, or at least you had it at some point: all kids dream. Don’t fight your inner child, don’t try to force yourself to act as adults are supposed to. Dare to have crazy thoughts. You’ll become a better innovator in the process. You might also get more fun in your life.
¹ Even Maddox, of early Internet fame, jumped on the bandwagon with an article pointing out the objective superiority of the Nokia E70. What, you never heard about the Nokia E70? Well, that’s my point.
