Our approach to innovation is dead wrong | Diana Kander | TEDxKC

This TED talk by Diana Kander about “Our approach to innovation is dead wrong” is very interesting. She started the talk with her story that when she was 17 she learned the martial arts and was the top student of her class with a green belt. The reason behind learning martial arts was to be able to defend herself in future if she ever gets attacked. One night after an evening shift at a restaurant where she worked she was attacked in the back parking lot. This was the moment she had been training for years and yet she felt helpless and didn’t fight, she was in shock. Luckily she was saved by a co worker who managed to scare off the assailant.

As an analytical person she was thoroughly confused why didn’t she deployed her training and handled the situation on her own. So she thought back of time when she had training classes and she realized that in martial arts training she was trained with an opponent of her size and in a controlled environment. She was learning how to score points instead of learning how to defend herself against a realistic opponent with realistic attack moves.

With this experiential example she tried to explain that what we teach in our schools and to entrepreneur about start ups, new launches and new business is entirely wrong. She explains that after somebody comes up with an idea we tell them to come up with a business plan, a 30 pages document complete with a 5 year projection, then you raise investment and build you product and then you think that customers will come running at you. But that is not the case. The reason is the not proper allocation of time.

Entrepreneurs who spend time on generating business plans, projecting what will happen next 5 to 10 years ends up wasting their time because you are more likely to fail because actual dynamics and facts are different once you put the product in the market from your paper/business plan. Therefore, instead of wasting your time on generating long business plans and projecting 5 years ahead, experiment and test your product right away and see if it would work out or not. This way you’ll save a lot of time and realize whether your idea or a products is worth pursuing or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pii8tTx1UYM&feature=youtu.be