Impressionists, iPhones, and innovation
For many years, I have been promoting the idea that innovation is about solving a problem, not just coming up with a new idea. As such, I think innovation is a planned activity, and unlike invention, is not something that happens by accident. Consider this the difference between pure and practical science.
This is also why the notion of locking so-called “creative” individuals in a room and telling them to be “innovative” so rarely produces much of value. This leads me to the following.
Yesterday, a friend suggested that “innovation” is more a question of providing value than solving problems. He said, “Steve Jobs iPhone famously did not solve a known problem, it created a new value and a new market”
The conversation then went into Mozart, Picasso, and the Beatles, all of whom are generally considered “innovative.” So, what problem did they solve?
A very good question — which I will attempt to answer.
Innovation and art
Let’s start with “art.” Up until the middle of the 19th century, most art served to record an event or immortalize an individual through portraiture. But with the advent of photography, it became less important to depict an event in naturalistic form. And with the exception of heads of state, royalty, or the wealthy, portraiture became much less popular.
This gave rise to the impressionists — Renoir, Cézanne, Sisily, Bazille, Monet, Manet, Degas, Pissarro and others. Since the idea that “art” usually triggered emotions to a greater extent than most photographs, “realism” became less important. The goal was to release reward chemicals in the brain (primarily in the limbic system) that would elicit a response. Today, we understand the chemistry; the impressionists understood the effect, if not scientifically, at least intuitively.
As to Picasso, well, he kept pushing the limits. His abstract faces actually derive much inspiration from ancient Egyptian art, where the idea was to illustrate the “whole.” If you look at Egyptian reliefs and paintings, you will never see anything other than the big toe. The “foot” was considered an abstract concept; the small toes were irrelevant to this concept. Eyes were always shown full front, even though figures were always depicted in profile. When Picasso came along, first with cubism, then with a myriad of other “periods,” he was constantly pushing the concept of “representation” far beyond the naturalistic images that had been produced throughout many previous centuries.
Yet when it comes to innovation and “solving a problem,” most true innovations go unnoticed. For example, the great Italian Renaissance artist, Tiziano Vecelli (“Titian”), is known for his use of white. Titian was a master of applying glazes of color in layers to create the desired effect (which is also why Leonardo DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa” cannot be effectively cleaned as some of Leonardo’s layers would also disappear). What Titian did was to replace linseed oil as a binding/drying agent with walnut oil in his white paint. Why? Because linseed oil rapidly becomes yellow; walnut oil does not. Here, Titian was solving a basic problem — as did Vermeer and others a century after Titian’s death, though they continued using cheaper linseed oil for blues and dark backgrounds where the yellowing didn’t matter as much. Who was responsible for this particular innovation is lost to history. But the innovation is real and evident today in museums around the world.
Which brings us to Mozart and many others in the musical arena — including, Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Bill Haley, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, to name but a few. The problem I believe they sought to solve was to get people to think outside of the norm (Schoenberg’s “twelve-tone technique” is particularly interesting in this regard). But common to all of these artists was the goal of eliciting an emotional response and developing techniques by which to do so.
Throughout history, the problem for artists has often been the challenge of changing the perception of what “art” is.
Introducing the mobile phone
From the mid-1980s until the turn of the millennium, mobile phones went through an incredible evolution. They went from lug-able monsters with a bare 15 minutes of talk-time, to sleek units that worked for hours and could be conveniently slipped into a purse or pocket.
The innovation was in batteries. Back when Motorola introduced its “brick” telephones, virtually no research had been done in battery technology since the days of Edison. Curiously, back in 1900, there were many electric cars. But the internal combustion engine won out because fuel was cheap and plentiful and batteries were tricky and, perhaps, less easy to understand; remember, very few homes were electrified at this time, so the entire concept of “electricity” was something new.
And then came the mobile phone. Suddenly, there was a need to reduce the size and increase the effectivity of batteries. Within just a few years, remarkable advances were made — innovations that solved a problem.
By 1994, the phones were so small that another problem needed to be addressed: soundwaves from the mouth were traveling in parallel to the phone’s microphone rather than being directed at it. Alas, merely turning up the responsiveness of the microphone meant that the phone picked up all kinds of background noise that made conversation difficult.
Motorola came out with the MicroT-A-C and then the StarTAC flip-phones to circumvent this problem. In Denmark, engineers at Bang & Olufsen solved the sound-direction problem and phones were then free to scale down. Even so, Samsung and L.M. Ericsson reintroduced flip phones in the early 2000s, possibly more to support conventional perceptions than of technological need. (in a related note, did you know that most mobile phones sported placebo antennas from about 1994 on? Probably also as a response to perceptional attitudes)
An interesting meeting
In the fall of 2001, I was invited to participate in a meeting with a group of innovators in Copenhagen. The goal was to define the “killer app” for mobile phones.
We spoke for hours, discussing the possibilities inherent in WAP, the need for “here and now” information, the basics of responding to email, and other issues. At no point did any of us think about cameras — there were no phones on the market that even HAD a camera at this point. Given that Denmark, at that time, had possibly the best cellular network in the world, we concluded that the “killer app” was still telephony. After all, cell networks, even in Denmark were still pretty spotty (and this problem is still with us in 2018 — though now we talk more about wifi connectivity).
Research that died
Back in the early years of this century, my company, FatDUX, was working on projects for both Ericsson and Nokia, with various Chinese walls to prevent different teams from seeing prototypes and operating-system structures.
Around 2006, we took it upon ourselves to initiate a research program to uncover the key problems mobile phone designers should have been addressing back then. We bought dozens of used mobile phones, studied sizes, keyboards, and displays. We also bought TV and VCR remotes.
We researched user patterns, pitch and rake metrics, whether people looked at the keys during use, and other curiousities. And we started to write a detailed report.
What we learned was that there were two main problems:
- We needed more keys dedicated to specific tasks
- We needed big screens that could display the photos we took
And yet, people wanted smaller and smaller phones, so how could one incorporate a bigger screen and more buttons in a small device?
Apple came up with the answer in 2007 — the iPhone. Our report became irrelevant and remains unfinished to this day (although we still have all the phones).
Innovation and the iPhone
Steve Jobs is widely quoted as having said that the iPhone team didn’t do any research prior to the design. This is nonsense. Perhaps they didn’t conduct the study my team did, but they had a significant body of empirical experience on which to draw.
They solved both of the problems FatDUX had identified by replacing the entire screen and keyboard with a single, touch-sensitive screen — and software that would display the relevant buttons in graphic form. It was pure genius.
So, to answer my friend’s statement, “Steve Jobs iPhone famously did not solve a known problem, it created a new value and a new market,” I think the iPhone DID solve several problems — and in doing so created value. Did it create a new market? Possibly. It changed the mobile market dramatically — and it certainly got us away from the notion that the “killer app” was telephony.
Innovation SHOULD create value and markets. But unless you solve a problem — acknowledged or latent — you probably won’t succeed. History tells us so.
A final note: some innovations may both solve a problem as well as create new ones. Any innovator needs to consider the technological, social, and political consequences of their “solution.” Not necessarily in equal measure, but they all need to be considered. However, that’s something for another post 😊