Want to innovate? Unlearn what was.

How much of what is is because of what was? Figure that out, and blow it up.

For this week’s How Hard Can It Be podcast I interviewed 128 Technology co-founder and COO Patrick MeLampy. With longtime partner Andy Ory, Patrick co-founded Acme Packet Inc. and served as its Chief Technology Officer, eventually taking the company public and selling to Oracle in a transaction valued at almost $2 Billion. A great student of innovation, Patrick has accumulated 26 patents over the years, and has some very specific ideas about what keeps most people and companies from innovating, the subject of this week’s second segment.

Question the constraints. Break with the past.

Patrick sees re-framing problems as the key to true innovation.

“You have to turn things inside out and upside down at the same time to see them clearly... And it’s only when you [do] that you can come up with new ideas.”

Most problems and opportunities exist with the frame of certain generally accepted constraints. Today’s challenges of network security, efficiency, and flexibility, for example, all exist within the constraints of a set of commonly accepted networking standards, many of which were put in place as the Internet was coming together in the early 90s. Some of those constraints are “fundamental,” meaning they’re necessary to ensure the flow of data we’re trying to improve. Others are merely “historical” — meaning the exist now only because they existed at the beginning, for reasons which may no longer make sense given all that’s changed since.

To innovate is not simply to operate in novel ways within accepted constraints, but to actively question every constraint; to negotiate and in some cases break with those that no longer make sense.

The real challenge of innovation, at a human level, isn’t just learning what’s new. It’s unlearning what’s old or out of date, very often the things most deeply embedded in our expectations about how things are or need to be. That’s why innovation requires deep thinking, and focus. It takes vision, and oftentimes even some courage.

Not just products. Business models.

The approach applies not only to products, but to the kind of business model innovation that powers many of today’s most disruptive and successful companies.

Why do you source materials the way you do? Why do you manufacture that way; price, and distribute the way you do today? What is your relationship with your employees? Why do you market and sell the way you do? Who else occupies a link in the value chain between you and your customers, and what value does each add relative to what they cost?

Got all that? Great. Now set it aside.

How would you do all those things — source, manufacture, price, distribute, market, sell, and engage your customers — if you were designing the model from scratch based on today’s requirements and technologies?

There are some powerful frameworks for this out there, and tools to use them as instruments of strategy. Whether you do or not, recognize that a startup is always a fresh start, a chance to question everything and begin again.

“It’s easy to do it when you don’t have any business.”

Maybe. The key is conscious effort on the part of you and your team to break free of constraints that may be so deeply embedded you can’t even see them anymore.

Look harder. Create technology and pricing that’s disruptive enough to get customers to question their own constraints, and you just might be able to build a billion dollar business as well.

Here’s the conversation, let me know know what you think.

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