The Sunjay Times

As far as innovation goes, I prefer major disruptive innovations over incremental improvements (not to say the latter does not have it place, it does). As a keen observer of human behavior, I’m interested in understanding in general why people do they things they do, with a focus on human interaction with technology–such as factors that affect the adoption rates of new technology.

I long discovered (the painful way) during my time as an academic in computer science that just because one builds something super well, that by no means guarantee that “they will come”. In fact, my favourite quote then became, “So what if it doesn’t do anything? It was made with our new Triple Shielded Core Blowfish Encrypted Reduced Internal Resistance 26 Level On-Die Cache 512 1024bit Registers Supercharged Iso Bifurcated Krypton Gate Metal Oxide Semiconductor process …” (souped up version from something similar I read from a UNIX fortune cookie, but I digress).

Thus, I found this blog post by Andrew McAfee, a HBS faculty to be quite interesting. I’m going to summarize the key takeaways, although I highly recommend you read the original post.

Changing the status quo is extremely difficult and often leaders get “carried out on their shields” (from an awesome and inspiring Carly Fiorina talk about change and leadership at Stanford, that I’ve quoted her before here). Let’s examine one of the traits of the status quo:

We are loss averse. A $50 loss looms larger than a $50 gain. Loss aversion is virtually universal across people and contexts, and is not much affected by how much wealth one already has. Ample research has demonstrated that people find that a prospective loss of $x is about two to three times as painful as a prospective gain of $x is pleasurable.

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Makes sense, it takes a non-status quo person with a vision or be hungry enough to be prepared to lose $50 for the upshot of potentially gaining another $50. The willingness to feel fear and keep going forward distinguishes the living from the merely breathing

.. behavioral economist Richard Thaler has called the “endowment effect:” We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute.

If you’re introducing a mere replacement of an equal product, it’d better be .. uhh, just realize that you’re fighting an uphill against change. Make sure you have incentives for people to change.

As if all this weren’t enough, Gourville also highlights that the people developing new products are very dissimilar from the products’ prospective consumers. You don’t go work for TiVo (to use his example) if you don’t ‘get’ the potential of digital video recorders and think they’re a really good idea. And after working for the company for a while, having TiVo becomes part of your endowment; you think of things in comparison to TiVo, instead of in comparison to a VCR. Both of these factors make it harder for developers to see things as their target customers do.

Many techies suffer from this, falling in love with their own creation and failing to see that it could perhaps actually be fundamentally, how should I put this gently, a completely useless product. If it’s not solving a real person’s pain point that he/she is willing to pay for a solution, then monetization may be a challenge. Doesn’t matter how snappy the UI is, or the fact that you’ve just spent a month shaving off 10 CPU cycles on the algorithm that calculates the number of molecules in a can of soda, I highly doubt anyone would pay you to compute out the exact number of modules in a can of Mountain Dew just before they pop the can. I’m sure the algorithm is still very cool, though!

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see
–Leonardo da Vinci

As an innovator, train yourself to see the things that you cannot see. Ok, so that’s admittedly difficult, so at least try to see the things that other people see that you don’t see.

This last point is one of the reasons why I strongly believe that techies should actually get out there (at least occasionally) to go talk to real human beings, such as the paying customers. Be aware of your own inherent bias and need to protect your “baby” (the product), but don’t forget that you are also creating value for someone else.

The bottom line is: if you’re developing something new, you’ll have an easier time if the benefits of the product surpasses the existing solution by (at least) a factor of 10.