Innovation strategists are in the business of making the future. They do this by unearthing motivations behind human behaviour, synthesising unmet needs and identifying new opportunities, all with no respect for the status quo. The intent is to disrupt the market with an offering that has not existed before, creating new partnerships, envisioning new systems and provoking new paradigms.
Working through such bold objectives undoubtedly takes a lot of courage as well as convincing throughout the process. Decision makers signing o on unproven initiatives may feel the risk in deploying significant resources to building new futures. This is the reason that disruptive innovations throughout modern history have been consistently offered up by unemployed, obscure tinkerers working out of garages, basements or cafés.
Think about Edwin Land, the Harvard drop-out who invented inexpensive filters for polarising light, developing the first of its kind in-camera instant photography, the basis of the Polaroid camera. Not being associated with an educational institution, he lacked resources needed to explore his idea and ended up sneaking into a laboratory at Columbia University late at night to use the equipment.
Consider N. Joseph Woodland, the inventor of the Barcode. Having overheard a supermarket executive’s need to capture product information automatically at check-out, he quit his teaching job at Drexel University and moved into his grandfather’s apartment in Florida. While on the beach, he was able to think through unique ways Morse Code can be adapted to enable digital ‘reading’.
The list continues with founding stories of Twitter, Amazon, Google and Apple, reinforcing the riskiness of innovation. These once scrappy start-ups are now large, established organisations with the bigger task of continuing to stay innovative.
Incubators, spin-offs and in-house innovation teams reporting directly to the c-suite are some ways large organisations are attempting to stay nimble and scrappy. Even then, growing groups of involved stakeholders demand more and more convincing about the next step; the risk factor can be crippling.
This is where history can come into play. The past can be a helpful tool in defining the future, especially in terms of validating the opportunity and boosting stakeholder confidence.
In some cases, it is a simple matter of confirming the deeper, timeless human need that resonates across yesterday, today and likely, tomorrow. In exploring unmet needs in the American breakfast market, we find that beyond taste and convenience, users are driven by the need to appear healthy even to themselves. This is resulting in them shunning traditional forms of breakfasts, including ‘sugary’ cereals. Consequently, for any new product to succeed, it must satisfy this basic ‘healthy’ requirement, deviating significantly from current traditional breakfast cereal offerings.
While this direction sounds unconvincing and downright risky to cereal manufacturers, a peek into the past helps solidify the argument. When cereal was first introduced in the market around 1890, it was part of a health movement relieving people of digestion issues caused by eating meat and other heavy foods in the morning. The first cereals did not contain sugar and helped consume milk, vitamins and whole grains. It was only in the 1940s that sugar began making an appearance, in the then fiercely competitive morning-meal market.
While the nature of breakfast products has shifted significantly over time, what hasn’t changed is the human motivation behind eating: to be and appear healthy. By connecting the dots from the past to the future, strategists can build a stronger narrative and push for product innovation.
Greater the ambiguity in the industry, the more relevant the trip down memory lane. In the looming uncertainty around struggling Gujarati handicrafts, my teammates and I uncovered that the biggest hindrance to a thriving and self-sustaining handicrafts model was the disconnect between small-town production and the metropolitan consumption of craft.
This is a seemingly obvious observation, but when you turn back time, the insight becomes clear: life was not much different between small and large towns just a few decades ago. With the country’s opening up to the global economy and advances in technology, tools, services and communications, consumers living in large cities today have little in common with the lifestyle, activities and priorities of small-town craftsmen. What craftspeople need is not better access to marketplaces but better understanding of the evolved lifestyle of their consumers.
The strength and rationality of this understanding helped the team ideate on solutions and build the bridge connecting unmet cosmopolitan needs with existing craft skills through disruptive new products. Historical study is also meaningful in communicating or evolving a brand: capturing the timeless value it brings to its users is the starting point of any such exercise.
Detours to the past can help solidify the insight, augment the rationale and strengthen the strategy. Understanding why initiatives, launches and projects worked or failed in the past is significant in helping create the future. Case studies of projects that identify unmet human needs and document subsequent responses can prove to be a useful tool, especially in cataloguing design solutions that address timeless or unchanging human needs. In this way, we can author innovation history for those following us, leaving behind a legacy of the new futures that have been crafted over time.
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