HX Podcast
HX Podcast
Ep4: On Innovation
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In this episode, Radu and Jonathan talk about innovation. We have a look at creativity, passion & necessity and the role they play in solving problems in new ways. We also discuss the need to minimise risk and fail fast and early. We cover the types of innovation and the way products need to feel new but also familiar. We discuss how the right timing is crucial for launching successful products.
Innovation provides a competitive advantage and, once you have it, is something you shouldn’t take for granted. It should be a part of a company’s vision and long-term strategy.
Are you interested in creating a more human experience for your customers? We would like to help you with that. Hello, and welcome to the human experience podcast. I'm your host, Radu, and in this episode, myself and Jonathan are going to talk about innovation. I am a user experience designer and Jonathan is a creative director. We both work at granite, a creative digital agency based in Ireland. We love sharing practical advice for your business, your team and your customers. And we believe that by focusing on the people using your products or services, your company will thrive.
Jonathan Callan :So this is our fourth, third
Radu Jitea :The forth one yeah,
Jonathan Callan :is it number four?
Radu Jitea :After a very long break yeah.
Jonathan Callan :Wow. Okay. Are we up to to fingures with diagonals in them now... Jesus!
Radu Jitea :Yeah, yep.
Jonathan Callan :Okay, this is big. So how are you?
Radu Jitea :Good! It has been an absolutely insane week, very busy, which I guess it's a really good complaint to have.
Jonathan Callan :It's actually good to mention at this point, today's Saturday and we're doing this on a Saturday.
Radu Jitea :We are Yeah. We're very passionate about this.
Jonathan Callan :That's impressive. Yeah.
Radu Jitea :Mainly because we have no time during the week.
Jonathan Callan :Now that's exactly it yeah. It's It's nuts at the moment. It really is. So it's kind of nice to get up and yeah, just to do something that's a little different. So, yeah, I love I love the topic of your your podcasts today.
Radu Jitea :And what is what is the topic today?
Jonathan Callan :The topic of the podcast is a single word, and it's innovation.
Radu Jitea :Nice.
Jonathan Callan :It is that one, isn't it? There were a couple of them being thrown around.
Radu Jitea :It's most definitely innovation. I mean, I've done a bit of research. So hopefully it is innovation because I only researched innovation.
Jonathan Callan :Yeah, yeah. No, it got me thinking because I was like, Huh, okay, because the phrase "Necessity is the mother of innovation". And I was like, okay, that's really cool. And then I was thinking about like, what is it that kind of drives us like what what is Like innovation is and I did a little bit of research there. And I say research research is probably, you know, glorifying us and I did a quick Google before we came on. But it's kind of the process of inventing or creating something new typically, maybe in an engineering kind of space. And you know, it's more technical. And I was thinking, then, you know, in terms of what we do, is, is innovation, and I wonder if this is all lining up at your research, but is kind of innovation more like evolution of ideas, it's kind of slow progression, making something better, and the other words that are coming into my head, when they're thinking about, well, what's creativity? Where does that fit in? Because obviously, that's something that we're all very passionate about. And then passion. What drives us why, like if necessity is modern innovation, there's many things that we do that we don't need to do as humans. So where's the passion? Why, why did the Wright brothers do what they did when there was another team very well funded, trying to do the exact same solution powered by Flight, but it was two bicycle engineers were the guys who succeeded, you know, they were passionate. And then that idea of necessity, you know, they didn't need to do it. So we're and just those four words were rolling around in my head innovation, creativity, you know, passion and necessity. Where did your research catch?
Radu Jitea :Well, I was looking at the innovation and the kind of things associated with with the act of innovating. And the ones I found, were also creativity. So creativity, we know it's one that applies in this context, because you need to solve problems in a novel way. Right? But I also came across failure and risk so you cannot talk about innovation without fully understanding that there will be failures and probably quite a few of them and there's also a risk associated with that with the with the Wright brothers. What was their risk, their risk was actually quite small because didn't really have funds. They were not well funded. They didn't really have the money. They don't really have anything to lose, as in the other team, the guys that were actually paid and, you know, they had quite a lot of resources available, the risk for them was quite high, because they have to perform.
Jonathan Callan :They had the people like the press following them. They had news media, everybody was was looking to them to be the people to solve this huge problem for us. The two lads in the countryside. Yeah, if we do it it's great. If we don't have luck, we'll be back by tea. And you know, so yeah, you're absolutely right. There was no no pressure I suppose on those guys. And, and the fear of failure, I suppose was was much, much less.
Radu Jitea :Maybe that had something to do with it. It's almost like when you look at psychology and you know, the way you have two types of motivation, you have intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic, it's something that drives you from within something that you really, really must do because you want to because you love it because it brings you pleasure.
Jonathan Callan :It's that passion?
Radu Jitea :That's passion. Absolutely. 100% could be up Session could be anything that comes from within. And extrinsic is everything that comes from outside, for example, incentives, salaries, being paid to do a job that comes from the outside. So that's the two different types of motivation. So I felt like they had a lot of intrinsic motivation that drove them.
Jonathan Callan :And then in terms of because one of the topics that we were going to talk about, as part of a podcast, was that idea of passion, what, what is it that makes us get up in the morning to do the thing that we do, day in, day out, and, and for me, at least in the 20 odd years, doing this type of work, every single day has flown, like every single day, there's never been a day that's just dragged on, I didn't want to do it. And despite the changes and innovations and you know, stuff that's happened within the industry, it's always kept my interest. It's kind of aligned to some of what we're talking about here. Like that idea of passion and you know, driving innovation and stuff like that. And I'm just wondering where that idea of the passion and the intrinsic kind of drive to do stuff all the time. And I suppose to naturally lead to to innovation. If you're always trying stuff all innovation is bound to happen, you're bound to come up with new ideas. Because I know from looking at some of the stuff that we do on, say, a development side, the guys and I bought, when I was coding, I always looked for easier ways to do stuff, faster ways to do stuff. If I'm doing this thing again and again and again. Why would I start from scratch? Why don't I bundle this up in a certain way? Right? One line instead of 10. You know, so you're all the time kind of innovating in that type of space. So I think certainly in our industry, you see, every 6-12 months does a new thing. But the thing that I think is interesting is that it needs to be new, but yet familiar, because I think if it's new and so new, that it's unrecognisable, I think you kind of start to go into that realm of creativity that is uncomfortable for people, you know, they don't there's no connection to the current world. And I think of Apple, for example, like Apple get credited for being incredibly innovative. But I don't know if you'd say that they're necessarily incredibly creative. Like you look at Johnny Ive, the creative director of Apple back in the 90s and noughties, or whatever, and the work that he did for the iPod, which if you go and Google Dieter Rams, the industrial designer who worked in Braun, the work is exactly the same, like the radio that he created is exactly the same as the iPod like there's the little or no difference. The calculator that he created is exactly the same as the calculator in the apple, the iPhone. So it is new but yet incredibly familiar. Like even though everybody didn't recognise it at first, there's a familiarity so it wasn't so massively out there that people were uncomfortable with it. But they do get credited for being incredibly innovative. So you know, it's an interesting mix that You know, it doesn't need to be new, fresh, exciting, but something that people can still relate to.
Radu Jitea :Yeah, I think you're hitting on something very, very interesting there. So you mentioned just when we started talking, you mentioned about evolution. So the way evolution it is innovation is just innovation that is very, very long term and solving a very, very tiny problem at a time. And so, you know, evolution, you'll have to speed it up by thousands of years to actually see it moving, to see it in action. It just, it doesn't happen from one year to the next. So I would argue that evolution is innovation, but at a very, very large scale. And it takes incredible timelines that we can't even comprehend. So that that's kind of one thing. The other one was when you mentioned that creativity that becomes uncomfortable. So I think we've been in a situation quite a few times where a brand has rebranded and they created a new product they created maybe an existing product but improved. And they presented they had a tada moment when they said, Okay, we're launching our new brand. And this is a new product. And this is how it will look. And this is how it will function from now on. And almost every single time when that happens, you go online and you start reading articles and you see people complaining about the change, even if the change was a good thing. And long term, it might, you know, deliver better results and faster search times and you know, less people time spending with that tool because they can achieve their goals faster, then the knee jerk reaction at the beginning is I don't like it. So so I think with innovation in this case, we should keep in mind that doing it that way and for example, you're developing a new website or a new app, and you launch it, and then you don't come back to it for let's say three years. And then after three years, you go and you redo the whole thing again to match whatever trends that whatever tools and whatever behaviours you might have in three years from now. So I think that's the wrong way to do it. I think innovation, if you look at what this is solving the problems one step at a time, and constantly releasing improvements to your app to your website to your whatever tool you have, or product, and in this way, you make sure that people don't have that knee jerk reaction, and they just see it as a small incremental improvement of the tool.
Jonathan Callan :But I think that's exactly what the great companies do. So you look at Apple, you look at Amazon, you look at Microsoft, and every year say, for example, again, I'm an apple fanboy. And you look at the, what did they have their recently the WWDC event, you know, and in insulated products and so on. And every year you kind of see a slight incremental improvement, you know, little bit faster, that button where there wasn't one before you know, some software tweaks and things But you're right. When you look then going back, say 5,6,7,8,9+ years, you just realise Holy God, like the changes have been dramatic over that longer period of time. So as you said about evolution, it's like you don't notice it. But when you speed it up, you kind of realise Whoa, yeah, there's a huge amount and the fear of failure as well, like evolution is there's no fear of failure. There's plenty of examples of, you know, probably species, you know, how evolved or mutated or failed and they didn't survive and they were put to the side and that's a Darwin's theory of, you know, evolution. Apple, I suppose, as the same thing like their butterfly switch keyboard, and the touch bar. That's a monstrously crap idea. And, you know, I can see those being ditched, but they're comfortable with that, you know, and they'll innovate and they'll change and they'll be brought out other things. I don't know. Did you remember Apple had their social media music, social media website, or service Ping. I think it was called Yeah, you know, they tried to compete with Facebook, but on a music basis and there was a space, you can go and share your passion for, you know, whatever bands, and it failed and failed dramatically. But that's okay. They'll come up with something else. And they'll kind of realise, you know, now they're on what Apple TV, the TV streaming service. Not sure if it's going to be a winner, like it's a big, big kind of space. I don't know if it works, because they're fundamentally like an engineering company. But you're right, it's slow. So it was that then what innovation is it's just a slow, steady progression of incremental changes over time.
Radu Jitea :I think so I think it's, it's all about not reinventing the wheel. Sometimes you might have to reinvent the wheel. And I think we can we can think of a few examples, but we can come back to that later. I think right now, another good example kind of to your point. Is Sony. So Sony, invented back in what? 1980s the Walkman. They came up with this portable music system that you could just carry with you and listen to a cassette right, which was absolutely revolutionary. And I think it changed the way people consume music and music content.
Jonathan Callan :But can I kind of stop you there just for a second? The so yes, revolutionary, absolutely completely new, but yet familiar, because it's carrying music. It's not some new form of noise, like it was the record player in a different form. So people, there was a connection to what it was doing. It was just doing it in a slightly different form. So I think there's that innovation. Yes, familiar thread right there. Sorry to interrupt.
Radu Jitea :That makes sense. I mean, they did not invent music. They just invented the novel way of consuming music. And the innovation came in from the engineering side where they found a way to miniaturise components to a point that you can actually use a battery to play a cassette and to listen to music. So I think Sony is a very good example of innovation because they also had, you know business in terms of music and and recording studio, music rights. So in essence, if you look at the all this, they were in a very good position to be Spotify to come up with that Spotify service that actually Spotify came up with. So why was not Sony the one that created the next thing that was streaming online? And I think the the answer for this is, is a lot to do with the business model and with the internal politics, you know, to a point I'm sure they had that conversation in, in the company where they said, let's let's create the system for streaming music. And then of course, everybody opposed because they're like, but that's gonna cannibalise our sales that's gonna cannibalise everything you do. So their decision was not to do it. And this is why they lost so you know, to a grand scale, and they didn't come up with the next thing. So I think innovation is good and you have it. However, it's not something you can take for granted. It's something You need to fight for and you need to have a process to keep you true to your your goals and make sure that if you want to be an innovative company, then you have a process that will make sure that you are and you stay innovative.
Jonathan Callan :That brings up a really interesting point. So, okay, we've got innovation we spoke of creativity was both a passion and a necessity. And they're all the things that are driving in the same direction. We're all going towards, you know, this new ideas generation, evolution, revolution, whatever it is. What's the counter to that? What's that thing that pulling all of that back? You know, is it the fear of change? Like we look at changing processes within Granite all the time. How can we do this better? And as always, that kind of sense, well, if it kind of isn't broke, let's not kind of try and fix it. Or it's just not the way we do things or you know, there's always something and Sony is a great example. Kodak is another fantastic example. They were so fixated on film, and this is just the model that we have and let's not cannibalise it. Apple then have Mac's Sales and so on, and they bring out the iPhone or the iPod. And again, you know following in Sony's footsteps it's just another way to consume music. So it's very familiar. But they weren't afraid necessarily. I don't know what their thinking was, but they weren't afraid to cannibalise, potentially Mac sales, and then roll out the iPhone. without the fear of cannibalising iPod sales, they somehow overcame the fear of whatever it is that was pulling back innovation. So I just wonder for our clients or clients in the industry that we work in and what would stop them from being innovative, because I think some of the best examples of clients that we have are those that we work with on an ongoing basis to do what you described there and continually innovate, review, tweak the website, the booking page to cart Checkout, like, you know, I worked with somebody before, and we were talking about the cart. And they were an engineer, they were a developer, thrown at the idea of well, you know, can we improve This a little bit, and the answer was just a flat no, it works, there's, there's just people going through it people are booking, so therefore must be working. And there was no sense of yet let's improve this in some way, maybe if we move that button just a little bit up here, or change the name of it to such and such, then that could actually spur more improvements. And I'm reminded by the guys of Basecamp, to the project management software, that they don't do that anymore. But they would have said, on a piece of news or a case study or something, we had button A and button B, and we changed button a to this and button B to that the improvement was 23%. And they gave some statistics on the value of making those slight changes. Now, I don't know if you'd call it innovation necessarily. But you know, in the whole it is innovative. It's moving forward making incremental changes, but do enough clients or people recognise the value of that, do you think?
Radu Jitea :I don't think so. I think we can go back to to the two types of innovation that I can I can see, so short term where you look at fixing a very specific problem, and once once you do that you're happy enough for the business to take over and try and monetize it as much as possible. Or if it's already monetized, you're you're just improving it to a point where you feel like it gives you the maximum output. So that's one type of innovation. Now the other one, and it's funny, because you mentioned Apple again, and again, and again and again and again. And I think we keep going back to Apple, and you can tell we're fanboys, but what I think Apple had that is not very well known, and you might as well if you look at Apple from the outside, you will just say, Oh my god, they come up with so many things and look, they're not afraid to cannibalise their own products. Actually, that is not true. Because if you look at the strategy, so back in the 80s, Apple when Steve Jobs came back to run the business, so the second time the second time, he came back to be a CEO, he created this vision, a really, really long term vision, it could even go like 20-30 years in the future. So there's a video online that can actually can can be viewed. And it's something that we're sometimes using in our workshops as an example of experience vision. So what they've done, they created this video for a tablet, how will a computer tablet look like and behave like in the future. And even though the technology and the way the video was created in the in the 80s, is quite dated, the principles apply to that project. They're very clearly understood from our point of view as but that's the iPad isn't it? So what I'm trying to say is that the vision they had was: we want to create a tablet computer and we want to get there eventually. So along the way, every single product that they developed was just a bridge to bring them closer to the iPad. So long term Innovation is, you know you minimising risk. So you know you will fail, you know, you will launch products in failure, you can mitigate failure by making sure that you fail early in the process not late. So what I mean by this is when you fail in creating a prototype, it's fine because you can improve the prototype quite quickly within a day or two or a week, and then you can go back and test it again. If you fail when you're in at the fully developed stage, that's going to be a very expensive problem to solve. And in most cases, you will probably not be solved because you can't it's way too late. It's way too much too much momentum and inertia behind the project. Now the other one is risk. When you have a long term goal, you mitigate risk by breaking the project into smaller chunks and testing every single one of them and learning before you move on to the next one. So Apple knew that it's impossible technologically to create a tablet computer that has a big screen and a small battery and a form factor that is, you know, a few millimetres thick. So back then they knew that's an issue. That's why they created, they focused on creating the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, and then they actually combined all that technology into the iPad. And that was the next revolution that they came up with. So innovation sometimes doesn't look like innovation, because it's part of a plan that you need to actually zoom out to be able to see completely, and then it makes sense. So that's what I'm saying that when you look at Apple, it feels like they're actually not concerned about cannibalising their sales. But in fact, they had a very long term goal and strategy for them to get there.
Jonathan Callan :Hmm, that's really interesting, actually. Yeah, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. Because I know the video you're talking about. And yeah, it does look a bit cheesy and a bit dated but you recognise it and you go, that's, that's the iPad. Yeah, yeah. And you realise, Holy God, it's like, early 80s or whatever it was. The thing that as you were talking there, it was thinking about is are the two streams then to to innovation. One is the innovation true necessity. So we just have to solve this problem. This has come up now and we have to get over it. A recent example might be COVID-19, the massive shift towards online services. Somebody I was talking to yesterday who works or their client is PayPal had said the increase in online sales and so on and so forth is is astronomical, absolutely huge. So there's a huge need for people to to move online, to sell products or to do whatever. So they're driven by necessity. I would argue that based on what you're saying, is that they're not driven by strategy. And that's the difference between, say them and Apple, and they're missing that differentiation. So Apple sat down one day and said 30 years into the future, 40 years into the future where do we want to be? Actually, the thing that comes into my mind is is that putting a man on the moon, everything was aligned to that strategy, every single thing that they did, they might go off on a tangent, to find out something to research something and it might look to the outside world like, that's crazy. What what are you going and doing that for? Elon Musk, another great example. You look up the Solar City that he has, you look at the stuff that he's doing on Tesla, you look at the stuff that he's doing on SpaceX, but actually all of it is aligned to putting human life on Mars: battery technology, car transport, or whatever else, you know, how would you get around Mars? How would you power yourself to get around Mars. SpaceX, the actual transport of getting to Mars. All of these things, while they look very separate, are actually part of a strategy, that when connected together, people will realise and go, Oh My God, that's absolute genius. And that's, to me very similar maybe to what Apple was doing all the time going towards this end goal. And if you look at it from a high, then you miss that if you're looking at it from the ground, you just see it as these completely separate ideas. So we just wonder for the clients that we have, the ones that kind of have that long term strategy, that long term goals to say, Ah, that's the thing that we're doing and everything we think of will work towards that. I think though, the challenge sometimes can be if the website or app or whatever else isn't actually so kind of front and centre to your strategy, it just becomes or feels like, it's, it's an aside, it's not part of our daily jobs. And I don't understand it, and it's difficult and frustrating, and therefore don't want to do it. Quite often we see people that come in, and I think you said maybe every three years, they might decide to redo the website or something like that. And you can see by them, it's not something that they enjoy. It's not something that they see is key to an overall strategy. You know, it's just something that they have this necessity to do because it just looks dated or it's not functioning anymore or their competition has done something that has trumped them. Maybe the competition has the strategy, they don't see that strategy. So yeah, I think that's an interesting kind of split in terms of innovation, those that have the strategy, the long term goal, and those that are just doing it, because necessity.
Radu Jitea :Some companies, they most definitely have that long term strategy. However, their online representation of that, it's not the priority for them. So you know, they will not really spend a lot of time trying to tweak the website. If you're if you're the likes of Amazon, you're selling online, well, everything you do, your whole business model depends on their website. If your website is only used as a online representation of who you are, and just for people to find you, maybe it's not that strategic or maybe they don't see it as a strategic so that can make the difference. But you're right, I can see a lot of companies focusing on the short term. Everything is is about tomorrow, and it's about next month and I've seen, I worked in big companies and I can tell you that absolutely even in big companies, you always have this next quarter syndrome, where you only care about your next quarter, you don't really see beyond that you don't know what the vision is. And this might be a strategy, the strategy might be that you just want to sell the company. So what you want to do, you just want to bring it to a point where it looks investable, and it looks good for an investor to buy the company. So that might be the exit strategy, which by definition, it's not a long term. But it does it does impact everything you do. And you know, I would much prefer to work on digital products, to work on them constantly by looking at smaller chunks that require, maybe do let's say, a journey map, and to understand what part of that experience, what step in that experience frustrates customers and then bring that frustration to delight. And that is a very small incremental process. Still innovation but longer term, and I think more focused as well and that could be beneficial. So to go back and reiterate I think well, one thing we could, clients and companies would be to not just treat your product as a one time thing just constantly work on it. No product, no website is ever complete or finished. It's always a version of something that used to be version one and version two, and so on. So constantly every month, get somebody to help you and assist you, looking at identifying pain points and improving them one step at a time.
Jonathan Callan :Yeah, as you're talking there, something came to mind. The history has lots of companies that, you know, are very innovative. And they have a strategy and maybe even even Kodak, you know, had a strategy. So they had everything right, you know, and so far is that they had the strategy they had, you know, passion and all this kind of stuff. The word I just wrote down there was timing. So, so many companies have had all of the right elements, but they just missed that one key ingredient. There was a company a documentary I saw about this company, who had developed a touchscreen device and many of the people who worked on that project then went on in the early 80s to work at Apple and the Mac division and but they had you know this everything was lined up that strategy that huge amount of investment and funding and passion and everything under we're in stealth mode. They weren't, nobody actually knew what they were doing to people in California around just knew something was happening. There was a gathering of these great people and minds and and creative folk or whatever, but the timing was just wrong. So I just wanted to throw timing into the mix that how does that play into say innovation? And, again, just taking it back to our clients. Some of them have fantastic ideas. There's there are some that I talked to, and the idea is that they come up with on that's brilliant. That's absolute genius. But it's maybe a little bit too, maybe it's going into that creative, you know, space. It's just the timing isn't right. It's not comfortable. They think I'm thinking actually, when I say that is, I don't know if you remember Google had a service maybe about 10 years ago called latitude or longitude or something.
Radu Jitea :Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Callan :And it was basically tracking and it wasn't very well publicised, or maybe that was because when it did kind of come out, people were like, you can't do this. You can't constantly track me. That's, that's an invasion of privacy. That's, that's unbelievable. No, no, no, no. I loved it. I thought it was fantastic. Because I could see in a Google map where I was, which I knew anyway, but anyway, it was kind of cool. And then slowly, they kind of morph that into, you know, say Google Maps, and they use it in a different way. But it kind of became acceptable or whatever. But the timing for latitude was wrong. They kind of held on to it, or maybe they had a bigger strategy, and they kind of brought it out again. YouTube there was a service, I think before YouTube, that was a streaming service, maybe the year 18 months prior. And just the technology wasn't right at that time because we didn't have cameras on our phones at that stage. It was incredibly difficult to upload anything to the internet, you had to take it on a normal camera device, plug it in properly with a FireWire cable into your computer or transfer it to your machine, make it smaller file size ended up, you know, I had to do loads and loads and loads of stuff. And that was when YouTube launched, it still had to do that. So the guys who had done it maybe just 18 months before, but maybe none of that technology. So timing, I think is hugely, hugely important in terms of all of the ingredients and throwing that into the mix.
Radu Jitea :So we covered what innovation is. We looked at how creativity, passion and necessity play a role in solving problems in new ways. We looked at how you cann't talk about innovation without considering mitigating risks and failing early. We talk about the types of innovation: short and long term and the way products need to be new but also familiar. We also discussed about how people react to change and what is a better pace for evolving flows and products. We talked about how the right timing decides what products catch on. We realised that innovation is also a state of mind and something you can't take for granted and why it should be part of your vision and long term strategy. Because we want to keep each episode focused and to the point we will continue the conversation on innovation in our next episode, so make sure you check it out. Thank you for listening and like always, please let us know what you think by rating the human experience podcast on your favourite podcasting platform.