My name is Curt Carlson.
My passion has always been, how people innovate.
I really believe that the way we work is our most important innovation.
That ultimately, the faster we can innovate, the better we can innovate, the faster the society is going to move forward, the more jobs we're going to create, and safer the world is going to be.
Its a world of abundance.
There are more opportunities now, around the world than any time in my career, but you have to work properly.
We've asked thousands of people what their definition of innovation is,
and its amazing how few organizations have actually stopped, even for a little bit, and said "what is our common definition?"
So, we've spelled it out. We say it's the creation and delivery of new customer value in the marketplace,
with a sustainable business model.
Now, people often say it's about invention or creativity. Well no, those are inputs
What really matters is,
"is it in the marketplace? Are people using it?"
And if it doesn't have a sustainable business model, it means it goes away.
A quick example
There have been over six thousand mousetrap patents in the history of the U.S. Patent Office.
They get a couple hundred more every year.
How many of them have actually made money, and are used?
About a dozen.
In other words, there are essentially six thousand patents that have no value.
They're creative, they're clever, they're IP, so they're an invention, but they're not an innovation.
If you look at the typical accomplished professional,
one of the big issues they have today is that they really don't know how to create value. They've never been taught that, they've never experienced that.
Now here's; and mistakes are made all over the place, so here's a simple mistake that's often made in Silicon Valley.
How many times have you heard people say something like
"fail fast to succeed early".
For lots of people, particularly in Asia and parts of Europe, that's terrifying.
So, suppose I frame it this way though for you.
The goal is to learn fast to succeed early.
Innovation is about learning. It's about understanding your customers, your approach, the marketplace, the competition. It's about learning fast,
and that framing changes everything.
When people think of it as a learning exercise, two things happen.
One of which is most people know how to learn, so it's not terrifying, it may still kind of foggy in their head how to go about learning
but it's not the same thing as selling to someone "you have to fail to succeed".
Failing fast doesn't tell you what to do.
Learning fast tells you exactly what to do.
It says "anything you can do that speeds up the learning process is a good thing."
So having a common language speeds it up. We're not floundering around in this muck and mayer, right?
Having the definition for a value proposition; that is a good thing. That speeds it up.
The fastest way you can learn; there are a number of ideas. You have to do, you have to actually practice it, you want to have continuous feedback from your colleagues,
you want to have the best mentors, you want to have the right incentives.
As soon as you start talking about learning, all the sudden, all the ingredients that ought to go into that become crystal clear,
and what we've learned is, if you put in place,
those kind of practices,
for teams or entire companies,
just amazing things happen.
I'm particulary interested in the United States, to get these practices more widely used for example, by the National Science Foundation
which is really struggling with what they call "The Valley of Death". Everybody knows what the "Valley of Death" is.
You do research and you try to cross it over to make a commercial entity out of it, and fail.
You don't say research is "The Valley of Death", you don't say commercialization is "The Valley of Death". The truth is, they're all risky,
They all have a discipline involved in them.
If you're an amateur in any of them, you're not going to do good work, right?
The reason we call it "The Valley of Death" is because we, until recently, have not taken that seriously as a discipline.
Something that we ought to have a common language, frames, processes, and if we do, I am convinced because i've seen it at S.R.I, and other dozens of companies that we've worked with,
the results you can transform into are really quite remarkable.