Tune Bad Ideas to Innovate

If you're not making mistakes, you're not taking risks, and that means you're not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more chances to learn and win... John W. Holt, Jr.

"You have to plan for creativity," Dr. Ellen Weber notes. "You just can't throw paint at the wall and expect it to look good." So how do some businesses come forward with groundbreaking inventions that change the way we do things?

Consider this... The Google phone just burst through the gates, bringing innovation and magic to handsets! Built on Google's Android system and HTC's inventive magic, the revolutionary phone is user-friendly so you avoid thick user manuals. Google phone features Touch Flo. Just reach out intuitively and touch a web page, a memo or document on the screen to move it around where you want. No up and down buttons that get in your way. Who created Touch Flo anyway?

Interestingly, HTC's innovation emerged from it's Magic Labs. John Wang, who thinks of himself as "Chief Innovation Wizard," purposely created Magic Labs where 60 "magicians," experts in many fields, work through new ideas quickly. Unbelievably, the whole organization is designed to fail. Hmm... failing's not what most people would plan when it comes to invention...

John Wang explains what he means by fail...

The way to get a great idea is to have many ideas. By definition, most of your ideas will fail. You want to be able to generate ideas very fast, very cheaply and fail very often but at very low cost. Magic Labs is optimized for the efficiency of failure. Among the many ideas, there will be great ideas that bubble up and then we will invest R&D efforts to cultivate the great ideas.

And, Magic Lab's process...

Magic Lab magicians tackled the problem that phones were getting complicated. They tried rearranging menus, making the screen easier to view, so on and so forth. But, zero results... "One day, inside Magic Labs, Wang shares excitedly, "there was an epiphany -- that was a day I still remember -- and the key can be described in a single word: baby."

We recognized that we had been going about simplicity in the wrong way. This happened in a brainstorming session. The true mission is not to reduce learning, but to eliminate learning. There needs to be zero learning, not very little learning.

The baby is probably the best expression for zero learning because the baby has not learned anything yet. If she wants to see the monkey on the other side of the block, she simply reaches out and turns the cube. I don't think she would read a user menu. There is something that is innate to living beings that you just simply reach out intuitively and turn the object. In HTC Touch, there is a slide out cube and you literally just turn the cube. That design was actually motivated by the recognition that people don't read user manuals, they just want to interact with objects intuitively.

The magicians applied this principal to Touch Flo and it germinated from there...

Inventors are both born and bred... it's all about gene pool and learning process. The human brain has remarkable plasticity, which opens up new possibilities. The more people practice doing new activities the more neural stimulation and synaptic strenghtening occurs. Would you agree U.S. schools and universities need to foster more inventors? Here's how that can take place...

Students discover workable design through doing... Skills for invention are really no different than learning to throw a touchdown pass or play the trombone, Jeff Schuler, executive director of Lemelson-MIT Invention Box asserts. "It takes practice. Students need the opportunity to get their hands dirty and invent," he said. "Generally speaking, there's not enough 'learning by doing' taking place in today's high schools."

Today's universities help young inventors and entrepreneurs by creating similar kinds of labs. Chris Brown describes an Entrepreneurial Lab at Kent State University. Here young entrepreneurs have access to tools that can make new business happen.

How are you and others finding your fire? "If your products, services and customer experience don’t thrill you, Mike Wagner challenges, "you can be certain they don’t thrill your customers."

How are you planning for creativity so you stand tall in today's competitive market?