Communicating Disruptive Innovations
Entrepreneurs and other innovators often worry if they will find enough ideas, and they are usually wrong. Some also worry about transforming their ideas into viable businesses, and they are usually right. Very few ever stop to think about the problem of persuading other people to adopt their innovative ideas. “Build a better mousetrap,” they used to say, “and the world will beat a path to your door”. But this doesn’t happen.
Some new ideas take off very quickly — like motor cars or smartphones — but many others are rejected, or at least delayed by the market, by management or even by the inventors themselves. A good idea simply doesn’t spread automatically. We have to understand why this happens and to work around it, taking appropriate steps to overcome the obstacles.
Modern competitive swimming began shortly after the invention of the indoor swimming pool in the 1820s. By the 1840s the sport was already popular but, in Europe at least, everyone swam with the breaststroke. Today any swimmer knows that of the four standard strokes that is the slowest. Why did they not adopt the front crawl, the fastest? Was it unknown?
Crawl was known since antiquity and in the 1840s was commonly used outside of Europe. We also know that Europeans knew about it because in April 1844 the British Swimming Society invited two native American visitors to demonstrate their style at the Holborn swimming baths. Witnesses described the crawl as “grotesque” and “un-European”. After the demonstration they continued to swim in their more “gentlemanly” breast stroke, for another 40 years.
Much more recently, the management of the Gibson guitar company decided in 2014 that they would equip all Les Paul Standard guitars with a G-Force automatic tuner. This decision was massively unpopular among guitarists, though there are actually good arguments for using it. So, when they announced that the 2019 models would have manual tuners this was highlighted in the industry news and product reviews.
In other cases, the barrier to innovation is the management. Perhaps the best case-study illustrating this is the strange case of the Xerox Alto personal computer, the world’s first PC with a graphical user interface. By the end of the 1960s the Xerox company essentially owned the plain paper copying business. To prepare for the next generation of office technology they invested in an entirely new research center in Palo Alto on the west coast — Xerox PARC. Tasked with delivering the office of the future, PARC did exactly that. By 1973 they had invented or developed all of the core technologies like graphical user interfaces, networking, WYSIWYG editing and much more.
Xerox’s Alto was never a commercial product but more than just a prototype. A 1000 Alto’s were made for internal use as a future platform for developing other technologies. In 1973 it had capabilities that no PC would have for 12 years. Xerox had a massive advantage over rivals in the market. But then management chose not to develop it as a commercial product, missing an opportunity to be the leader in this market. Perhaps the world could have been dominated by Xerox Xphones, Xpads and Xbooks, but it didn’t happen.
Entire books have been written about what went wrong. To be fair Xerox was originally a classic disruptive innovator, building the plain-paper photocopier industry from concept to market domination. By 1977 when the fateful decision was taken, they had become sales driven and the managers was less familiar with innovation management. When the Alto was presented to the management team at an event in Florida in 1977, they were not impressed. Witnesses attribute this to their inability to accept such a radical change. They also noted that the managers’ wives were much more impressed, which is an important detail.
Almost certainly their discomfort comes from the fact that the office of the future disrupted the social structure of the 1970s office. In those days senior people did not touch keyboards or any other machines. Like the captain of a ship, they simply gave orders. Even to touch a keyboard would make them lose face. Almost certainly this thought was subconscious. They could feel that something was wrong and rationalized more palatable explanations about business models. But the truth is that their subconscious brain was on red alert, sensitive to this existential threat to their lifestyle.
This highlights a universal truth, that most people can readily accept technological change but they have trouble accepting social change. You see this also in visions of the future, where everything is high tech but the social context is unchanged. You see it also in science fiction, where writers find it hard to imagine real social change.
These subconscious drivers are incredibly powerful, providing an explanation also for one of the greatest business mysteries: why it took people 40 years to accept wheeled luggage. We know that at least one company worked on the concept in the 1950s. Dudley Bloom at the Atlantic Luggage company explained much later that he had pitched the idea to management in 1957 only to be told that nobody would want it. The reason was that people would be afraid of looking ridiculous. As late as 2005 Chicago Sun Times journalist Julia Keller was still writing that she had rejected wheeled bags because she was afraid of looking weak.
But then in 1988 Robert Plath made himself a bag on wheels in his garage and started using it for work. Nobody laughed at him because he was a 747 captain at NorthWest Airlines. His colleagues also wanted them so he founded the TravelPro company and within a few years wheeled bags were standard. This is extremely important. Rejection of technologies that make life easier is often blamed on macho pride, but the fact that the wheeled luggage taboo was broken means that it was more than that; it was conformity to a norm.
Even today, some wheeled bags are acceptable — like luggage for travelling — but others are not. Wheeled shopping bags — often belittled as “granny bags” — cannot be used by young people in most cultures. Eventually this will change, but these primitive fears still exist in our subconscious.
And they almost certainly are primitive fears because we share them with some other primates, suggesting that these ideas evolved a long time ago before our family trees diverged. Dr Erica van de Waal has done some fascinating research on wild populations of Vervet monkeys that shines some light on this. In one experiment she trained one group of monkeys to prefer pink colored maize and another to prefer blue colored maize. Then she noted that when two individuals went from one group to another, they ate what the locals eat, even though they believed it to be unpalatable. They have to fit in with the new group, according to Dr de Waal, because they cannot survive alone. Being part of a group means survival, so they are motivated to do just like the locals do.
There is another factor from evolutionary biology that likely contributed to some degree to these strange norms. Studies in the late seventies by Kenneth Glanders’ team at Duke University revealed that wild Howler Monkeys in Costa Rica also exhibit an interesting behavior. Newcomers to an area always watch what the locals eat first then eat the same. But this is not because they are trying to impress the locals. They often eat the leaves of trees which are toxic in varying degrees. Eating random leaves can cause sickness and death. Local individuals know which are best so it is safest to eat the same.
So, on one hand we have inherited from our ancestors the use of innovation as a survival trait. When conditions change, we can adapt by inventing new solutions. But contrasting this is the pressure of conformity, which can sometimes delay or block innovations. The problem for innovators is to work around this subconscious effect.
Concretely what could you do?
In the Xerox Alto case there were many things that Xerox could have done better. They could have reduced the polarization between the head office on the east coast and PARC on the west coast by swapping some employees, so that there was less mistrust. They could also have exposed management to the new ideas gradually, through placing Altos on the desks of early adopters, through coverage in media and through incremental improvements. They could also have included spreadsheet software, the most effective “killer app” of the era. Spreadsheet software had already been developed for mainframes and they had the skills to implement it on the Alto.
Atlantic Luggage Co could have changed the attitudes to wheeled luggage in several ways. First of all they should have always shown the bags being used by strong models in advertising, to get away from the idea that they are only for older people. They could also have given them to airline pilots and other people with high status, or perhaps to platinum level frequent flyers. And they could have used product placement. Marilyn Monroe’s first entrance in the 1959 classic movie Some Like it Hot was at a train station, carrying a small suitcase. She could have been pulling a bag on wheels.
Individually we can all do better, too
First of all, we need to learn how to avoid rejecting our own ideas. Very often good ideas are lost because the inventor doesn’t recognize the value. Write down ALL ideas, even the crazy ones. Then re-read them later. You will be surprised how many turn out to be useful in the end.
Secondly, we need to be more objective in judging other people’s ideas. Your first reaction might be to think that you don’t like it, but ask yourself why. Is there really a good reason, or is it the monkey brain that speaks. One way to work around these subconscious biases is to try to find arguments in favor of the idea you don’t like.
Finally, everyone needs to learn some essential influencing skills. Learn how to speak and write persuasively, learn how to develop an influencing strategy and learn to identify the hidden obstacles that stop people adopting your disruptively innovative ideas.
