[music] Let's take a look back at our national, our natural soil conditioner, the Sow-n-Gro. And so this is the thing, we looked at it, we said yuck. And in fact, everyone when I go to do presentations in person, I pass this stuff around, even my class I pass it around and people are looking at it and saying oh this is so cool. And I tell them what it is and they're like they throw it away from their body. That this natural soil conditioner, people just say yuck. So if you said this company had some constraints around this product, what were they? Well, we need to have an idea. So there was someone, this person who had an idea, hey, I will use human hair, recycled human hair. They get the hair off the floor. Human hair as a plant conditioner, a soil conditioner. Okay, so that's the idea. I didn't think of that. I think that was a pretty creative idea. The second step then was to say, okay, I need some people to help me do this. And so the person got some creative partners together, got some helpful people. Maybe a group of designers, maybe a group of business people, to say okay we'll give you money to do this. The person built an organization. And so I was able to go to a website. Let me go grab it. I was able to go to a website. Type in Sow-n-Gro, and buy this stuff. And so they were able to execute. You know when I think about the sort of, the market. The industry constraints is where someone has to able to get lots of hair. And so where do they get the hair from? Well you may notice, all the hair is, this black and grey and they go to China to get the hair. Thats where the hair is mostly black. And then China, they go to barber shops. They collect this stuff off the floor. Theyre able to pack and ship it. They bring it over here. We worry about technical constraints. Does it work? In fact it does work. You know our hair absorbs water. We know its made of protein. Theres lots of nitrogen in there. This is good stuff for plants. In fact if you go back a few hundred years people were using hair, animal hair human hair, all kinds of hair, in gardens to help their plants grow. So this stuff actually works. But where's the problem? The problem is it's kind, kind of got a yuck factor. And so ideally we'd see this kind of overlap but it's not to be. Alright again, so try to get the overlap, try to get people to want this stuff, Most people don't want recycled human hair in their plants, especially not if they are going to eat those plants. So what's there to do? What would you do if you had to fix this? So now you know, means you've got this innovation constraint, we've figured out that the problem is not technical, the problem is not the idea, the problem is not social, the problem is, actually, the problem is social. The problem is that people don't like human hair. How would you fix it? Well some things that the company did were pretty interesting actually. But they moved from Sow-n-Gro to calling it something completely different. They now call it Smart Grow. Right. That makes sense, right? Sow-n-gro is a difficult name to understand. It's a difficult to recognize, and so Sow-n-Gro is probably not the best name because in the English language you have so, sew, so there's lot's and lot's and lot's of words that have that sound. And so if I told my friend, hey go get some Sow-n-Gro, they would have no idea how to get it. On the other hand, if I told my friend hey, buddy, you don't want to dumb grow, you want Smart Grow. Right? You're going to Smart Grow. That they understand. That they get. So they're going to say, well, I'm going to go get some Smart Grow at the store. What else did they do? They changed the color to green. And the green color's important because it represents a plant, right? So that's what a plant looks like, is this green color. So that's another important thing. One, another thing they've done is they've added some data. And so they show you why it works and how it works. In fact that's a pretty good solution. Let me put this down. That's a pretty good idea because what they're able to do is to try to change you, because when we first know what this stuff is, we have a visceral reaction. It's a very emotional reaction. However, if I can convert that emotion into a more rational reaction, like, oh, let me look at the data. Wow, that actually is better than this because it grows faster and I can see the data that's here. It's very important that way. However and this is sad to say Sown-Gro was not quite as popular as it might have been. In fact here's a picture of Mr. Sow-n-gro, I'm not sure what his real name is. Mr. Sow-n-gro with lot, lot and a lot of this stuff. In fact he had so much I was able to get one. Let me share my so here's a big piece of Sow-n-Gro, actually I might even put this on for a few, for a few moments here, wearing it like a poncho. So you got a lot of this Sow-n-Gro stuff, and so what are you going to do with it? Well, it turns out that one day, this is a made-up story, but this is how, something how it would go. One day, Mr. Sow-n-grow got all his hair, and he's trying to think of like, What am I going to do with this, what am I going to do with this? He's watching TV, and he sees a picture of an oil spill, and he sees these poor otters; oh, those poor otters, that oil really sticks to their fur. Hey, wait a minute. The oil sticks to their fur. Hey, I got a lot of fur here, and maybe I can use it to clean up oil. So in fact, the oil spill clean-up is done with these, this is the, the mat this is a large Sow-n-Gro. You'd throw it out there, you'd pull it in, you put it through a ringer, and then you are able to oh, lost some of my hair there. Then you're able to pull the oil out in a very natural way. People don't say yuck to this. People find this quite positive. They think it's a really good thing. On the one hand, my hand here, on the one hand, using it for my plants. People think of it disgusting. On the other hand, people using it for oil spills, people think it's great. It's the same product, what's the difference? Well, there's no technical difference, there's no idea difference, so it's, the only difference here is the people. Is that the people in the society have an aversion to this, but not to this. So we can take the same idea and make it happen for people. So, these generalized constraints. So I took you through how to think about got some hair in my mouth. I took you through how to think about constraints given that sort of specific example. And so if we generalize this thing, we have at the beginning individual constraints. And we're going to talk about these, think about these. What is it that has to be true at the individual level in order for innovation to happen. We have to have a good idea. And psychologists happen to know a great deal about how having ideas works and how it's important. We're going to talk about that in that, context. But groups also matter because we need other people to help us with our idea. And so we're going to tune to the world as a social psychologist who talk about how groups happen and how it feels to be safe in groups, how groups brainstorm. The environment within groups work, and how that works to see how innovation is stopped by them. What has to be true in the group in order for innovation to happen? We're then going to move to the organization level and talk about organizations. Organizations have strategies, they have structures, they have resources. How can those things be put to use in the service of innovation? Some organizations make it very difficult, and some organizations make it very easy. We want to look at the properties, what is different in the organizations that might make it easy in this organization to do something that's very difficult in this organization. Because it may be that the innovation that we're pursuing causes, requires us to organize ourselves differently, to cause our organization to do something different about the way it currently competes and behaves. Then we have the problem of the industry, competition, the market, and in that case we need to think about who is it that we are competing in, who are the rivals, who are the suppliers to us. You know, what are the kinds of, what's the market, what is the nature of the market, are people going to want this? And so that is something we are going to think about as well, and talk about. Actually, we are going to spend the week talking about it. We then need to think about the societal constraints. We gave a couple examples already where society basically says these things we like, these things we don't like. So how can we make sure that for ourselves through the innovation that we're proposing that society is going to say, yeah, that's okay. At the very least, we don't want society to come in and say, you can't do that and make it illegal or make it immoral or make it unethical, the innovation that we have. And then finally, we're going to have to make sure the thing can work. That is the technological constraints are met. That we know that in fact by the end that this thing is going to work, right, functionally. And so if we say this is the condition, these are the conditions of success. This is what has to be true in order for an innovation to happen, well then why on earth would we say, think outside the box? Right? Because that's what thinking outside the box represents is going way outside here, going to a whole new place that makes no sense. No wonder ideas kept getting, this is too expensive, this is too weird, this is too, you know, difficult, all these things. This, that's why. We actually need to be thinking inside the box and find ways of growing the box, of making the box bigger, of making more possibilities in this space where a solution could be possible. And that's what we're going to work on today. But it's not arbitrary how it is that we want to open this thing up because some places, some aspects of this constraint system represented in this venn diagram. Some aspects of this, if I make it bigger like here, I might haven't made the space any larger, the space where solutions could live any larger. I have to really pinpoint the one that will actually make the difference. And so if I can diagnose, that's where I'm going to spend a lot of time doing that looking at a very pinpoint way, which of these constraints do I have. Let me work on that constraint then I won't waste a lot of energy making things better that don't need to be made better. That won't you know, the world will be a better place but it won't improve your likelihood of reaching a successful innovation unless you solve what I call a show stopper. The constraint that will stop your idea dead. Remember I said creative people must be stopped? The world behaves that way, and this is the way they're going to stop you. Which ever one of these things is the most constrained. And it could be any of them. Doesn't have to be any one. And our job is to figure out for the idea that we have, for the solution we're trying to get, which one of these things is the one that was going to stop it. So, turns out that the truth about innovation is that all these things have to true. And, in fact, we have to satisfy them all. Another question is, when are they true? And that's where your diagnosis helps. So, maybe it's, you've been a little bit puzzled as I talk this through, about why constraints. So you say, hey, you know, Professor Owens we're talking about innovation which is a positive thing. You said so yourself. You said innovation's good, it's something that we want. Now why all of a sudden, we're all of a sudden talking about the things that we can't do? Why is it meaningful to talk about the constraints instead of talking about the possibilities? And why not talk about what we can do and not what we can't do? Well, let me just give you a couple ideas here. One thing is, from a management perspective, and again, I teach in a business school, and this is about managing innovation, you know, managing it ourselves. Well, constraints are something we can focus on. So if I know which of the constraints I have, which is the problem, I'll focus on that one, because we know if we're going to be efficient, if we're going to be effective, if we can stay focused, that's a good thing. Because we don't have lots of, of excess energy to waste. The world is requiring us to be much more efficient. And so if we can focus, that's a much better thing. Constraints are also something we can often agree upon. It's really hard to say, I maybe worked in a project, with, with some other people, a school project, a, a work project, but say, hey let's make something really cool. Well, what you think of as cool, or desirable or as creative is really different than what another person thinks of as cool, as desirable, as creative. And so how do you come to decisions about that? It's really hard to agree on what's cool. On the other hand, constraints if we could say look, we're going to make something but it has to fit in a person's hand. That's really easy to agree upon. And then in fact, there are is a certain size of hand that we can do all say, lets measure the hand and it won't be the 99 percentile hand, the big hand and will be the small hand, will be some more in the middle, the average size hand. And then everyday we can say, does it fit in the hand, yes, we agree upon that. Every idea we get we can say does it fit in the hand, and if it does we can agree upon that. Constraints are all something that we can measure. And so if we say the cost of this product is to take a product example, the cost of this product has to be less than $10 or people will not buy it. Well, if we can measure that, that's great, because if we know the current way we have the idea that costs $12, 12 Euros. All right, or 12 denote, what ever, that we know that we have to bring it down to 10 and if we know that we're 12 then we have work to do. If we're at 9 then we have no work to do, we're done or we can stop. And that's very important in managing people in a group managing motivation, managing progress because if I know I'm close to the end I work really hard just to finish it off. Whereas I think if I have no idea where I am, I'm not going to be working as hard to push the innovation forward. Then finally the thing about constraints is that constraints are what drive adoption. So when we look things, when we look at propositions for change we look at innovations that people are offering us and we say, should I do that? You say well how does that fit in my life? I have a certain set of constraints, I have a certain amount of money, a certain amount of time, a certain set of habits, a certain way I live. A certain set of constraints around myself. And whatever you propose for me has to fit in that constraint. And so the constraints drive adoption. They're exactly what drives adoption. So if we want to think about adoption as innovation, the constraints are the most important thing that we can actually think about. That's why I think, thinking about what stops innovation, the constraints on innovation is much more productive, especially in the short term than thinking about what, you know, what's possible. All those things out there, because there's too much to think about. If you're a designer, work in design, or in, in graphic design for that matter, you'll know that knowing more of what the constraints are is actually very much more helpful than not being told what the constraints are until after the fact. So if we think about why innovation's hard. Well, innovation's hard because we don't find a good problem. We have to find a good problem in order for innovation to happen. Innovation is problematic, because we don't generate good ideas. So we have a problem, but we don't have good ideas for that problem. You know, that can stop it also. In the nation's heart, when we don't choose the best idea, we may have great ideas, but we don't choose the best one because that's the difficult one, or because our boss likes that one, or because that one's easier, or because that one's faster, but not necessarily the best. But I think the most important reason that innovation is hard is because we don't anticipate, as we don't become strategic and think ahead about the constraints that we know we are going to face. And so that's what we're about in this class. It's about understanding the innovation constraints and how it is that we're going to get around them.
