Stackhouse

Startups today seem to be born to solve a known problem. To flip around Edison’s famous quote, the most common inspiration for invention is perspiration. The kind of frustrating sweat associated with not being able to do something you believe you should easily be able to. In other words, the discovery of a need.

This abutment off need and technology seems to be the driving force of our digital economy. The discovery of a need has therefore been transformed into an economic force driving large aspects of our lives.

Yet ideas are not needs. Ideas are new and transformative but should be born from something bigger than frustration. But this co-opting has happened in our society and the result is that ideas are now considered a commodity. I think that’s a sad turn of events.

Many ideas are great but hindered by technology and the ability for society to contextualize the idea. Idea’s based on needs are ideas based on today’s needs. This means they are vetted and doable and often even easily understood but it also means they are today’s idea.

What innovation truly is is tomorrow’s ideas.

anywho

Let’s imagine for a minute that I have a 5 year old who loves the movie Cars. Loves it so much he even loves Cars 2. He wants to watch it over and over and everywhere. I buy him every single Cars toy, buy Cars pajamas, Cars lunchboxes, etc. But let’s imagine that I illegally downloaded the movie. Not to delve too far into this imaginary tale but … he really wouldn’t stop demanding that we go to the theaters and even afterwards just kept wanting to go and finally, one night, during a tantrum about not going to see the midnight showing for the 10th time, I finally buckled and stole the film. 

Why am I’m using Cars as an example? Because the Cars franchise, as a whole, is one the largest entertainment franchises in the World.

Read More

References in this blog post: HBR Ideacast, Story of Mike Geary

So I’ve started walking a lot. It’s a big deal for someone who’s been on a bicycle since he was eight. But I’ve started to enjoy the feeling of walking around the city, moving at the speed of the people and being able to zone out and thinking about my day. 

Part of the zoning out bit has become an obsession with the HBR Ideacast Podcast. It’s become a kind of secret weapon for me. Listening to insights from business professionals while walking to a meeting with fellow agency/inventor types makes the meetings much more entertaining.

Recently I was listening to an interview with Heidi Grant Halvorson who’s written a book called “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently”.

(pause)

yeah, I agree, that title is awful. This is why the podcast is great because I would never have sought out this information it just happen to fall into by head through my iPhone.

Read More

Ideas are the product of inventive companies. But innovation and invention alone does not make a product or service a reality. Putting a product or service to market doesn’t make it real, it doesn’t make an idea true. Numerous inventors have tinkered away in obscurity, their inventions never seeing the light of day because there was no one to tell anyone about them. That’s all marketing really is, it’s a service that tells other people about a product, service, company, etc. There’s many methods to making this happen but, when successful, they all lead to one outcome. They make an idea into a truth. 

For better or for worse, marketing is the truth maker. We consume news and content everyday and as the amount of consumption increases it’s up to a mixture of PR, trusted referrals and engaging experience design to grab our attention. Once the attention of a group is engaged, only then is the product or service achieve truth. Truth, it’s said, is the reality that we collectively chose to believe in. There is no concrete truth outside of our beliefs. Even science refers to itself as a collection of hypotheses that have yet to be disproven. This isn’t to say that marketing and advertising are truthful. We know that advertising works by creating false, aspirational realities that we desire to be true. But marketing as a profession is about spreading an idea and thereby, creating “truth”. How that’s done is the complicated part.

But it’s up to companies that innovate to learn and understand the value of marketing. The key role that marketing plays in your product or service. Marketing distributes the message of your product, thereby making your beliefs, truth and your product real.

A new bill is moving through Congress titled S. 978. It would make the recording and sharing copyrighted materials illegal and punishable as a felony.

“Makes unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty of up to 5 years in prison. Illegal streaming of copyrighted content is defined in the bill as an offense that “consists of 10 or more public performances by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works” and has a total economic value, either to the copyright holder or the infringer, of at least $2,500.”

A new website has recently launched called http://www.freebieber.org which rightly points out that, should this bill have been enacted 5 years ago, people like Justin Bieber would never have become stars and would instead be just getting out of juvenile detention.

But that’s not the reason I find the bill such a misstep by the recording industry’s lobby. 

Read More

Technology is a purely and distinctly human invention. It’s not separate from who we are. It’s not the confusion associated with programming a VCR or using Facebook. Technology is the process that we pursue in order to make our lives collectively better. This process is in out nature; it’s the reason that we survive as a species. In fact there’s little difference between the hand axes we produced 50,000 years ago and the Internet. Both speed our access to vital resources. The ax brought us meat and the Internet brings us information and commerce. Without either we would not be.

 Paul Virilio professed that with each new technological invention a new paradigm of accidents associated with that technology arises. His example is that it would have been tough to die in a train collision before trains. He goes on to discuss how technology, in an attempt to mitigate accidents speeds itself up so as to invent solutions to these integral accidents. But by doing so simply creates further paradigms of potential integral accidents, like being fired for the misguided “everyone” email.

Read More