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Creativity
How Political Is the Process of Innovation?
To effect change, how do we build consensus on values?
Posted March 7, 2020
Will 2020 mark significant shifts in the politics of the United States? The current drama in the Democratic Party is fascinating for what we are seeing in terms of ideas, personality, power, and money. What lessons can entrepreneurs learn from what is going on?
The path for innovators and change-agents is long and hard. This has been known forever, in every context. Revolutionary, hopefully brilliant ideas are not enough. Charismatic personalities are not enough. Having a pile of money is not enough. Having strong initial support from a small but passionate niche of believers is very encouraging, but may not be enough to drive broader interest and demand.
Among the candidates in the Democratic Party running for President, look at those whose proposals were most radical or challenging of the status quo. In-person and online, their supporters enthusiastically showed passionate support and tremendous energy. As awareness of these proposals became more widely disseminated, the resistance also grew, and diverse groups of citizens who would vote in November began to clarify their priorities. Their dissatisfaction and/or distrust of the calls for disruptive change spread just as virally, and as primary elections proceeded, the energy needed to align the Democratic Party has now coalesced around two major figures.
How is this situation similar to startups? Especially for a high-tech startup, getting a small customer base of early adopters is hard, but how does it build momentum among the mainstream customers? This challenge is often referred to as “Crossing the Chasm,” a term popularized almost 30 years ago by Geoffrey Moore, a prominent consultant and author of a book by the same name.
The key issue is that what entices early adopters may not motivate mainstream customers. Founders can get so excited by their initial niche supporters that they forget to do the hard work of truly understanding what mainstream customers want. As a result, they will be in shock when sales of their product stall unexpectedly. This happens a lot to inexperienced founder-CEOs, especially those who depend on their intuition and instincts.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Looking back in time, it’s easy to blame the marketing department for not doing their homework. Their defense is usually: “We did the surveys, polled lots of consumers.” What did they miss? Why did their quantitative, scientifically-designed methodology fail to alert them of what they needed to know? Numbers don’t lie, right?
The more productive questions are:
- What assumptions did we make when we designed the surveys?
- What do we believe about our end-user customers and their needs?
- What did we test for in our surveys?
- What did we learn about asking “better questions”?
- What do we believe about the value of our products and/or services?
The last question is most critical, and where the political angle comes in. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If perceptions of value are highly subjective, what does it mean for a product to garner millions of dollars in sales to diverse segments of society?
Obviously, many people—with diverse priorities—are willing to pay for that product. Do they really believe the product is completely perfect and that their lives are incomplete without it? The parallel to elections of politicians is that the message of the winner must resonate strongly enough with people who have diverse backgrounds and interests so that they will vote for him or her, even though they might disagree with some of their policies.
People want positive change—in the form of new things that are better, cheaper, more convenient, more fun. What people don’t want is negative change—physical, mental, and emotional discomfort, especially feelings of insecurity, such as can result from unfamiliarity with high-tech features.
For an innovator, the issue is how to balance and package the truly new features that may engender resistance with enough desirable features so that the final product will appeal to large numbers of people with diverse interests. The campaign to launch a new product (that will be successful) is very much like a political campaign. The CEO and VP Marketing must reach out to the ecosystem, to learn as much as they can, to communicate as effectively as they can, even before they initiate product development. The human-centered design movement is very much about reminding businesses that they exist is to serve customers (end-users), to provide products and services that solve real problems (not just entertain) for them.
For a successful outcome, the creative process of innovation is actually far more important and a greater challenge than just building an innovative product or service.
In the political context, the creative process of building true consensus is more than ideas, personality, power, or money. A leader is defined by his or her followers. What are the public’s aspirations, and especially, what are dreams they weren’t conscious of or couldn’t articulate? How can a leader surface and communicate those dreams and make them seem achievable?
What does a leader have to do to inspire and support hope? At the most fundamental level, this is about trust, credibility, reputation, and truth. What can we believe in?
