Forging The Path To Game-Changing Innovation | Above the Law

Early in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he spoke at an event in Japan. Of course, President Carter was an American speaking English to a Japanese audience, so a translator interpreted his remarks for him. To loosen up the crowd, President Carter told a joke, and the joke was thought to be well received because the audience laughed. In reality, the joke was hard to translate and the interpreter didn’t know if the president’s onlookers would understand it. So the translator basically said, “President Carter just told a funny joke. Everyone must laugh now.”

The innovation process can sometimes yield ideas that are beyond the understanding of the target audience, or too far removed from their experience to be received well. I can imagine Steve Jobs trying to explain his vision for iTunes to the Apple Board of Directors with something along the lines of, “Trust me. People will need this service so they can listen to music on their mobile phone. It’s going to disrupt the entire music industry! I know what I’m doing.” And in the end, that’s exactly what he did.

Early E-discovery products were quite innovative and must have evoked a similar kind of reaction. “We’re going to scan all e-mails in a business and find the relationships between people and what they communicated in e-mail as part of evidence collection.” I can only imagine the chill that went down the spines of general counsel when they first understood the technology might be viable and could shed light on conversations that would have required manual review of thousands of documents.

So how does an innovator with a game-changing idea communicate or test such an idea? Here are a few tips that can help with more disruptive types of innovation.

Truly disruptive ideas require more than traditional market research. The late Clayton Christensen, Harvard business professor and author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” once said, “You can’t do research on a market that doesn’t exist.”

In business we talk often of an addressable market or the amount of spend in a category based upon identifiable competitors. The reality is, if there are no direct competitors to a new idea, there is nothing to measure directly against. Today, it is easy to measure market share for digital music between iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify — but there was a time when that category didn’t exist at all. Asking customers or clients what they want or don’t want isn’t going to help much either, since they have would not have any practical experience using a solution if an addressable market doesn’t yet exist.

Look for needs and a job to be done. So what is an innovator with a game-changing idea to do? To riff on Christensen a bit more, he expanded his thinking in the book “Competing Against Luck,” encouraging innovators to consider the “job to be done.”

You have an idea. Now focus on how it solves a problem and study what individuals do to solve for the need now. Maybe you don’t have an idea yet, but have identified a major pain point in your organization or with your customers.

Manually combing through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents back in the day was the way that discovery was handled. Observing the time and challenges of that manual process helped quantify the need, identify shortcomings, and inform what a solution would need to accomplish to be better than the current approach.

It is also important to note that not every problem has a solution. There is a legal concept known as the “ripeness doctrine” which keeps a court from ruling on an issue before its time. In simple terms, a court doesn’t typically act on an issue that hasn’t yet happened or doesn’t pose a real and immediate threat of injury.

To draw an analogy to this doctrine, some innovative ideas are conceived before their time because users aren’t yet ready or the concept isn’t technically feasible yet. Electric vehicles were developed more than 100 years ago, but generations have passed while battery storage technology caught up and made a Tesla a viable product. The time for electric vehicles has arrived, even though the need and solution have been around for hundreds of years.

Build trust with your customers, and be willing to pivot. The process of testing your ideas requires continuous input along the journey. Most innovators can assess the technical feasibility of their idea and also assess the potential economics. The missing ingredient is often a continuous connection with potential users and a willingness to pivot based upon their feedback.

Thomas Edison and Henry Ford actually partnered in the early 20th century to investigate electric vehicles, but they abandoned that effort, and the Ford Model T cemented the gasoline-powered engine as the solution to “the job” of personal transportation.

Developing relationships with potential users, customers, or clients that you can take along your innovation journey can be the missing ingredient. Here are some of the benefits of having relationships with your prospective customers of your idea:

Understanding the market and your customers’ needs is a process, not an event — but asking thoughtful questions and asking a few trusted customers along your thought process and journey can help you to better understand the best way forward. Even if the world isn’t ready for your idea, taking these steps can help to pave the way for more incremental innovation in the short term.

Ken Crutchfield is Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Ken has more than three decades of experience as a leader in information and software solutions across industries. He can be reached at [email protected].