Scaling Time Brilliantly

Technology is changing relentlessly. It always has been, but the time scale is far more compressed these days. Faster development techniques (SDKs, APIs, Frameworks), massive low-investment distribution networks (iTunes, Google Play) and near-instant fabrication (Makerbot and more) have decreased the time it takes to travel from idea to functional product.
All this means that shifts can happen faster. We’re witnessing the collapse of decades-old constructs around us almost daily. But what we don’t realize is that technology consumers, not companies, are driving these revolutions based on their casual demands. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just that people often don’t understand how much power they have until everything’s changed around them. Sometimes the changes are so gradual, people don’t even recognize the technology revolutions they create.
Most of the time “the way it’s always been” needs to be disrupted, since it’s "super old school," by which I mean centralized and generally wildly inefficient. And if there’s anything people can’t stand in a 24-7, always-on society, it’s inefficiency.
We’re on the brink of busting up the status quo through a citizen-engineered revolution the likes of which we’ve never seen.

1.  The higher-education lecture hall. Gone are the days where you pay tens of thousands of dollars to sit in a room with thousands of other people, only to be talked at. In-person classes at universities are adapting to become more interactive in format, rather than a really expensive place to fall asleep.
 With massively open online courses, welcome to the 21st century lecture hall. Your classmate might be logging in from Abu Dhabi, bringing an entirely new viewpoint to the conversation. Universities like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford have started offering courses for free online, breaking down walls and giving educational opportunity to everyone, regardless of zip code or what’s in your bank account.
2. The old way of designing and manufacturing physical stuff. By the time you had designed and prototyped a technical innovation in the past, chances are Apple would have already changed the shape of their iPhone (or connector or something). We needed more control and a way to innovate faster.
3. Our dependence on oil for energy. It takes a long, long time to break down something as longstanding, and with as many private sector and government interests, as the energy industry. But it’s happening, as people opt for more control over our energy dependence.
 Electric cars and charging stations are becoming more and more prominent in cities around the country. Soon, you won’t have to worry about how far you can make it without a charge, as plugs replace pumps nationwide.
4. Our payment infrastructure. We’re relying on incredibly out-of-date technology, as well as credit card companies that charge merchants the largest invisible tax on our economy: interchange. Every purchase you make with a credit card costs a merchant a fraction of that purchase, which up until now, they’ve just chalked up as a loss.
 Merchants are realizing that it shouldn’t cost money to move money. Instead of paying a tax for nothing in particular, merchants are exploring mobile payment platforms that offer some sort of real value beyond just the transaction (in the form of getting new customers in the door and keeping the ones they have). Consumers and merchants are experiencing the simple yet powerful benefit of saving money.
5. The digital divide. It used to be that rural areas simply didn’t have as good of access to the Internet as urban areas. That was a major problem. Luckily we don’t have to rely on the speed of broadband anymore to solve this problem.
 Mobile infrastructures are leveling the playing field, giving more equal access to the Internet in countries and areas of the United States that fell within the realm of the digitally divided. Add to this trend the much lower cost of mobile devices and tablets (versus a desktop or laptop device) and the opportunity to access technology becomes that much more possible.

So, what do you say? This year, let’s break down some new walls just because we can. After all, changing the status quo is the number one thing that gets engineers excited.

brilyuhnt design thinking

As a Search software business leader, you have the opportunity to make bold choices that keep you one step ahead of the market and make you indispensable to your customers. Innovative leaders, like the late Steve Jobs, do that by thinking like web and product designers.
"What a designer does is imagine the future," That's what's powerful about design thinking for a business leader."
A designer brings two essential perspectives to every problem: empathy and creativity. "To invent a future that doesn't exist, you really have to understand what people are doing today and completely reimagine it,".
You have to know your customers well enough to find the right problem and give yourself enough creative freedom to find the right solution.

1. Observe your customers in many contexts. If you want to innovate, skip the market research. "You can't innovate with market research; all you can do is incremental product improvements,".
Instead, really get to know your customers. Observe them at home, in the workplace, and on the go. "Think of yourself as an anthropologist,". You're looking for frustrations, processes that waste time, or work-arounds people have found to accommodate poor designs. Each is an opportunity for innovation.

2. Find the right problem. "Most of the time, people are solving the wrong problem,". To solve problems your customers can't articulate, you have to use all the data you found during observations.

3. Brainstorm hundreds of ideas. Once you identify the right problem, let your imagination run wild. "People tend to gravitate very quickly toward solutions,". "They start thinking of how services they already provide could be adapted and immediately truncate the brainstorm down to what is known."
Give your team the freedom to indulge every wild possibility. Include ideas that you have no idea how to implement, or that don't fit your company's current expertise. "In order to be successful, you might need to completely re-engineer your company,". That might be scary, but those who have the guts to do it will be the ones who solve the right problems and succeed.
4. Create and test easy prototypes. Take the ideas that seem most interesting and make easy samples to share with the people you observed. Mock services with screenshots, products with cardboard, and apps with post-it notes. "You want to show them stuff that's obviously not good or done so they can react more honestly,".
Designers call this "building to think," meaning that watching people engage with the prototype sparks even more creativity. "You give them something they've never seen before and they act in new ways,". "You start creating with them." When you do land on a final design, you'll be able to choose it with confidence.

Motivating creativity

Your company is filled with creative employees. Some of them are easy to pinpoint and many others are brimming with untapped potential that can help your business thrive in an ever-changing market. Many companies unintentionally hinder creativity, so learning how to motivate creative employees can give you an advantage over your competition.

The way you treat creative employees has a snowball effect on the organization as a whole.
By creating a culture that inspires creativity, you can motivate employees from all areas of the company to offer more ideas. That diversity improves your idea pool and increases your chance of success.


1. Give feedback on new ideas. Generating new ideas takes time and effort, so employees need to know that their creativity is valued. "You're asking your employees to give you feedback and suggestions, "That needs to be a reciprocal road."
When you solicit creative ideas, establish a point person to give feedback on each of them. You can also crowd-source the process using an online voting and comment system, or have a live brainstorm. The more employees understand why their ideas did or did not work, the more motivated they will feel to offer ideas again.

2. Recognize and reward collaboration. Creativity is typically an iterative process, where one person says the initial idea and others jump in to improve it. The best teams build off each other, so they need to be motivated to work together.
"Prizes [or recognition] for the best idea often encourage competition instead of cooperation, This stifles creativity and upsets those whose contributions go unrecognized. Instead, acknowledge everyone involved. That way, you encourage future teamwork and fuel creativity.

3. Put creative work in context. When senior executives think about innovation, they think five or ten years out, while employees tend to focus on immediate improvements. That discord can lead employees to suggest ideas that get dismissed for being off target -- a missed opportunity that saps motivation.
When you solicit creative ideas, tell your team what you hope to accomplish. "Put people in a different mindset, "You might say, 'here's how the market seems to be changing, so what can we do now to put us in a good position five years from now?'” That specificity empowers creative employees to succeed.

4. Celebrate well-considered failures. Inspired ideas often fail, even when the idea is well vetted before it's released. "Being creative is risky," To motivate creativity, reward well thought out ideas, even when they lead to failure.
"Celebrate the effort and audacity to innovate," "That sends a message to employees that you're rewarding the mindset and the willingness to try to improve."
Plus, your company needs those failures -- they often provide valuable lessons that help you find success.

brilyuhnt collaboration

While it’s unlikely that focus groups can create an innovative idea, they can help evolve one--fine-tuning how it will be embraced and determining the feature set, price point, and physical embodiment of the core idea.
In my view, innovation is really a three-step process, and only in the last one are focus groups truly helpful.

Engage with people in a one-on-one context.

Rather than a focus group, we call this a “contextual focus.” It’s learning what people do in a particular context and the value that has in their life. The context may be their car, home, or job, and even in the life of significant others. In a sense, you could call this deconstructing the focus group. Rather than a group, you are using a focal point to better understand real people communicating valuable information in response to stimuli in their real lives. A focus point may also involve what cannot be seen but impacts people’s experience; that is, exploring the physics, chemistry, or economics of a problem; learning what dirt in a home really is and what removes it most effectively.

Come back to the table to make sense of what is uncovered in step one.

This is the time to ideate and figure out how to resolve problems and address unconscious needs; conceptualize unexpected but meaningful innovation while still embedding it in the familiar. During this stage, we rapidly prototype a lot of different ideas and test them in a controlled environment, looking to fail quickly if they don’t work, but learning from each failure. We call this the “focus filter.” By using the focus filter during early concept development, it allows us to “fail faster” in order to get the product to a stage in which we optimize it and take it to market.

Take it to a focus group.

Once you get closer to the real thing and have a truly innovative product, then you can go to a traditional focus group to help you figure out how to place and position it.

For innovation, we need to look for the outliers--the game-changing ideas that will truly transform their categories. To create successful products or services, we often look for and learn from the behaviors and aspirations of outliers--but we also need to create innovations that will be embraced by the many. After all, if we create something so revolutionary that only a small fraction of people buy and benefit by it, then we are not doing our job. Focus groups are about fine-tuning for mass appeal--about evolving the truly revolutionary ideas to the point where they will be embraced by the majority of consumers, while at the same time not losing the essential points of what made them innovative in the first place. For informing that evolution, focus groups serve a very useful and valuable purpose. Just don’t expect them to be where those revolutionary ideas originate.