brent phillips

Prior to the holidays, Guy gave a presentation on innovation at the one year anniversary event for Microsoft and Novell. Shortly after, he was gracious enough to answer a few questions for me about innovation, technology, and his personal life. If you’re not familiar with Guy, I would start here http://www.guykawasaki.com.

Guy, thanks again for your time today. To start, can you walk me through how you came up with the principles in the Art of Innovation?

Guy: The truth is that most principles in business books are not new. It’s just that some authors package them better. I learned about half of what’s in The Art of Innovation in the Macintosh Division back in the 80s, and I stole the rest from other books about innovation. Packaging isn’t the only important skill—knowing what to steal is too.

It is a fantastic framework.   Are you getting any feedback from companies or entrepreneurs who have applied your principles with success?

Guy: I get emails everyday from people who have utilized the principles. Like I said, you need to know what to steal. What I find most gratifying is when not-for-profits are able to apply these principles.

And how about at Garage, are you seeing a general improvement in pitches - given your 10/20/30 principle? Someone who came in and wowed your team with a perfect pitch?

Guy: Sadly, I don’t think pitches are getting much better. The most disappointing ones start off with, “I’ve read your book, Guy, so I have a great pitch,” and then the entrepreneur has sixty slides, takes one hour, and uses the ten-point font. Honestly, there’s no such thing as a perfect pitch—there’s only pitches that get funded and that don’t. What’s more important than even the pitch is the demo. It’s easy to fix a pitch. It’s hard to fix a product that sucks.

What are some areas of innovation that have gotten your attention recently – anything curb-jumping, paradigm-shifting, or patent–pending?

Guy: I focus on stuff that I would use immediately: tools for bloggers, writers, speakers, marketers, and consumer-ish uses of the web. My partners are the more long-term, out there visionary types.  I like what Spokeo is doing for tracking friends; Visible Measures for monitoring video watching; and Mspoke for RSS feeds. It would be nice if someone took care of my Christmas wishlist too.

Following that theme, are patents (or pending) playing a large role in start-up activity these days?  If not, what is? What else?

Guy: I don’t care about patents—maybe I should care more. But I’ve never seen a case where a startup has the time or money to litigate a patent. Either the dogs eat the food or they don’t—and dogs don’t care if the food is patented. I grant you that patents can make a company more valuable to a large acquirer, but not as much as a ton of customers. So in my mind, one of the major benefits of getting a patent is impressing your parents.

In addition to funding start-ups, you are a founder of NoNoNina, Inc.  who, in turn, launched truemors.com.  How did your principles of innovation apply to truemors?  How is the site doing these days?

Guy: Truemors is a labor of love for me: I get to work with two very close friends, Will Mayall and Kathryn Henkens. I get to play editor-in-chief of a news site. I get to recruit reporters aka “truemorists.” The site gets about 8,000-10,000 visitors a day, so it’s not exactly a business yet. I hope I get to cash big checks from advertisers someday.

On the website, you mention democratization and demonstration as two of its goals. These, plus advertising, seem to be a common strategy for social networking sites.  What else makes for a successful social site? How is truemors.com  standing out /differentiating itself from sites like Digg or Fark?

Guy: Truemors is not a social networking site. People don’t go there to find hot (or not) dates or to express their inner child. It’s closer to a news site. Our goal is to be “NPR for your eyes”–as opposed to your ears. How are we different from Digg or Fark? For one thing, we get a whole lot less traffic. Fark is primarly links to humorous stories. Digg is primarily summaries of technical stories submitted by anyone and then popularized by an elite few. Truemors is interesting stories submitted by an elite few and read by anyone intellectually curious.
 
Web 2.0 describes the Internet as a participatory environment. What’s next – what will Web 3.0 look like?

Guy: These terms are bull shiitake. Their primary use is for names of conferences. Either people use your site and software or they don’t. Nobody goes out looking for a “Web 2.0” or “Web 3.0” site.
 

(Guy offered this one up) When you die, what do you want to be remembered for?

Guy: Three things: first, being a good husband and father; second, empowering people to change the world through my books, blogs, and speeches; and third, for my wrist shot.

Last, I hear that you play hockey.  Ever land a hat trick? How often do you get to play?

Guy: I have had a few hat tricks, but they were long ago. This is because I’m playing against better people, and I’m getting slower. I play about five times a week. If I’m in town, I’m playing hockey. This is why I never have lunch meetings or conference calls.

Always a pleasure Guy - Thanks again for your time!

I came across a post today on Sam Larbi’s blog entitled Save your job: understand the basics of business. Its a short post that gets to the heart of something that I have been thinking about for quite some time: how should engineers think about their role relative to the strategic direction of their organization? In Sam’s post he shares some insight from a fellow who had been replaced by an outsource firm. In part he writes “Looking back on it, I realize how foolish we were. We worked for a business and our job was to contribute to either making or saving money for that business. Yet we didn’t understand the basics of how the business came to profitability…” This is an interesting point that I took, not long ago, to a couple of acquaintances who teach computer science. My questions to them were along the following lines:

Do students think about the business side of the work they are training to do? Do they think about the strategic value they bring to an organization? Do they think about entrepreneurship? Do they think about intellectual property and how they might innovate to build a business? I also asked if students had an opportunity to take classes on such subjects.

The answer to the latter was yes. Students could certainly take business courses as electives in their curriculum. Most did not however.  In terms of the other questions, the answers were basically ‘no’ across the board. According to my conversation,  students learn a trade (coding) and most expect to land an hourly position somewhere, then expect to apprentice with a more senior developer to learn the complexities of a particular sofware product. This is certainly not a bad approach and many do quite well following this model. I cannot help but think, however, that a few minor changes to the core curriculum of a computer science program would add significant value to the skillset of a newly minted engineer. Specifically, I think a course on business strategy would be a great start and possibly a course on innovation and intellectual property. Perhaps a survey course could be created to address the gamut. The material doesn’t have to go too deep, but just deep enough to give students insight into the environment they will most likely be working.  The easiest way to address this in fact, might be some cross-pollination programs among various schools at a university. GSU offers an intellectual property survey course to its business students for example, so it would be easy enough to make something similar available for the CS students. 

Taking it one step further - consider an entrepreneurial capstone program for MBA’s, JD’s, and MSCS students that included the identification of a market oppportunity, building prototype software, and developing a business plan to take it to market. Maybe along the way you secure a trademark or file a patent or two. Not a bad way to round out a college degree. Maybe they even launch a business.

I’m sure there are schools doing this today, but my guess is that they are a minority. If you read this and know of an interesting program, let me know.