What do you do when you encounter a seemingly-unsolvable problem? Do you have a go-to technique that helps you break through? Please consider the following anecdote (known as Dunker's Radiation Problem, originally developed in the 1930's) that keeps cropping up in my research. It highlights a technique that our students have found enormously value. (This particular version is taken from Dave Epstein's "Range"…

I remember the first time I met Roger Martin. We were both delivering "keynote addresses" to a gathering of hundreds of business leaders at a conference in Philadelphia. He was so smart! Had so many great things to say! No wonder he was the headliner…

Self-censorship is a classic creativity pitfall. It's natural to attempt to multi-task when coming up with new ideas: to generate, and simultaneously evaluate, the material we come up with. But experience and research both suggest that such tasks should be separated. It can be painful to deliberately defer judgment, but such discipline pays off…

Did you know that your teenager wasn't the first person to cleverly fool a live zoom call? That distinction belongs to Rudi Kompfner, a brilliant Bell Labs engineer who fifty years ago hacked one of the most hailed technological advances of the day by "positioning a still photograph of himself in front of his Picturephone (the image showed Kompfner to be remarkably attentive and invariably interested in whatever was being said) so that he could move about his office during a chat." (This story, and all quotes below, from "The Idea Factory"…

I was struck by this story about Bill Baker, the head of Bell Labs' research division, and a simple daily practice he employed to fuel his own creative practice.

"Every day at lunch he would sit down with the first person he spotted in the cafeteria, whether he was a glassblower from the vacuum tube shop or a metallurgist from the semiconductor lab -- 'Is it okay if I join you?' he would ask politely, never to be refused -- and would gently interview the employee about his work and personal life and ideas. 'At the end of any conversation,' Baker's friend and colleague Mike Noll recalls, 'you would then realize that he knew everything about you but you would know absolutely nothing about him…

What drove Apple to invent the iPhone? According to insiders, it was the phenomenal success of the iPod, and the potential vulnerability to disruption that that success presented…

Apple's ability to capitalize on the breakthroughs of Xerox PARC is fairly well documented. Not that they're the only ones who did so... In fact, when Steve Jobs angrily summoned Bill Gates to Cupertino to vent about Microsoft's newly rendered graphical user interface in a non-Apple product, in a software called "Windows," Gates' reply is telling…

A former student, now longtime friend, recommended “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. What a fun read! It's the most un-scientific book I've ever read by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (the only other being Einstein's attempt at a layman's description of general relativity, which went over my head completely 😜)…

The gist of the origin of the Post-It Note, is that a 3M engineer found himself daydreaming during a particularly boring sermon and, by making an unexpected connection between a seemingly-irrelevant technology and an irritating private-life annoyance, stumbled across one of the most widely adopted new product innovations of the last 50 years.

As it turns out, apparently there's an empirical foundation for the daydream-to-insight loop…

I just finished a product sprint with Prof G. His associate, NYU Professor Adam Alter, recommends auditing the points of friction in any product or service, as removing friction is a great way to improve the experience and retention. For example, when Neflix auto-plays the next episode, they remove friction; when Uber auto-pays at the end of the ride, they remove friction; when Amazon Go stores allow you to walk out of the store without a point of sale, they remove friction. You get the idea. (More on that subject here, if you're curious - the word was really just my jumping-off point…

One simple way to identify potential founders-in-residence inside of an organization ("intrapraneurs") is to look for the people who can't leave well enough alone. Who are the folks who just won't let an idea die, who come in to tinker after hours, who are using the lab equipment on the weekends, etc. Those folks are a nice group to consider. Some are lunatics, but some of those lunatics are right…

I just got off of a particularly brutal call with a mentor who is pushing me to shift gears a little bit more radically than my comfort zone enjoys. And that, coupled with the recent post on complimentary collaborators, reminded me of a couple of important functions that others can play in sparking fresh thinking…

I'm a practice nerd.

I saw Michael Phelps give a talk at a business conference, and remember him saying he didn't take a single day off for something like five years. Not a holiday, not a weekend, nothing. Practice every day.

I watched an excellent documentary about Dirk Nowitzki, and one of the things that struck me was several professional players' comments about Kobe Bryant. The Lakers would arrive in a new town, and the team would hit up the night life. All but Kobe. They all knew: Kobe was in the gym, practicing…

Do you know why WD-40 is called WD-40? Beyond being a warning against putting engineers in charge of branding, the product's name is actually an important lesson for innovation... more on that in a moment.

I just got done hosting the first LaunchPad office hours of the new year. We are interviewing applicants to determine their fit for the program. Each spring quarter, Perry Klebahn and I take 10-15 new teams into the program with the intent to launch real businesses in”…

There's incredible power in pairs. Lennon had McCartney. Anthony had Stanton. Hewlett had Packard. Crick had Watson. So did Holmes. The power of a dynamic duo is that they not only complement, but amplify one another's contributions…

Do you know why WD-40 is called WD-40? Beyond being a warning against putting engineers in charge of branding, the product's name is actually an important lesson for innovation... more on that in a moment.

I just got done hosting the first LaunchPad office hours of the new year. We are interviewing applicants to determine their fit for the program. Each spring quarter, Perry Klebahn and I take 10-15 new teams into the program with the intent to launch real businesses into the world. Over the past 11 years, over 50% of our students' ventures are still in business, have pivoted to another entrepreneurial venture, or have had a profitable exit. Pretty cool stuff…

The origin story of Flamin' Hot Cheetos is one of the most inspiring business tales I've read in a long time. One thing that struck me is how an employee was bold enough to take Frito Lay CEO Roger Enrico's exhortation to "act like an owner" seriously. When we act like an owner, we start contributing to the body of work, rather than simply taking orders…

In the early 1900's Bell Labs laid the foundation for the research institution of the future. What they built, and how they built it, shaped research and development practices around the world. Mervin Kelly was one of the formidable characters who shaped the Lab's development and approach to new products. He believed, as Steve Jobs did as well, that in-person collaboration was nearly impossible to over-emphasize…

One of the key strategies that the unusually successful team at Marvel Comics employs to avoid the sophomore slump on sequels is what an excellent HBR article ("Marvel's Blockbuster Machine") dubs, selecting for "inexperienced experience"…

I received my regular amazon supply delivery today. There are a couple of very simple tools that have helped me in my own creative practice, that I thought to share in case they're helpful to others…