E0068 - The art of innovation (S0004)

• Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee, venture capitalist, and advisor to Google, shares his top ten insights on innovation. These include making meaning rather than money, creating a short mantra that encapsulates your purpose, and moving onto the next curve rather than sticking to the same path.
• He believes great innovation is deep, intelligent, empowering, and elegant, even if it initially has elements of "crappiness". This suggests the need to take risks and launch before perfecting the product.
• Kawasaki insists that letting customer usage guide product positioning can result in surprising, beneficial ways people use the product that were not initially anticipated.
• He argues that successful products often polarize people, with some passionately loving them and others hating them. He also highlights the importance of continuous product iteration based on feedback.
• Kawasaki concludes with an emphasis on the need to "niche thyself", by creating products that are unique and add value, and cautions against being led astray by 'dangerous bozos' who undermine innovative ideas. He gives examples of big misses in the history of innovation to illustrate this point.

Author: Guy Kawasaki

Keywords:

• Entrepreneurship
• Meaning
• Value
• Purpose