Steve Jobs as head of Apple helped changed the world as we know it – the computer, music, movie, and telecommunications industries all have changed because of Apple and visionary founder Steve Jobs. In the book Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo,  McGraw Hill, NY,2011, the author points out what Mr. Jobs did and the 7 principles to follow. The seven principles are Do What You Love; Put a Dent in the Universe; Kick-Start Your Brain; Sell Dreams, not Products; Say No to 1,000 Things; Create Insanely Great Experiences; and Master the Message. The 7 principles will not bring you to the billionaire status, but it may bring you a better life. A better life for you, your company and your customers and in the end that is what we all try to do.

In Mr. Gallo’s there is a number of examples of how innovation can work and some of them are:

Every industry has and needs innovation in it – one of the basics which every household needs is a vacuum. James Dyson saw a major problem, in his eyes, the performance of the vacuum cleaner lost suction as they picked up dirt. After 5 years and 5,126 failures, Mr. Dyson solved the problem which was great. The next step was to take it to the big vacuum companies such as Hoover. The folks at Hoover as the biggest company had a couple of choices of what to do – nothing or something. Hoover could have bought the company and folded it into a division to raise its head in another 20 years (which is often done), instead they were thinking they had a good profitable business of selling vacuum bags and decided to do nothing. Dyson had to do it the long way or independent distribution and has great results – the best selling vacuum in Japan, UK and and can be easily be found in North America.

Innovation is often seeing what others do not see – people see a higher usage for a program, for example early on in Apple, Steve Jobs and his programming team were touring Xerox PARC – a research facility owned by Xerox. The folks at PARC had developed a graphical user interface (GUI) which allowed people to interact with computer via icons on the screen instead of text based commands. In the hour long demonstration the Apple team understood and knew where this technology could go. The numerous Xerox executives who had years of demonstrations never could get past their copying perspective. Microsoft and IBM have a similar story. Passion with vision leads to innovation.

A great story from Hurricane Katrina of 2005 is the company Entergy – the power company. The CEO told employees to deal with their own personal crisis – take as much time as you need, their jobs would be guaranteed. An astonishing thing happened, recognizing the importance of electricity in people’s lives – just about every employee returned to work the next day until the lights were on. – working for a noble purpose.

To improve the school in the neighbourhood of Chicago’s East Lakeview – with the full encouragement of the principal, the mothers found innovative solutions. They partnered with artists to paint the classrooms which resulted in murals, sculptures and vibrant colours. They asked the ballet, karate, music teachers to hold classes after hours, and they asked local chefs to teach culinary classes, as well as host of other things. The school went from an undesirable one to a model for other schools including most important better grades.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, innovation has risks attached to it, to change something often is to reallocate resources. If it is a new product or category – it is easier, if it is change an existing structure besides a great idea you need people willing to say yes to try. In many organizations finding those people is a challenge, find them and things can happen.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions