Question: How long does it take in the real world—as opposed to the world of retroactive journalism—for an “epiphany” to occur?

Answer: An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occured to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories—Newton getting hit by an apple or people with chocolate and peanut butter colliding in hallways—are just more fun to think about. A movie called “watch Einstein stare at his chalkboard for 90 minutes” wouldn’t go over well with most people.

Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?

Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.

You can check the full interview here.

In my opinion companies can innovate and still fail. Whether you consider success to be measured by profits, revenues or any other financial quantity there are plenty of cases where organizations developed innovations but failed to achieve success.

When Telecom Italia first introduced the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) it certainly represented a promising innovation. The WAP would bring the Internet experience closer to the mobile terminals, allowing users to access their bank accounts and receive various information about the weather, the traffic and the like.

The Italian telephone operator, however, handled the introduction of the technology with a strange approach. They tried to create all the content themselves, so that the profits would not be shared. The strategy turned out to be disastrous since the company was not able to produce quality content at a pace that customers were requiring. The company also failed to reach partnership agreements with other actors involved in the diffusion of the WAP.

Telecom Italia certainly developed an innovation with the introduction of the WAP, but it burned millions of euros along the way.

Despite those trends, however, we still face several myths related to design. Below you will find three of them.

Myth 1: Design is something superficial

Many people associate design with something superficial, like finishings or decorations. It is like you get the engineers to develop a product and then, once it is ready, the designers decide what colors to use and how the product will look like. Forget it!

Design is at the core of every commercial activity (and perhaps at the core of every innovation?). Every endeavor that connects the customer to the company and every process inside an organization is heavily influenced by design.

Myth 2: Design is about products

When we talk about design, do we also need to talk about products? Not really! Many people believe so, though. Even the Wikipedia definition for design carries a strong product bias: “Designing normally requires considering aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object.”

Design is as much about products as it is about processes or services. FedEx has designed an extremely efficient hub-and-spoke delivery system. Dell’s distribution model is a perfect example of beautiful design.

In 1999 the international design magazine published a list of the 40 “most design driven companies in America” and the list included (not surprisingly) many service companies like Bloomberg, CNN and Disney.

Myth 3: Design is about luxury

Ferrari. Mont Blanc. Dior. Armani. If you ask someone what is the connection between those brands he will probably say “outstanding design”. Obviously true, but we need to have clear the difference between causation and correlation. The fact that luxury products are necessarily well-designed does not imply that well-designed products are necessarily luxury.

Tom Peters illustrates this with Gilette: “a leader in demonstrating that awesome design can be applied to relatively inexpensive/common items. Consider the Sensor. It redifined women’s shaving. And we thought we had seen the last word for men, the Mach3 turned out to be very special, very different.”

My favorite example, however, is the BIC Cristal ballpoint pen. People take them for granted but they represent design at its best. It is not by chance that BIC sells 14 million of those pens daily…

People tend to behave like that because they place too much value on the idea itself. Innovation, which is what you should aim for, is based not only on new ideas but also (and most importantly?) on the implementation of those ideas.

Instead of keeping ideas tightly locked try to share them and collect other people’s insights. Using this approach you will realize that the ideas alone will not suffice. You will need to test, execute, understand the market, research, test some more, and so on.

As Howard Aiken used to say: “don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats”.

At some point in the documentary a F1 expert was asked what made Senna such an outstanding driver. He answered that Senna, from the very first races, had no fear to commit mistakes whatsoever. As a consequence, he collected so many mistakes in the early years of his career that at some point in time there was not much left to be figured out. From there other drivers could not match him anymore, and the rest is history.

This story has a very important lesson for organizations. You should not fear committing mistakes or collecting failures along the way if you want to succeed. Unfortunately our society promotes the “avoid mistakes at all costs” mentality. Attend an MBA and I am sure you will see tons of case studies explaining “how to avoid failure” in this or that industry.

You need to pursue failure if you want to innovate and consequently to succeed. Now let me clarify this point. I do not mean you should pursue failure for the sake of failing. But rather because you can learn from failures and because it will spark new ideas. When a company fails it is necessarily trying new things, new concepts. It is challenging the status quo.

As Tom Peters argues: “It is failure, not success that makes the world go around. Because failure typically means that someone has stretched beyond the comfort zone and tried something new… and screwed it up… and learned something valuable along the way.”