Brand new website I learned about via www.springwise.com this week. It's the latest crowdsourced business incubator. Quirky.com allows anyone to submit product ideas, plans, etc. for $99. The community then decides which submissions to develop, and the top votes result in a new product released WEEKLY.

It's certainly a bit bold to announce you'll be producing a product every single week, but the concept is certainly promising. Obviously spawned from concepts like threadless.com, Quirky stands a chance for survival if the submissions are creative, yet boot rooted in enough reality to justify production and sale to a supportive audience.

I think Quirky will need to quickly grow their consumer base beyond their site subscribers in order to maintain any long term viability. Unlike the crowd at threadless.com, not every member is going to be a prospective customer for every item produced.

Learn more by visiting the Springwise summary page or the company website at Quirky.com. A video produced by quirky to provide a quick overview of their concept is embedded below.

Continuing the ABCs of Innovation, I now turn my attention to the letter "E."  You can catch-up by reading my previous posts, starting with: A is for Awareness.

E is for Excitement!
Excitement actually plays a dual role in the practice of innovation...

First, you have to feel excited about an idea if you're going to work passionately toward making it a reality.  Here are three tips for building and maintaining excitement about a project:

1. Work in an area for which you already have passion.

2. Envision the rewards you will enjoy once the project is complete.

3. Celebrate small victories on your path toward your end-goal.

"Get excited and enthusiastic about your own dream. This excitement is like a forest fire -- you can smell it, taste it, and see it from a mile away."
~ Denis Waitley

Second, it is only through an exchange of excitement (causing others to feel the same excitement that you feel) will get others to provide the buy-in necessary to move your idea forward.  These three tips will help you win allies by arousing in them a similar passion for your project:

1. Pitch your project in terms of how the other person will benefit.  Don't focus on your own selfish interests -- focus on THEIR self interests!

2. People buy on emotion and justify with facts. You might not be "selling" them a physical product, but you certainly want them to buy-in to your project, and that means all the same principles apply.  Push their emotional hot buttons to get them excited enough to say "yes" -- but include enough facts and data to help them justify their decision.

3. Recruit support from people who are passionate about the focus of your innovation.  Don't try to sell a salad to someone who hates vegetables.

"In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved."
~ Rupert Murdoch

What are you doing to excite yourself and others about your ideas and projects? Are you doing enough?

Continuing the ABCs of Innovation, we now turn our attention to the letter "D."  You can catch-up by reading my previous posts: A is for Awareness, B is for Bold, and C is for Create.

D is for Difference.
Please be sure you note the word is "difference" not "different."  Just being Different doesn't always make a Difference.  Different is merely "not alike." Difference is the degree to which it differs.  This may seem like splitting hairs, but as Mark Twain said:

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
~ Mark Twain

Xbox is different from Playstation, but when you begin to calculate the level of difference between those gaming systems and the Wii, you are blinded by the lightning and no longer notice the lightning bugs. 

It's no longer a great creative feat to choose a different path. The path you choose must make a difference.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
~ Robert Frost

Continuing the ABCs of Innovation, we now turn our attention to the letter "C."  Sure, it might be considered an obvious choice, but my original thought was to go with "creative" which (while still applicable) didn't have the same power as the more direct CREATE.

Some examples of how Dictionary.com defines CREATE:
...to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes.

...to evolve from one's own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention.

...to cause to happen; bring about; arrange, as by intention or design: to create a revolution.

These three definitions really made CREATE the obvious choice. They address important elements of innovation -- the most powerful innovations come from extraordinary circumstances, are usually inspired by a single bold thinker, and come into reality through an overt decision to 'make it real.'

Try these five CREATE tips to make your innovation efforts more successful:

1. Jump ahead in the evolutionary process
Don't merely come up with an idea that takes the next 'logical' step -- think three, four, five moves ahead.  Creating with 'leap frog logic' will have competitors chasing after to you. As the Great Gretzky said: "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it's been."

2. Don't move in a straight line
Depending on the reason you believe -- comets, an ice age, or smoking brought about an end to the dinosaurs.  An outside force that completely altered the status quo forever.  Technology has this effect on industries all the time (VCRs, Personal Computers, Music Downloads, etc.)  What can you create that comes totally out of left field that will have an unalterable effect on the world as we currently know it?

3. Be a force for change
Someone once told me there are two constants --
Number One: Change is inevitable.
Number Two: People resist change.
After that, I never quite understood why people spent so much time and stress trying to avoid something that was going to happen anyway:  Rob a bank, go to jail.  Touch fire, get burned.  Be a Cleveland Browns fan, live a life of disappointment. Why not embrace change and the opportunity it brings?  Seems like a waste of energy to try and avoid it.  Use it as a chance (and excuse?) to create.

4. Be an artist
How wonderful to think about whatever you are working on as "art." Treat every project in which you are involved as if it might one day be spoken of in reverent whispers while being viewed on display in a place of honor... and perhaps someday it will be.  Ben Franklin offered the best advice (as usual) -- "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

5. Act with intent
When you create -- do it on purpose.  Make sure your success no accident -- and then prove it by going out and doing it again and again.  A single success can be explained by a lightning strike.  Repeated innovations (each one surpassing the other) is a hallmark of genius.  Franklin, Edison, Disney -- you could find worse role models.

Bring earth-changing, awe-inspiring ideas into reality and do it on purpose.
CREATE!

Continuing (finally!) with my crafting of the ABCs of Innovation, I now focus on the letter "B."  I have carefully chosen the word BOLD for this entry.  Among the definitions I found for the word are --

1. Not hesitating or fearful in the face of danger or rebuff; courageous and daring.
2. Not hesitating to break the rules of propriety; forward; impudent.
3. Necessitating courage and daring; challenging. 
4. Beyond the usual limits of conventional thought or action; imaginative.

You'll note that nowhere among these definitions are the words outrageous, unrealistic, or foolhardy.

Being a bold innovator simply means being willing to laughed at, ridiculed, and frankly -- pissing people off.  Bold ideas are those that challenge the status quo and those that enforce it.  Bold innovations are those ideas that usually result in a committee of people reflexively saying NO to whatever changes it in entails -- usually for no other reason than "we've never done it that way before."

Can you stand up to a little laughing behind your back?  Do you believe in the idea enough to fight for it?  Can you come up with one more reason to put your plan into action than "they" can come up with for reasons to kill it?

Markting guru Hugh MacLeod (the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards) has a cartoon of which I am especially fond.  The accompanying words are "It's not an original idea till it costs you the corner office."  I've pasted it below to inspire you -- and to perhaps decorate that cube they're going to move you to if you suggest an idea that's too bold for your company (my advice is to go find a bolder company -- you're current one isn't going to be around very much longer.)

I would have once attributed the most important characteristic of an innovative individual as CURIOSITY, but after reading Jim Canterucci's book "Personal Brilliance" I feel that the 'most important' label should got to AWARENESS.

Once I was aware of Awareness as a catalyst to creativity, I saw it in every single one of the ideas I chose to develop.  Awareness is that internal radar that causes you to prick up your ears and squint your eyes as you look and listen intently to some 'thing' that has captured your attention and focused your concentration into a singularly specific topic.  Like dog hearing a high-pitched sound or a jungle cat hearing prey drawing near, you know this 'thing' is important -- but maybe not exactly WHY (at least at this point in time.)

You file this attention-collecting information away for future use. Sometimes it's merely mentally filed in the back of your mind, but you would be better served to physically record the information: bookmark a website, make a journal entry, or tear out a magazine article and put it in a file cabinet. Taking these steps will actually heighten your awareness to that specific topic the next time it enters your area of radar coverage -- encouraging to you make a further connection to the content through another act of Awareness.

A is for Awareness.
If you'd like additional ideas for increasing your personal effectiveness of this ability, I encourage you to read Jim Canterucci's article on the subject: "Seven Ways to Amplify Your Awareness."  You can also listen to more of my own views on Awareness in Jim's Personal Brilliance Podcast. My specific episode is located here.

Other words receiving 'Honorable Mentions' for the letter "A" were ACTION and ALTERNATIVES.  Do you disagree with my designation of AWARENESS for the letter "A?"  Want to suggest alternatives, or make a nomination for the word I'll select for "B" in my next post?  Leave a comment below!

Awareness Test
See if your Awareness skills are heightened enough to spot how this color changing card trick is accomplished...

For me, 2008 is turning out to be a year of going back to the basics in order to advance forward to the future.  I've been working in mass media for the last couple years, and it's a perfect example of an industry that has been around for so long that it has become rooted (mired?) in an almost mythic tradition that created a weighty and egotistical pomposity.  Newspapers, Television, and Radio (as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz would say -- "Oh, my!") 

Everyday you can read about (usually on the Web) another Newspaper ceasing production of their print publication and moving to a strictly digital distribution format.  Just the other day, giants of the newsprint industry united to create a digital ad network.  Radio and Television stations are creating YouTube channels and alternative web streams in an attempt to stay hip and relevant in the lives of their dwindling audiences.

As a big believer in the cliche "the more things change, the more they stay the same" I think the best way to move forward when confronted with such an overwhelming obstacle to your survival, is to go back to the basics that helped you first build to your success.  And what could be more basic than the ABCs?

Today I start a series to recreate the ABCs as they pertain to innovation.  Connecting sound advice for successful innovation to these 26 tiny symbols seems somehow appropriate, in that these symbols can be rearranged, reordered, and reimagined in an unlimited number of variations in order to created world-changing innovations.

The Declaration of Independence, the "I have a dream" speech from Martin Luther King Jr., Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ghandi -- every great work, great author, great speaker, great thinker had (and has) access to these same number of letters and all have created legendary and life-changing innovations.  From the millions of letters used to create a set of encyclopedias to the 271 words in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the 5 characters (counting the number and mathematical symbol) in Einstein's mass-energy equivalence explaining his Theory of Relativity -- these letters are powerful in any combination and quantity.

It all comes down to how you use the most basic of building blocks -- your ABCs.  Visit me next time when we start with the letter "A."

While this slideshow was originally created as a way to spot and develop trends, I think the content shares effective insight on how inspiring infectious innovation in any industry. These are ideas that will help prevent you from becoming "the best typewriter company in the world." Watch the slideshow for the explanation...

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