THE MEDICI EFFECT

Much of the book describes processes and techniques to break down the barriers that prevent us from seeing and entering intersections. These techniques include:

• getting exposure to different cultures
• broadening one’s knowledge and learning capacity
• encouraging curiosity
• reversing assumptions (e.g. imagining what would happen if a restaurant had no menus, didn’t charge for food, and didn’t serve food)
• taking different perspectives and points of view (e.g. how would X view this situation)
• randomly combining concepts (e.g. the craze for Magic The Gathering was generated by combining attributes of gaming with attributes of collectibles)
• learning to be mentally prepared to see opportunities at the intersection when they present themselves (I am especially appreciative of this point because it is the hardest thing I ever learned to do) — I have written about this before when I described how the learning of how butterfly wings display colour even though they have no pigment has been applied to counterfeir-protecting banknotes
• undertaking a variety of diverse occupations
• interacting with diverse groups of people
• looking for connections in unlikely places
• producing a continuous, large quantity of ideas
• striking a learning balance between sufficient depth and maximum breadth of knowledge subject-matter
• reading prodigiously and listening attentively and openly
• brainstorming (starting with individual idea generation to prevent groupthink and premature discarding of ‘crazy’ ideas)
• allowing time for ideas to be properly considered (Johansson dispels the myth that deadlines and time pressure encourage innovation)

Johansson then explains the importance and difficulty of implementating innovations. It is critical, he says, to ‘execute past failures’, to know that no innovation will work perfectly in its first design, and be prepared to fail by being agile enough to turn failed ideas into successful ones, allowing time and resources for trial and error, and staying motivated to persevere and overcome adversity.

Although this is a useful compendium of innovation-stimulating techniques and proven methodologies, I didn’t find any of the ideas in the book especially — well, innovative. But then Johansson delivered the book’s most important message: The need for innovators to be courageous. In my book Natural Enterprise I downplayed the risk of entrepreneurship and explained ways to keep this risk to a minimum. I did this to counter the popular myth that entrepreneurship is necessarily extremely risky and stressful. But Johansson has a point. It takes courage to be an innovator, which is one of the reasons so few great ideas are ever realized in the commercial marketplace.

Being courageous means:

• a willingness to break free from old-paradigm networks which reinforce old thinking
• a willingness to give up the security (for what it’s worth) of your present job
• a willingness to fight knee-jerk defenders of the status quo, who will ‘black-hat’ anything new or threatening
• a willingness to confront the possible social stigma of ‘failure’ and non-conformity
• the ability to walk away from unsuccessful ‘sunk’ costs and not throw good money after bad
• the ability to reframe alternatives from risk-averse to risk-accepting
• the ability to acknowledge your fears and overcome them
• a willingness to follow your heart

I agree with Johansson that innovators need to look for ideas in the space between disciplines, and that the opportunities for innovation have never been greater. But it is the argument for courage that makes The Medici Effect such a compelling read. I’ll have more to say on this subject in a future post.