Simple Ideas for Innovation

Okay, so I have finished reading the book.

Though I couldn’t connect with Tom on some occasions, I like the book for various reasons. It gave me various take-home points.
These points, I believe, would be of great help. They would probably guide me whenever I feel terrible that my team-mate thinks and acts like an alien from Mars, or when the brainstorming session goes totally awry. They won’t push me hard to realize my childhood dreams: run my own restaurant and make my own movies. But, when I start doing them sometime, they would probably help me fight many barriers to creativity and innovation. But, most of it depends on how I grow creatively as an individual, whatever I may be doing.


These are some of my favorite tips/quotes/ideas from the book:

• Geography counts in the Internet age. Be close to action. Focus and Observe for Inspiration. Infer Motivation and Emotion.
• Find rule-breakers. Find the right people to observe. You learn more from a woman who takes a short-cut, who forces a product to do something the manual says it can’t.
• Why fight human-instinct? Celebrate it.
• Awaken your antenna to the endless variety of human nature, and you are bound to make customers happy and find new markets.
• See products as verbs. We are getting tended towards an "experience-economy".
• Get inspired by the Hollywood's studio system of production. They create hot teams.
• Inspired individuals become hot teams. Crazy deadlines and seemingly unreachable goals are often the sparks.
• If half of the team hates something, just forget it.
• T-shirts are metaphors in motion. Double the money for it. Wear your passion.
• Prototyping, Brainstorming, Observations. - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic of Innovation.
• When the muse fails you (the designer's block), don’t mope at your desk. Just make something.
• Prototyping is problem-solving. It’s a culture and a language. People who make movies prototype everyday. Good prototype worth a thousand pictures. They don’t just communicate, they persuade. They can remind you that sometimes the most obvious, simplest solution is the best.
• Playful, Childlike curiosity and enthusiasm as second nature.
• Make your junk sing. Like our Tech-Box.
• You can’t simply skate over cultural differences.
• Prototype your office space. Establish neighborhoods. Let them tell stories.
• Celebrate the differences. Cross-pollinate. Innovate.
• When you are struck, talk to all the smart people you know.
• You could stumble as long as you fell forward.
• "Fine" doesn’t mean fine. Customers mean well-and they're trying to be helpful - but it’s not their job to be visionaries.
• Be a child. Always ask Why? Why not?
• Make simple things simple and complex things possible.
• Make movie trailers that talk of little-futures of things and products, and how people would deal with them.
• The trick is to find the delicate balance between complete choreography and pure inspiration. If you are uptight, even all the talent and intelligence in the world can hold your creativity back.
• Use cocktail napkins a lot. Sketch your ideas.
• Handshakes are like affordances to opening doors of relationships.
• "May 30 is great, if you'll let me have 10 minutes with you on May 7 to make sure I am on course". Prototype early. Don’t let your ego suffer. Put yourself in a position to say, "After all it’s just a prototype".
• Products which have personalities are here to stay. Good products or services are like generous hosts. They greet you at the door, offer you refreshments, and make you feel at home.