Timing is everything: inventors' product returns 10 years after initial failure

From the "Prototypes" column in the New York Times, a discussion with Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos, inventors of the Elephant Trunk, a lockable home mailbox for parcels.

Back in 1999, when [Ms. Troyer] and Mr. Farentinos dreamed up the Elephant Trunk, it was designed to be large enough to hold the television-size computers that people were ordering as e-commerce began to take off. But while it was still in prototype, flat-screen computer monitors came along, defeating its purpose.

“It was deflating,” Ms. Troyer said. “All this time and money and energy had been wasted.”...

Even after shoving the Elephant Trunk into the proverbial drawer, the couple were convinced that it would eventually see the light of day; it was just a matter of when. Sure, computers had become skinnier, but more and more people were shopping online for a wide range of products, and they often were not home to accept the packages.

Beyond the annoyance of coming home and finding those packages “behind a planter,” Ms. Troyer said, or wet from the rain, there was the danger of parcel theft.

Still, when they floated the idea of a mailbox for packages, the response from retailers was, “I think it’s too soon for that,” Ms. Troyer said....

Last year, good timing was compounded by luck when Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos met with Theresa Graham, a merchant for the builders hardware category at Home Depot. As they chatted, Ms. Graham explained that she was a working mother who often came home to boxes strewed all over the porch. She said to Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos, “You know, what I’d really like to see is not a mailbox, but a parcel drop,” Ms. Troyer recalled.

“Chris and I looked at each other and our eyes lit up. It was like, O.K., it’s time.”

The Elephant Trunk is beginning a 3-month sales trial in selected Home Depot stores. Will it become a success the second time around? We'll have to wait and see.

Doug Rauch of Trader Joe's: 1 in 100 new products becoming "big successes" is a good performance

In this HBR video, Doug Rauch, former president of the Trader Joe's grocery chain, describes the need to fail often in order to create "exciting, adventuresome products."

Game Designer Colin Northway: "I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas"

Another mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop." This was excerpted from Kris Graft's excellent writeup in Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Fantastic Contraption developer Colin Northway talked about the importance of identifying failure in its early stages. He spent several months trying to find the gameplay breakthrough in projects such as the bird-inspired Flocking, but they just didn't materialize.

Flocking was a project "that I thought was fantastic and a good idea, but one ... that I couldn't get to function as a video game," said Northway. He stressed to developers that just because you're really in love with an idea, "you won't always be able to make a game about that."

"I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas," he said. That search is often futile. "That's the downfall of a lot of game designers," he said.

"When you're doing game design you should be picking among the ripest fruit... your job is to find the sweetest fruit. ... your job is not to eke something out of the cracks that will be playable."

Now, Northway feels that he has found his way out of the game design wilderness. He's currently working on a beautiful game called Incredipede, which appeared at Tokyo Game Show's Sense of Wonder Night. "I hope none of you get lost, and I hope all of you make your way out," he said.

I salute the GDC for holding this session, and especially to the game designers for sharing their stories. There is loads of research referred to on this site to show that destigmatizing and sharing mistakes is immensely helpful for learning and for ongoing improvement. Finding one's way out of the wilderness is a very valuable experience, and telling others about it is a great act of generosity.

Mistake Bank podcast: "The Wide Lens" author Ron Adner shares stories of innovation mistakes

I had the opportunity to interview Ron Adner, professor at the Tuck School of Business and author of "The Wide Lens: A New Strategy of Innovation." The book details the challenges with innovating when you are dependent on more than you and the end-customer - including intermediaries, co-innovators, etc., who influence the success of your new venture.

Ron shares a couple of great stories, but perhaps the most significant part of the interview is the discussion that happens after each story. One of the great benefits of sharing mistake stories is dialoguing with others about what happened, why, and how we can learn from it. I have found this sort of dialogue very helpful in my own learning, and I'm happy to share this neat example with everyone.

You can learn more about The Wide Lens at its website, where chapter 1 (in which Adner evaluates the Michelin story he relates in this podcast) is available to read for free.

Podcast:
Ron Adner, author of The Wide Lens, on innovation ecosystem mistakes (28 minutes)

0:30 - How did The Wide Lens come about?
2:30 - The Michelin mistake story
6:45 - Discussing the Michelin story
13:15 - The inhalable insulin mistake story
19:30 - Discussion: The value blueprint, leading/following, timing, etc.
24:10 - How "The Wide Lens" helps innovators

Amir Rao of Supergiant Games: Users had "no idea what was happening" when using gardening feature

This mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop" was captured by Kris Graft of Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Next up for the [failure] workshop was Amir Rao of Supergiant Games. The studio did ship its first title, Bastion, to much success. But what's not known by most people is that it shipped without one big feature that failed.

Basiton had a rich art style, a unique reactive narrator, and, Rao said, "It was going to have a rich and exciting gardening feature."

The reasons for including this feature were clear for Rao. "Gardening is an aesthetic that everybody understands. ... We wanted to try and take that aesthetic ... and apply that to an action RPG, because that is something that we haven't seen before."

The studio spent a year working on the gardening feature, influenced by games like Viva Pinata, Harvest Moon, and even certain systems from Civilization Revolution.

Player would find seeds out in the world, bring them back to the hub called Bastion, put them in planters, water them, and wait to see what they would become. The problem was that players had "no idea what was happening," said Rao. "It's really hard to communicate the intermediate part of planting" that happens between burying the seed, and having the final plant.

"You know people understand a lot better than planting? A menu," Rao determined.

I empathize with Rao's disconnect with his users, and respect his recognition that the gardening feature wasn't working. It's easy for a product developer to fall in love with certain features, and hard to finally decide to take them out.

Steve Jobs in 1997: "You can't start with the technology and figure out how to sell it"

Steve Jobs has been getting a lot of press recently, as if he needed that. But this clip was referenced by VC Brad Feld and is tailor-made for this site. Jobs is answering a confrontational question at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997, soon after he returned for his second act at Apple.

The meat of the story, at least for me, happens at 2:00, right after Jobs states that design should start with the customer experience and work backward. He lays out that starting with great technology and figuring out how to market it is wrong--and he says that he himself has made this mistake "more than anyone else in this room."

Also, while clearly under attack, Jobs shows his maturity by not only not immediately getting defensive or attacking his questioner, but in fact taking some time to reflect and think, during a high-pressure, public address, and ultimately giving a powerfully thoughtful response. We can all learn from that.

Invest in the people, not the idea

This story is from Steve Blank's terrific blog:

Before we closed [E.piphany's] Series A..., I had called on Mohr, Davidow Ventures, the firm which had funded my last company, Rocket Science. The senior partner at the time was Bill Davidow, a marketing legend and a hero of mine who had also funded other Enterprise software companies. I went in and pitched Bill the idea about how to automate the marketing domain. He gave me 15 minutes, then as politely as he could do it, walked me out the door and said, “Stupidest idea I ever heard, Steve. Enterprise software means across the Enterprise. Marketing is just one very small department.” As he was walking me out, I remember as I physically crossed the threshold of the door that: A. He was right, and B. I figured out how to solve the problem of making our product useful across the entire enterprise. So E.piphany went from a bad idea to a good idea by being thrown out by a VC who gave me advice that made the company. He has reminded me since, “Sometimes you invest in the idea, but you should always be investing in the people. If I would’ve remembered who you were, I would’ve known you would figure it out.”

"Investing in the people": echoes here of Fred Wilson's story on AirBnB. Also, Davidow's book "Marketing High Technology" is still as relevant as when I first read it as an MBA student in 1990.

NYU Researchers explore learning from success and failure

In a paper published in draft form in January 2011 ("Reaching and Falling: Why Failure in Exploration differs from Failure in Exploitation"), NYU Stern School professors JP Eggers and Jung-Hyun Suh studied learning from success and failure in a new-product development context. They compared learning in exploration (longer-term, more speculative) vs. exploitation (shorter-term, iterative improvement-based development) among mutual-fund firms over a 40-year period.

By using this frame of reference, Eggers and Suh discovered some fascinating results. Firstly, failure in exploratory new-product development had negative implications--but only for what the authors termed "near-miss" failures. Little or nothing was learned from more profound failures.

The authors generated a different but related conclusion from studying product development via exploitation. In this case, near-miss failures correlated with significant positive learning. More significant failures had negative learning. This result makes sense, as exploitation changes are more small-scale, a step forward that, if wrong, can easily be redone. This "probe-sense-respond" model is frequently used to move tech products from version 1.0 to 3.0, such as Microsoft Windows. And, of course, disastrous exploitative changes (Windows Vista, anyone?) tend to send those responsible scurrying into holes to hide.

Here's how Eggers and Suh summarize some of what they learned about learning from failure:

We suggest that positive organizational learning will result from both failures in exploitative activities (which are more pressing for the organization and must be dealt with) and successes in exploratory activities (which bring important new knowledge to the firm that the organization is more likely to encode and utilize). Meanwhile, significantly less learning will result from successes in exploitative activities (which may be viewed as validating the efficacy of existing processes and thus making additional learning unnecessary) and failures in exploratory activities (which may possess little information that can be assimilated and may be met with retreat from risky opportunities).

Here is James March's seminal paper, "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," which provided the framework Eggers and Suh utilized.

A product killed by poor packaging

When John Caddell first became a product manager, he thought his MBA had prepared him for the jump from software development into the marketing world. He still had a lot to learn, as became obvious when he had to create pricing for a new product.

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