Innovation Rarely Begins with a Blueprint

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. of America for a reason. With SUVs made to move with your rhythm. The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend. And tracks bring style with value you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together let's drive. What if you invented one of the internet's most iconic features and yet you didn't remember doing so. I'm Martin Reeves and with my co-author Bob Goodson we wrote an HBR article using the like button to show how innovation really works.

1:10In 2022 Bob Goodson my co-author was packing up his possessions to make a move from America to the UK and he stumbled across an old sketch of a prototype of the like button several years in fact about four years before Facebook introduced their like button and at the time what his company Yelp was trying to do was to encourage more user content creation. What's the lesson here? Well Bob and I when we were discussing this initially spent a whole day on one question. Who invented the like button? And what we found which was elaborated in the subsequent three-year journey was that in fact it's very hard to say invented the like button because a large number of people at the time were exposed to very similar problems.

1:49How to rank content, how to encourage users to submit content and not surprisingly they came up with all sorts of things that looked a little bit like a like button or contributed to the eventual like button so really innovation is not the linear heroic instantaneous process that we often see it to be innovation is rarely so clean and linear so if you want to encourage innovation don't focus on one individual don't focus on grandiose instantaneous plans keep your eye open for accidents encourage diverse contributions, allow for trial and error because that's the way that innovation really works.

2:25To read the full story go check out the article on hbr.org.

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