Everyone has a different idea on how innovation happens. Large companies with very complex organizational structures and reporting hierarchies often have trouble adding innovation to their products. Some companies solve this problem by creating their own think-tanks or labs. The lab would work on the periphery of the normal operational business to come up with new ideas and product enhancements. This model is agile in nature and solves the problems that have plagued large organizations in the past. In my humble experience, it is near impossible to innovate with twenty people in a room.  The lab model, (otherwise known as a research and development department) will sometimes be criticized for being outside of the normal process and protocols. Stakeholders in an organization love to be included and if they feel that they’ve been left out of the process, it can cause quite a bit of friction. The best way to manage this is to layout the process in advance of the project – to indicate clearly where a larger group will be involved. This will work sometimes but other times, despite laying out the ground rules, many organizations feel their processes and procedures will supersede the project rules.

It is why consultants like me are engaged to come in and work in small groups. Because innovation often gets mired in the day to day issues and process flow of a large organization.  On a philosophical level, I often hear the comment that innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum – this usually comes to me in the form of a response to a process that is outside of the norm. My standard reply is, “You’re right! Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it happens with two guys in a suburban garage”. From that you get little a company known as Apple. Sometimes innovation happens in a basement somewhere or sometimes its two guys on laptops in a dorm room.

This may sound anti-corporate but history shows us that many corporations will buy an idea from the guys in a basement rather than try and innovate from scratch. Innovation doesn’t have any rules. It requires total freedom and the ability to think-through future states without the anxiety of what’s happening now. The best ideas are born when you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

On my last trip to British Columbia, I was lucky enough to have my sister and my niece visit-me on the island while I was there. I picked them up at the ferry terminal to bring them back to town. In the car, I noticed my niece taping away at an i-pod touch. I asked her what she was doing on it and she replied “playing a game and before that I was watching the rest of my movie…”.

Apple may just have done the smartest thing ever by introducing a multi-touch application interface to the ipod and I-phone. They have now trained an entire generation (maybe a couple of generations) on how to use their new tablet computers. Of course, I’m referring to the ipad. No learning curve here. If you can use the iphone, you already know how to use an ipad. At first when apps started coming out for the iphone, I thought… do people really want to manage all those apps? I mean – there’s an app for this and there’s an app for that. When I started downloading and playing with apps myself, I realized that the process forces you to pick and choose carefully. I found myself cleaning out my screen and getting rid of the dirty old apps and replacing them with apps I would actually use – a fairly quick and painless process.

Regardless of whether you think it’s good or bad usability – the last couple of generations have been trained and are ready to grab some more apps for the ipad. As anyone who has read my previous posts knows, I think we’re nearing the end of browser-based experiences. Mobile platforms and Apple has brought us to the dawn off the app.