Trendspotting supremo delivers rich tapestry of creative ideas
Review: ‘Create the future – tactics for disruptive thinking’ by Jeremy Gutsche. Fast Company Press, New York.
Jeremy Gutsche is, by his own admission, a restless soul, permanently brimming with new ideas. Having learned to code in his native Toronto, Gutsche eschewed a good job in banking to develop a site called Trendhunter.com which has since become a phenomenal success. This portal, developed initially as a night-time hobby in 2005 to track innovative ideas from around the world, was designed to help him find a big idea. In reality, the site became the big idea.
Trend Hunter is user-generated platform that curates thousands of new innovative ideas every month and gets an impressive 20 million monthly views. It also contains a range of useful tools to help entrepreneurs develop their ideas. The really smart part is at the back end, however. Gutsche’s background as an analyst has enabled his team to find clever ways of generating insights from Trend Hunter’s vast collection of trends. That’s where the money is with clients including Coca Cola, Microsoft, Nike, Kellogg’s and Budweiser paying for fast market research.
All of this makes Gutsche something of a guru in the trend-spotting world, in north America especially. His reputation was enhanced when he wrote Exploiting Chaos in 2009 and he’s a popular guest on US TV shows and has a well-honed conference keynote presence now. That’s the background to this new book, which showcases all he has learnt about chaos, innovation and creativity.
Gutsche’s opening gambit is that the most important characteristic you need in the world right now is the ability to change. Master change and you will be in a better position to spot new ideas, act on opportunity and convince others about your wonderful new vision.
The author says that there are seven traps, however, that you need to be aware of and overcome.
Opportunity is subtle. Gutsche cites lots of examples of missed opportunity on the part of successful companies. The iPod, for example, originally conceived by a man called Tony Faddell, was rejected by Philips, Microsoft, Nokia and Motorola amongst others.
For one thing, we are more dependent on past decisions than we’d like to admit. Gutsche cites the example of the width of NASA’s solid rocket boosters, four feet, eight and a half inches wide. Why this random number? It all goes back to the Romans it seems. This was the width of an axel on a two horse Roman chariot. All wagons followed suits, then the railways. The analogy of getting caught in a groove follows easily.
Opportunity is subtle. Gutsche cites lots of examples of missed opportunity on the part of successful companies. The iPod, for example, originally conceived by a man called Tony Faddell, was rejected by Philips, Microsoft, Nokia and Motorola amongst others. Near the point of giving up, Fadell finally approached a CEO friend and offered all his intellectual property in exchange for a job making theproduct. That CEO was Steve Jobs.
Ferruccio Lamborghini, initially a very successful developer of tractors, met Enzo Ferrari at the Ferrari racing club and told Ferrari about an idea he had to make Ferrari’s clutch better. “You stick to making tractors and I’ll make cars,” he was told.
Almost every tale of disruption, Gutsche notes, involved smart people dismissing a subtle new idea and most billion dollar start-ups experienced some level of rejection. The founders of Hotmail were rejected 100 times before a private equity firm gave them $300,000. A year and a half after their launch, they sold out to Microsoft for $400 million.
Google, Amazon, Cisco, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Airbnb faced similar problems.
Gutsche has lots of ideas about creativity and brainstorming and is in favour of workshops and rapid prototyping. He also knows how to spot opportunities.
According to Gutsche, if you can identify a group of similar ideas, chances are you have found a cluster of opportunity or what is often known as a consumer insight. One example of this would be caffeinated beverages, caffeinated chocolate bars, caffeinated potato chips and caffeine pills. When these four trends started spiking in popularity, your insight might be called ‘alternative caffeination’ and you should study the reasons behind it to better understand what is driving it. Based on themomentum behind the alternative products that are gaining traction, you could predict new products and services that would probably trend positively for one to five years.
At a broader level, there are three megatrends at the moment that innovators should be aware of, he says.
The first he defines as hybridisation, the process by which industry lines are blurring and competitors could emerge from anywhere. Witness Amazon’s entry into the grocery market through its purchase of Whole Foods and its plans to open a line of retail stores.
The second is instant entrepreneurship where anyone in the world can establish a global web-enabled business within a couple of days.
The third trend is Artificial Intelligence. So far, AI’s capability is quite limited but in around 10 years, he says, if an AI system were only as fast as computers today but as smart as a typical Stanford researcher, it is estimated that it could do 11,000 years of research in a single week. The implications for how we live, save the planet and cure diseases are immense.
Innovatively, Gutsche’s book is a two-headed volume. Flip the first side and you get a revised and updated version of Exploiting Chaos called The Innovation Handbook.
These twin volumes are jam packed with ideas, interesting statistic, quotes and case studies, broken into easily digestible chunks. An easy read and the type of book that can be delved into at any point, it is all the better for it.