SwampFox

There`s no one there I really wanted to talk to...

Submitted by: John Warner on Jul 28, 2010 at 2:01 am Tagged with: Innovation Source: InnoVenture

We used to play an eight track tape on the way to high school with a great song by Jim Croce, "Operator". (If you don't know what an eight track tape is, ask your dad.) It has a memorable line, "there`s no one there I really wanted to talk to..." That came to mind this week in a meeting with an executive of a global company, who said, "I've lived here all my life, and there is no one here interesting to talk to." Hmmm... as succinctly as anyone has put it, that defines the cultural challenge we face.

We are all surrounded by incredibly talented and creative people, but we have organizational and cultural filters that make it very hard to see them. Until they did what they did, few would have picked out the young Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, or Sergey Brin, or even the middle age Sam Walton, as having exceptional insight. No one would have targeted Michael Bolick, a plant manager of a contract pharmaceutical plant, as someone interesting to talk to. Even if they did, he didn't have the insight he did until exposed to carbon dots at an InnoVenture conference, when suddenly he said, "I looked around to see who else was taking notes." That moment of informed intuition led to the founding of Selah Technologies, now Lab21. Ralph Hulseman probably would not have started Hoowaki if the culture had not existed for him to absorb lessons from Michael for how to start a company.

I was looking for something else recently and stumbled into this paragraph:

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).

On the surface, that seems to make the point that only a few people are really worth talking to. It is more accurate that the top 1% are the people with the resources and capabilities to take big ideas and to convert them into big businesses. Steve Jobs didn't' have the idea for the iPod, but he did have the resources and capabilities to turn Tony Fadell's idea of combining an MP3 player and online music into the iPod.

The "managerial, professional, and small business stratum" is the "creative class" that Richard Florida and others talk about. There are 23 million people who live within a half day's drive of Greenville SC. 20% is over 4 million people. Someone in that creative class of people has or knows someone else in the world who has an insight that can lead to a major business opportunity for you. If we knew who they were, we would call them up and invite them to lunch.

InnoVenture produces Forums and Conferences where smart, talented people cross pollinate their ideas and "Sparks fly!". My backyard is filled with all kinds of amazing birds. I only see them though when I put seed in the bird-feeder and let them come to me. When we did the "product visualization" forum at the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology in February 2010 in Florence, over 100 "product visualization" professionals attended, most of whom had never been to the SiMT before. I commented to the director these folks were there all along, he just didn't know who they were.

There has been a lot of work done on the concept of the "long tail" of markets. The biggest physical book stores like Barnes and Noble carry maybe 50,000 titles, though over 1,000,000 are published each year. Jeff Bezos built Amazon.com around an insight about how to "lower the activation energy" to sell the other 950,000 titles in the long tail of the book market.

The InnoVenture Southeast 2010 Forums and Conference were version 1.0 of the current model More to come on what version 2.0 of the InnoVenture Southeast 2011 Forums and Conference looks like to "lower the activation energy" to reach the 4 million people the long tail of the creative class in our backyard. Framing the problem this way helps me to think through what elements of the solution need to be. If this inspires any insights of yours, I'd appreciate knowing them.