The Map of Innovation: Creating Something Out of Nothing - Hardcover

KEVIN O'CONNOR is chairman of DoubleClick and on the board of many other public and private companies. He has several other ventures in the planning stages and is a private investor helping to fund the next wave of technology companies. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?

Of course I know what I’m doing! What could possibly go wrong?

—Ralph Kramden in almost every episode of The Honeymooners

If you knew the odds against creating a successful innovation, you’d never pursue it. If you are trying to extend an existing product line, you have a reasonable chance of success. But if you are trying to create something new, it is a totally different story.

Out of every hundred ideas, only one can be considered a good idea, an idea that has a chance of becoming a reality, whether you are starting from scratch or working inside an established organization.

Out of every hundred good ideas, only one is worthy of pursuit, of building a new company or division around.

Of those hundred start-ups, perhaps only one will be considered successful.

So, your odds of hitting a grand-slam home run are 1:100 3 1:100 3 1:100, or only 1/1,000,000. When the odds are literally a million to one, why even step to the plate?

And if you do step to the plate and try to get under way, you are bound to get depressed. The beginning stage of invention is the worst . . . and best of times.

Even as I write this I find myself in the start-up stage. I am always trying to start a new company. And now that I have the extreme sporting goods superstore and the consumer electronics product that I mentioned in the introduction well on the way to market, I want to do it all again. But I have no idea what idea I will pursue, and while I’m trying to figure it out, I know that the odds are stacked incredibly high against another success.

While I wait, I worry.

· What happens if I can’t create a good idea?

· Or raise the money?

· Or hire great people?

· Suppose ten other people are already working on the same concept and beat us to market?

I’m starting to sweat just thinking about it.

But on the flip side, the beginning stage is also the most exciting. You can go in any direction. Maybe you’ll become the greatest inven- tor since Thomas Edison or more powerful than Bill Gates (unlikely, but still . . .). Perhaps you’ll create a company or even an entire indus- try that revolutionizes the world. Man, the beginning is an exciting time.

I guess that’s why I keep doing it. I’ve helped create dozens of products and three separate companies, and I’ve invested in over a dozen early-stage companies. ICC was our first start-up; it helped pioneer the PC software industry by, among other things, making it possible for personal computers to connect to corporate mainframes. Sounds pretty boring now, but twenty years ago, it was voodoo!

ISS, with revenues over $200 million, is a leader in the security software space, serving more than nine thousand corporate clients worldwide, including forty-nine of the Fortune 50, ten of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, and major agencies and departments within United States local, state, and federal governments.

And then there is DoubleClick, which people tend to lump in with eBay and Amazon when they talk about successful Internet survivors. DoubleClick is the leading provider of tools for advertisers, direct marketers, and Web publishers to plan, execute, and analyze their marketing programs. To oversimplify, our online advertising, e-mail marketing, and database marketing solutions help clients yield the highest return on their marketing dollar and also helps them measure performance within and across channels. We now employ more than fifteen hundred people in twenty countries.

Today I spend most of my time helping to start other new companies. Dave Strohm, a general partner at Greylock (a venture capital firm that helped fund both ISS and DoubleClick), described me awhile back as “a serial entrepreneur.” I never pictured myself that way, but when I thought about it, I realized that, as usual, my friend was right.

Back in 1983, when I cofounded ICC, I had barely heard of the word “entrepreneur.” Not only did I not know any entrepreneurs, I didn’t know how to spell the word. (I think I got it right in the last sentence. I still have to spell-check it to make sure.)

Whether you are trying to create something new or innovate within an existing company, the steps are the same—and there is a process that will allow you to do it faster, cheaper, and better.

A lot has changed in the past two decades, and I now talk to a lot of people who are thinking about starting companies or who have just started companies. In addition, I frequently meet people who want to become “intrapreneurs” (an ugly buzzword for an interesting process) and create new products and/or implement ideas inside the established companies for which they work.

Over the past few years, as I talked to these people and we traded stories about what we have done and hope to do, many of them told me I should write a book. As DoubleClick got more and more press, publishers got the same idea. I started receiving phone calls from editors who would ask me to write something about the “secrets” of starting a (technology) business.

I was always flattered, but I always said the same thing: I didn’t have time. I was then CEO of DoubleClick, and I told them I needed to focus on running the business. (What I didn’t tell them is that I knew writing a book is a horrible return on investment.)

Well, two years ago I handed over my CEO duties to Kevin Ryan, and while I’m still chairman of DoubleClick, I have a little more time on my hands.

WHY YOU SHOULD KEEP READING

I’m writing this book because there’s been so little good stuff written about innovation and how you bring an innovation to market. I’ve found that most of the books out there simply talk about the importance of innovation, but not about how to do it. Or they tend to focus on ways you can increase your creativity—some of the stuff by Roger von Oech, such as A Whack on the Side of the Head, is good—but nobody, including von Oech, tells you either how to be creative systematically or how to bring your ideas to market.

Getting my process down on paper is why I wanted to write this book. In doing so, maybe in some small way, I can accelerate the innovation curve and we’ll all live a little bit better. This process will help you avoid the numerous mistakes I made along the way (I will recount them in detail, so you know exactly what not to do). I know it can help you, because the process I describe here is the approach I followed in creating three separate successful companies and dozens of products.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, I think you can innovate methodically. You can force innovation. There is a process you can follow to improve both the number and the quality of ideas you can come up with.

I know this is true, because it is exactly what I have done in creating dozens of successful products. I’ve been a student of innovation for twenty years, and because I was never in a position to let the proverbial lightning strike me—I have too many obligations to wait for that, and even if I didn’t, I don’t have the kind of temperament that would allow me to wait for things to come to me—I needed to figure out a way to force innovation. It’s that process of forcing innovation that you will learn about here, a process that I developed by trial and error over two decades and that has been refined and proven over time in a number of different industries.

I only wish Thomas Edison had better documented his serial approach to innovation. I’ve always loved and agreed with his famous quote “innovation is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” which reinforces my belief that innovation can be forced. Edison would find a problem and work his ass off finding the best solution. That’s what we’re going to try to do here.

What’s in it for you? This isn’t a get-rich-quick book. If you are looking for that, put it down now and go buy some lottery tickets. The only people who get rich from those kinds of books are the people who write them, from consulting and speaking fees. I always strive to create companies and products that solve real problems, generate profits, and stand the test of time. I love technology and innovation, and I’m fortunate that I now get paid for what was once only a hobby: creating new ideas.

This book is targeted toward anyone who wants to innovate by:

· Creating something new from scratch—developing new products or services, or making existing processes more efficient within an existing organization. (I believe there are a lot of commonalties between a successful innovation within a company and a stand-alone innovation. In both cases, you have to create the idea; put together the strategy; get money; recruit the right people; and bring what you have to market, even if that market is internal. As you will see, the process you use is nearly identical.)

· Making something better. Organizations either innovate or die (to be replaced by firms that have figured out how to improve a product or service or solve a need).

In short, this book is designed for those people who share the passion and entrepreneurial urge to come up with a new idea and do something about it once they do either by starting a new company or improving an established one.

BATTING PRACTICE

So why should you listen to me?

I’m not a Ph.D. I don’t even have an MBA. (I’m University of Michigan class of ’83, bachelor of science in electrical engineering.) I’m not a consultant. And there are plenty of examples of people who have been far more successful entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison and Bill Gates, two people I have tried to learn from.

Thomas Edison was one of...