I was recently asked to write an essay on “What is the most inventive or innovative thing you’ve done?” Here’s my 1000 word or less narrative below. I had fun writing it and thought to share. What is YOUR story of innovation?
Yesterday morning I awoke from a peculiar dream. I was reading my son one of his bedtime books when he stopped me and asked, “Daddy, have you ever been innovative?” The alarm clock on my phone buzzed me into basic coherence, and I shuffled into my morning routine, clueless to the seed the little blonde-headed wonder had just placed in my skull.
The shower steamed open my eyes and the word bounced back into my fore thoughts. “Innovative? Well sure, baby,” I muttered. But in ruminating a moment, I remembered innovation is in the eye of the beholder. In looking at all of the ideas I have in any given week, one might say I’m obsessed with it. Whether I track them in an email using SIRI to capture an idea while driving, scribble them in one of several notebooks or sketchbooks I keep, or jot them down on Post-It notes all over my desk, I have tons of ideas. Innovative ideas. But I’ve learned over the years, ideas aren’t enough.
The green-apple shampoo vapors revived my sense of smell, and I figured one should have to look at what ideas I have turned into reality to actually gain a sense of my level of innovation. In looking at the many things I have created, one person might say TROBO was my greatest innovation. TROBO is a cuddly plush toy born a few years ago into the Internet of Things. It reads stories about Science and Math to kids age 2-5 via an iOS app. To that, I’d reply, yes my business partner and friend, Jeremy and I did innovate, and TROBO gained lots of wonderful press as a result. We even wrote a book. But I’d say that wasn’t my most innovative moment.
As the soap suds bumbled down my fingers and leaped haphazardly into the drain, I mentally leaped to a more technical innovation, where I was trying to solve a tough problem. A personal problem. I’m obsessed with remembering as much as I can, because I find that I don’t remember nearly as much as I would like to. In particular I feel I don’t remember enough of my childhood, extended family members I see once a year, and even people whom I casually meet at conventions. Everything we come in contact could be remembered somehow, and those things could be easily retrieved with the right technology. Imagine how powerful it could be when you miss a detail in a complicated meeting, if you could simply rewind to that moment and hear it again. Achieving that was my goal.
In ruffling my worn towel through my soaking brown hair, I reminisced about how I approached the solution. In August 2005, I began my first entrepreneurial journey in launching the Personal Memory System (see photo just above). The initial device was a Palm Treo, a Windows Mobile phone with a microphone wired to my shirt, and I eventually prototyped a pair of glasses with a tiny video camera taped to the top right corner on a Dell PDA. I wrote an app that recorded all the audio I heard and eventually all the video I saw, onto a large compact flash card shoved into the mobile device. It chopped the audio and video into 15minute chunks and time and date stamped them for access later. I wrote a Windows desktop app that encrypted the files so no one but I could access them. I even wired up a thumb print scanner, to allow me to quickly decrypt the files when needed. In the end I created a full kit that one could use to capture all their audio and video memories, archive them securely, and retrieve them off of a DVD or removable hard drive. It was great, geeky fun. I even got seed funding for the venture. I used the system at work and conventions, to revisit meeting details, customer faces and names, and I continued to investigate uses.
I cranked up the buzzy shaver and began smoothing the night’s stubble. I remembered that although innovation from a technical angle can be marvelous, innovation can only be successful in having an impact, if people are ready for it, and if you can market it enough to get the message out to your target audience. I was a junior inventor at this point, and the concept of entrepreneurship was brand-spanking new to me. I had always built gadgets and sketched out ideas, but I had no mentorship when it came to business. When I created the Personal Memory Systems, I was fortunately going to USF business school and was joined by a small team of students (and lifelong friends) around the idea. We launched the company with a seed investor, friend, and mentor named George that I met from SCORE and started marketing it at conventions and business plan pitches. Some people liked it; we won a innovation award. Others hated the idea of being videoed or recorded in any way. I also quickly recognized that recording my meetings at work might be grounds for them firing me, as like most Engineers in tech industries, I always worked on secret IP. As I wound down the last few strokes of the razor and glared at my slightly wrinkled eyes in the mirror, I remembered realizing at one point that I didn’t have enough money, really the right team, or a clue about how to launch and market such a capital intensive venture. With some people resisting the idea altogether, I realized that perhaps people value privacy more than then their need to remember everything. I didn’t agree, but the buzzwords of Wearables and Internet of Things didn’t exist in mainstream. As a young inventor, not yet with a clue about how to get something like that to market, I stopped the venture and closed down the company.
I grabbed the toothbrush and reveled as the minty, tooth-whitening scrub set my tongue on fire. I remembered hearing later on about Nick Woodman’s GoPro and learning how he figured out a niche use of cameras to capture sports. He started in 2004 a year before me. He innovated, but in a business way more so than in a technical way and became a billionaire.
Years later in 2013, Google introduced the world to Google Glass, a wearable technology that could capture video and audio as well as give the user apps and a user interface right in front of their eyes with a minimal amount of wires and cables like my poor man’s prototypes needed. I was in awe and excited to see that Google had something very similar in mind, and they had the money to do it “right”. I was also sad to see that even after 8 years of Millennials moving into the workforce, wearables becoming a common term, and American culture coming more open to sharing their lives via Facebook, etc… that people still reported being asked to leave bars and restaurants after wearing Google Glass. We still value privacy over innovation sometimes.
As I pulled on my Batman T-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, I reminded myself of another major lesson I learned from that innovation, from other ideas I have feverishly explored in the late evenings that went nowhere, and from other products I have eventually taken to market. Some ideas may be absolutely innovative. Some opportunities to innovate may seem like the ones you should tackle regardless of your true abilities to execute on it. But in order to take an innovative idea, to an innovative product, to an innovative position in the marketplace, you have to have many things in place and be there at the right time. I no longer look at innovation like a crazy inventor, such as Flint Lockwood and his “FLDSMDFR”, creating items that perhaps no one but I really want. I now look at innovation from the eye of an entrepreneur, a father of two children, and a manager who has lead large teams and tiny teams in taking multi-million dollar products to market. You might say I behold it differently. I look at it holistically. I also know I won’t always get it right, but I will always keep trying.
I walked down the hall to a bunk bed and hugged my son into awareness, noticing his Iron Man PJs have begun looking a little tight. I asked him, “How are you feeling this morning,” and he responded, “Fine… How are you feeling?” Staring into the face of one of my three daily reminders to change the world for the better, I said, “…Innovative.”