everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons
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Last week, I gave this talk in San Francisco called "everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons."
(I don't like slides with lots of copy, so I recommend reading my notes that I uploaded into Slideshare along with the actual slides. I'm also hoping to upload a video of the talk soon).
In the talk, I used cartooning itself as a metaphor to describe how to come up with ideas and how to share them with others.
My main premise is that remarkable products are the result of the process of developing the idea and the process of getting it through the organization without suffering the "death by a thousand cuts".
Launching a cartoon strip is actually quite similar to launching a new product (except that cartoonists don't have slotting dollars). Both involve shrinking categories dominated by brands that have been around since the 50's. It's very hard to break through in a meaningful way.
I walked through my own experience, but also that of Bill Watterson, Matt Groening, Scott Adams, Hugh Macleod, Stephan Pastis, and Tom Meyer to see what insights we can apply to business innovation.
I had a lot of fun with it, and plan to do more talks in this vein. If anyone would like me to share it at a London venue over the next few months, please just drop me a line.
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