Being Clueless Helps Innovation

When you set up to build something, be it a new company, a great service, a product that the world can’t live without, one of the greatest barrier you hit is made from stereotypes. Let’s take luggage as an example. It took us so many years to put the tiny wheels on it yet people knew what the wheel was for many a year. And every year hosts of designers were thinking on how to make the next great bag and didn’t think about it. Why is that? Because a bag should look like this and this and that and doesn’t have wheels. So go wild boys and put flowers on those bag but no wheels. Luckily something snapped and they figured it out, after all.

But what if you took a guy that had never seen a bag yet knows what wheels are and you tell him to build some contraption for moving his belongings from point A to point B? Is he more likely to make a box with wheels on it than something that you have to brake your back to carry around? Probably.

Stereotypes kill ingenuity. Not because people are stupid, nor they lack creativity, it’s just hard to make a different sort of bag when you know what a bag should look like.

That’s why interdisciplinary approaches sometimes give incredible results. See Gary Vaynerchuck, who is a wine guy that started using the web tolls that were available in a way he thought it would work, and it did work! Look at Loren Feldman from 1938Media. Comes from outside the whole web geek culture, takes a different approach, which made sense to him, and nails it.

So next time when something you don’t know how to do comes your way, don’t run the other way, just do it the way it might seem natural to you and maybe you will do it differently then the rest and your way will be better.