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Recent Articles The Vision Thing | The Vision Thing |
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Having one really matters Particularly for the creators of breakthrough products that carry the potential of creating and winning new product categories, having a clear understanding of how it can benefit users and the ability to articulate that vision clearly are fundamental to success, according to science writer and technology entrepreneur Chip Walter.To screenwriter-journalist-technology entrepreneur Chip Walter, the notion of visualizing something which doesn’t yet exist and articulating that concept convincingly to others is not merely helpful, it is absolutely fundamental to success, whether in the movies or advanced technology. And while conveying one’s vision clearly is essential to any business enterprise, it is particularly relevant to so-called ‘disruptive technologies’ – breakthrough products with the potential to create new markets, rearrange old ones, and change the way customers behave.
Way out front
“I went through the pain a lot of entrepreneurs go through, which is the very practical issue of: okay, I’ve got a great idea, or at least I think it’s a great idea, but how am I going to make any money off it? How am I going to get any investors to put money up for it?” Walter explained. “At the time, Digital Alchemy was very difficult for people to “get.” I was talking to investors that didn’t have any idea of what a CD-ROM was, or digital technologies, or the Internet, or anything.” Digital Alchemy had a nice three year run developing learning games, mostly for The National Geographic Society. In 1997, a California-based game company called Engage Games Online was intrigued by a new concept Digital Alchemy was developing that combined CD ROM and Internet technologies. “They thought it was a cool idea so they acquired us and they acquired me and I went out there as vice-president and executive producer for six months or so. But my kids were back in Pittsburgh. So I said ‘I can’t do this,’ and I came back.” Television vision Earlier in his career, Walter had been in on the ground floor of another major start-up – one which has since proved to be one of the most important breakthroughs in television – Cable News Network (CNN). “When Ted Turner got the idea of doing on television what radio stations already do with round-the-clock news, he had to figure out how to do it. ‘Is there a system in place? Is there technology in place that makes it possible? Do I have the wherewithal, the expertise out there to make it possible? How could this really work?’ Thinking that through and having a clear idea of how it could be possible is the vision that brought CNN to the next step,” Walter recalled. “That took money, and satellite dishes, and satellite technology, and more. But what really drove it was the fire in his belly.” Yet even a clear vision coupled with a burning desire to make it succeed may not be enough. “One of the messages has to be that failure is inevitable,” he noted. “Not everyone sitting in that room is going to come up with disruptive technology that’s going to succeed. By definition, most of them will have to fail. But I think it’s still instructive to think this way, because the real opportunities are in disruptive products, particularly for small companies. We don’t appreciate failure enough in Pittsburgh. We have to appreciate how much entrepreneurs learn from making mistakes, and how much that increases the likelihood of success when they try again the next time. “Even for big companies this is true. For a while big companies can just incrementally continue. Eventually, though, something will catch up with them because the world is moving too fast. If you’re Nokia, you may not have to constantly come up with new innovations year after year to maintain market share, yet Nokia works very, very hard to be innovative and to stay open. because it knows that any company in this world that doesn’t do that is eventually going to be dead meat; it’s just a matter of time.” Problem of proof
“Some people are going to win because they’ll really have a clear vision and they’ll be very good at articulating it and illustrating it. But they’re probably not going to do it with spreadsheets. Unless you do it by analogy by saying ‘oh, this is what CNN did, this is what the hula hoop did, this is what the cell phone did, this is what HTML did for the Internet.’ But those are analogies, they’re never going to satisfy someone who wants to say okay, I want to make 17 widgets, how much money can you make on each widget?” Making the connection “Whatever the product is, whether it’s a hula hoop or a cell phone – it has to be simple enough that people can understand it and use it and see the connection between it and their life. The second thing is that it has to be affordable so that large numbers of people can buy it. Ultimately you have to create a service and a product that truly helps people do what they need to do in their lives on a day-to-day basis. Or if a business is your customer, it has to help that business make money or save money because that’s how they define what makes their life better. That’s where I think visionaries succeed because they make that connection between their idea and its meaning to other people,” Walter said. “If Ted Turner had thought of CNN and no one cared whether they could get the news when they wanted it, then CNN would have fallen flat on its face. The only thing you can do is to try to make the very best decisions to increase the chances of success. But like the rest of life, business is a chaotic system. There’s no formula. If anyone had a formula, they would be running the world right now.”
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