One idea that caught my attention was to give your products away for bloggers to review. With one of his previous books (The Long Tail, I believe), Chris says he sent out 800 copies to bloggers to review. As a result, the web was brimming with buzz and information about his book. Consequently, sales on Amazon led the market for the book.

If you have a product, don’t you want as much Google visibility as you can get? Most people search for reviews of your product on Google before pulling out their wallets. If you want to maximize your online presence, you should send out complimentary copies of your product to bloggers like me. If it’s a product within my area of interest, I’ll review it on my site. Not only will my post reach 850 people, it will also give you Google presence — sometimes on the first page if I SEO the post well.

This technique of free-giveaways-for-reviews is of course risky. You can’t give someone a free copy of a book or software with the agreement that they’ll “say something nice or else won’t say anything at all.” Sure, some people may blast your software and explain how problematic it is. But if it’s that problematic, the software will die anyway.

A while back Scott Berkun sent me a complimentary copy of his book, Myths of Innovation. At the time I was perplexed that he was sending it to me for free. Now when I search online for Myths of Innovation, I see what an astute marketing decision it was. The sheer abundance of search results makes the book look like a much-talked-about, exciting publication. Although I haven’t written an official review, I have quoted from his book several times, and I continue to excerpt from it. It’s an enjoyable read.

If you want to contact me about reviewing a product, use the contact form here or send me an email at tomjohnson1492@gmail.com.

Many innovations start in the same way as mentioned previously [from dedicated problem solvers], but an unexpected opportunity emerges and is pursued midway through the work (p. 41).

In other words, while people are pursuing one direction, they encounter a surprise that leads them down another, more fruitful path. The surprise may lead to an invention completely unrelated from the original intent of the research.

Berkun then mentions three examples (which I describe below) where an invention came about unexpectedly.

Flickr

Flickr, the popular photo sharing service, didn’t begin as a photo sharing service. Instead, the team’s original intent was to build an online game such as World of Warcraft. Midway through their work, they realized the photo-sharing feature of their online game was more popular than the game itself, so they switched directions and focused on a photo sharing service instead.

3M

3M, the makers of Scotch tape and Post-it Notes, originally stood for “Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.” In the early 1900′s, 3M was drilling mineral deposits to find better ways of making grinding wheels. Faced with declining profits, they shifted products to abrasives (e.g., sandpaper). One day an employee saw an industrial painter swearing at the sticky residue his tape left on a car.

The 3M employee, Richard Carlton, saw a need for tape with a non-sticky glue (which wouldn’t leave residue), and eventually developed Scotch masking tape. Later, using the same non-sticky glue technology, 3M came out with Post-it Notes. Who would have thought Post-it notes would come out of a mineral mining company?

CNN has a fascinating article on the unexpected twists and turns 3M has taken since its inception. According to CNN,

After the development of masking tape, McKnight [one of 3M’s entrepreneurs] learned a crucial lesson about letting his engineers follow their instincts. He soon codified this lesson into a policy known as the 15% rule. “Encourage experimental doodling,” he told his managers. “If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.” Still in place today, the rule lets 3M engineers spend up to 15% of their work time pursuing whatever project they like. (“3M: A Mining Company Built on a Mistake …”)

Based on the success from the unexpected innovation, 3M has adopted additional policies to encourage free thinking and innovation.

Craigslist

With Craigslist, Craig Newmark’s original intent wasn’t to build a community-information-and-exchange site for all the U.S. Instead, he began using e-mail to let his friends know about cool events taking place around San Francisco. When e-mail would no longer support the demands of the information, Craig evolved the site into the popular Craigslist site it is today. (For a podcast with Craigslist founder, see this podcast from iinnovate.)

Pavlov

I can think of two other inventions where the original intention was different from the end result. I mentioned Pavlov’s salivating dog experiment in a post last week. Pavlov didn’t start out researching conditional reflexes. Instead, he was investigating saliva. Obviously he needed saliva from the dogs to perform his studies. As he rang a bell to make them aware of food, he discovered the conditional reflexes that turned the direction of his research.

Google AdSense

Adsense, Google’s billion-dollar revenue generator, didn’t come about in a straightforward path of innovation. Integration of ads with user-generated content began with Gmail. The product manage, Marissa Mayer, nearly killed the idea because it seemed “creepy and weird” to pair up ads with matching keywords from email. However, the ad integration became popular and led to the formation of Adsense, which matches ad keywords based on Google searches. Adsense is now one of Google’s main revenue generators.

(For the full story on Adsense, see “How Marissa Mayer Almost Killed Adsense,” from Blogoscoped. I also wrote briefly about it here.)

It’s no secret that Google employees are given a small chunk of time to pursue personal, creative projects. David Vise and Mark Malseed in The Google Story explain the 20% free time to be creative that all Google employees enjoy:

At Google there is a 20 percent rule, that encourages employees to be creative and innovative. Employees are told to work on their own interests for 20 percent of their time, or one day per week. These projects are encouraged to spark the creativity of Google’s employees and to motivate them to come up with new products and ideas. To quote Krishna Baharat from Google (who developed Google News as one of his 20 percent projects), “The 20 percent time was invented for people to just explore. People are productive when they are working on things they see as important or they have invented, or are working on something they are passionate about. This is also an opportunity to get bottom-up innovation. There is only so much that top management can specify or ordain.” (Vise, 2005, p. 132). Employees have some flexibility around their 20 percent time — they can use it weekly, or pool it, to spend more concentrated time on their projects. (Quoted from Information Visualization)

Having 20 percent of your time to pursue your own projects helps make you passionate and extra-engaged about those projects (unlike some other project that may have been forced on you).

At the last STC conference, I attended a panel on career strategies that included Andrea Ames, an information strategist (tech writer) at IBM. If I remember correctly, Ames explained that at IBM, each Friday they have a four-hour sacred block where they set aside their regular projects and reflect. This period of reflection can help fuel new ideas and innovation.

Should Technical Writers Have a 20% Rule?

Definitely, technical writers should have time to innovate. Often when I read about research and innovation and inventions of new products, technical communication is not the first thing that comes to mind. Technical communication brings up associations of the realm of the known, the tedious, humdrum task of explaining what’s already built. People think we’re only describing inventions, documenting in the footsteps of innovators.

But that mindset is wrong. The field of technical writing poses many challenges that have simply been considered unsolvable. With Web 2.0 technologies, we’re on the brink of major transformations in the field.

I’m not sure a 20% rule will result in innovation, but it can encourage an innovative environment. Encouraging tech writers to take risks, allowing them to explore new deliverables and alternative methods for gathering information, not locking down their computers with a rigid lists approved applications and old-fashioned style guide rules — all this can help writers become innovators.

What do you think needs innovation in the field of technical communication?

According to Vitruvius, a new crown in the shape of a laurel wreath had been made for King Hiero II, and Archimedes was asked to determine whether it was of solid gold, or whether silver had been added by a dishonest goldsmith.^[11] Archimedes had to solve the problem without damaging the crown, so he could not melt it down in order to measure its density as a cube, which would have been the simplest solution.

While taking a bath, he noticed that the level of the water rose as he got in. He realized that this effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown, and therefore its density after weighing it. The density of the crown would be lower if cheaper and less dense metals had been added. He then took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying “Eureka!” “I have found it!” (Greek: “εύρηκα!”)^[12]

The story about the golden crown does not appear in the known works of Archimedes, but in his treatise On Floating Bodies he gives the principle known in hydrostatics as Archimedes’ Principle. This states that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.^[13]

Berkun says we tend to mythologize geniuses because we need the story, and he references Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero. Most of these stories turn out to be factually false. Geniuses don’t just pull ideas out of the sky with mere luck. They spend their lifetimes reflecting and thinking and pondering about these topics. Whether they do it in a bath tub or while eating in an apple orchard, the brilliance doesn’t come from chance. It is the result of a life immersed in thought and experiment.

Recommended Scott Berkun Podcasts

Check out these podcasts on Berkun’s site:

• The engaging brand, with Anna Farmery (40 minutes, in two 20 minute mp3 segments)
• Interview w/ Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com, about Myths of Innovation (15 minute mp3).
• IT Conversations about Myths of Innovation and software development (60 minute mp3)
• What to do when things go wrong, at BayCHI, San Jose CA. 90 minute mp3
• Digital web magazine, 5 questions w/Scott Berkun

Show me a genius and I’ll show you a workaholic. Van Gogh produced 2000 works of art between 1880 and 1890 (1100 paintings and 900 sketches). That’s 4 works of art a week for a decade, and he didn’t start making art until his mid twenties. DaVinci’s famous journals represent decades of note taking, doodling and observations, and it’s a good guess that work was the center of his life: no spouses or children are mentioned in any of our records of him (though he likely had lovers in his studio). Picasso made over 12,000 works of art (“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it” he said, and he was right) in his lifetime, including sculptures, paintings and other mediums. Shakespeare wrote more than 40 plays, not to mention dozens of sonnets, poems and of course, grocery lists. These are people who practiced their crafts daily and sacrificed many other ordinary pleasures in life to make their work possible. Every math or music prodigy practiced to produce the work they are famous for (See the ten year rule).

(This is an essay that Scott mentioned in his post here.)