In some ways, it’s never been easier to build something (digital). The tools are abundant. They’re easier and cheaper to use than ever before. A global network of supporting talent is on tap. In many cases, AI can write, code, visualise, and do the outreach too. But has this ability to create led to better outcomes or just a lot more … stuff?
In this episode of SIDEBAR, we found ourselves circling this tension. What does progress really look like when you can prototype ten things in a day, or one thing ten times in a day? Is volume the goal? Or are we missing a deeper, more important question: what’s actually worth making?
This was a conversation that explored the optimistic future, as well as some of the muck that is out there just now too.
AI Is Everywhere. But Are We Pointing It At The Right Things?
Like most conversations about the future these days, we started with AI.
Not because we’re obsessed with it, but because it’s become the default setting for almost all innovation chat, as the thing that seems to sit on top of every conversation about what comes next. Rightly so, in some ways, because the tools can be extraordinary and they set our imaginations going. But when you look at how much of it’s being used right now, are we aiming a bit low, at the easy and cheap stuff?
In some ways, the current wave of AI is being used to paper over things we already know are broken, because that’s the simpler thing to do. So people have made bots to take on the customer service frustrations for them, such as automated dispute letters or chat interface agents.
The problem isn’t so much the AI tech, but the ambition for which it’s being used. We’re not redesigning broken systems. We’re just building clever ways to step over the cracks. If all we do is layer AI on top of existing problems, are we really innovating?
To be fair, there’s value in that. These early experiments, however shallow, can serve as gateways to creating the case for digging deeper into the systems themselves. They spark curiosity, open minds and justify further investment. Sometimes a workaround is what keeps the door open for real change.
The Average is the Enemy of Innovation
If you spend all your time designing for the average user, you end up with average products. That’s not cynicism, it’s maths. The middle flattens everything. It’s at the edges where things get interesting.
What we’ve found, over and over again, is that innovation gets its spark from people who don’t quite fit the mould. The obsessive who maximises every bit of the feature set, pushing the product beyond the original intent. The hacker who Macgyvers a variety of tools together. The accessibility designer solving for one extreme need, only to realise the solution ends up helping everyone.
Design from the fringes, work your way in, get the middle for free. Rather than spending a lot of time in the middle, and learning it doesn’t captivate as you move out.
It’s not about serving only a niche. It’s about recognising that breakthrough ideas often start where expectations are highest, frustrations are deepest, needs are strongest or the use cases are most imaginative. And in those places, you don’t need to guess what people might like, the people are already showing you what the future might look like.
A Return to Skunkworks, or at least the mindset
Companies love to talk about the need to take more risks, only to go all queasy as they tiptoe towards the jumping off point. Instead of trying a dozen things and seeing what sticks, they spend a long time, and a lot of effort planning one thing and hoping it lands. Which tends to be riskier. And more expensive when they ultimately go shopping.
As we were recording this, Pepsi had paid $2bn for Poppi and Google shelled out $34bn in cash for Wiz. Deep pockets indeed. Must be nice!
In many ways, spending huge sums on a ‘proven’ thing is more comfortable than taking 1% of that investment and spinning up 10 experiments. Small failures still seem to reflect badly on their owners, unlike acquisitions even though most present just as much risk of (slower, future) failure as they are insanely hard to integrate and extract value from.
Not every company needs its own version of Lockheed Martin’s SkunkWorks, but we do think every company needs to find a way to experiment… with urgency, with curiosity and low enough stakes that failure isn’t fatal.
That might mean building your own parallel teams, some with a loosely exploratory mandate, others with tighter briefs. The key is really multiple bets, that can hopefully pay off much more than their investment, but you need a few of them rather than betting the farm. All should at least find their ways to places that make them interestingly less wrong.
Influencers Have Replaced Startups as Innovation’s Role Models
Ten years ago, all corporate companies wanted to act like startups. Now they want to act like more like influencers.
And, it does makes sense. Influencers move fast, iterate in public and understand how to capture attention at scale. They don't wait for permission, partly because they’re their own boss. They launch things off the back of their content curated audiences. Sometimes terrible things. Sometimes shameless things that maximise their moments in the sun. But sometimes, often even, wildly successful things.
Where startups once showed us how to rethink entire industries, influencers now show us how to test ideas in real time, and let the audience decide what works. By the time a corporate innovation type has found the permission to do the thing that’s popped up as interesting, often we’re onto a whole new thing and the ship has sailed.
To succeed in a system like this, businesses will need to field teams of scouts that can explore and experiment, and develop the decision making muscles necessary to quickly spin up the resources to scale what works.
There’s a danger here, too, though, because speed alone isn’t the win. For scale without care leads to something we’ve been seeing a lot more of lately…
Beware the Slop, Remember Taste Still Matters.
We’re entering the slop era.
AI has made it possible to produce more, faster, and cheaper than ever before. But just because you can flood the market doesn’t mean you should. We’re seeing AI generated games clogging platforms like Steam. YouTube channels spitting out endless low-quality content, much of which is detrimental to our mental health or the construction of young minds. Companies end up chasing quantity because the tools allow it, not because the audience wants it.
It’s not a tech problem, but a taste problem. At some point, someone has to decide what’s ‘good’, rather than efficient, passable or even temporarily lucrative. Sometimes there’s depth that the metrics don’t capture, and that’s the thing that will hold more value and trust.
Taste is what makes things memorable, worth making and remain valuable when larger consumer bases are questioning what’s trustworthy amongst the noise.
The Future Lies in Bold Visions and Small Bets
One of the threads we kept returning to was this:
What’s the biggest possible future you can imagine? And what’s the smallest possible action you can take to prove it?
Lots of ideas fall apart because they just weren’t ready or because they worked in one context, but not another. Ideas need room to grow but, conversely, they need constraints to protect them.
The trick is to do the small things fast while holding big, wild, audacious dreams, and let the small things move you in their direction. To rally people behind a vision that’s ambitious, but ground it in acts that are achievable.
And this is our future of innovation, it’s messy. We have better tools than ever before, we have lots of baggage, we have lessons that work in certain contexts, we have changing forces all around that mean some will work again, some won’t. All in a culture that is covered in scars and bruises, while also looking up to the success stories feeling a huge weight of pressure to succeed.
As we wrap up, it’s quite nice to look at some of the big ambitious things that didn’t work out too. For the context is always moving, changing, evolving and it’s a relentlessness, combined with opportunism that wins more often than not.
Not sexy, but something to be optimistic about!
SIDEBAR is a podcast born out of the Innovators Social Club, hosted by Iain Montgomery and Charlie Rowat. It’s the conversation after the main event, exploring tangents that could turn into something bigger. The sort of topics that spark up in the room but don’t always make it into the official dialogue.
Rooted in the discussions that emerge from the innovation community and events we host as well as attend, SIDEBAR is an informal, no bullshit exploration of the themes shaping strategy, innovation and business, that perhaps aren’t getting enough airtime. Drawing on our own experiences, guest insights and the occasional contrarian take, we use conversation as a way to test ideas, challenge assumptions and see where things go.
No rehearsed thought leadership. No forced frameworks. Just real discussions about what’s actually working, what’s not and where we should be paying attention next.
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