by Janet Muto

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an innovation junky. I love being around it, participating in it, and pushing innovation myself. It’s why I do what I do. That’s why I was so excited to be on the panel at The BootCamp Ventures Israel Innovation Road Trip in Boston a few weeks ago.

We participated in a flurry of presentations from companies looking to innovate. They gave us their 30-second elevator pitches, deeper 6-minute presentations. And then the panelists provided on-the-spot feedback.

I won’t go into detail on what I liked, didn’t like, who did best or who struck the wrong notes. But here are a few general notes from the session.

• Don’t innovate for the sake of innovation. “The Big Idea” is often so rapturously engaging to its creators that there is no thought beyond the idea itself. Ideas are often like our children. It’s impossible, to paraphrase Mrs. Seinfeld, to imagine how someone couldn’t like this child of yours. After all, it’s brilliant. Isn’t it? Be thick skinned, and get feedback from the toughest people you know—from within your company and elsewhere. Then find more, tougher people. The lessons you learn from the feedback you get will be invaluable to you. It might sting at first when you find out your little baby isn’t perfect. But it will be worth it.
• Think about your customers—early and often. A smart idea, even a groundbreaking idea, can sometimes get bogged down in development with little focus on the customer. Has anyone tested the idea with people who might use it? If you have, good for you. But has that feedback been given to the development team? Has the feedback the sales people have gotten been integrated into the product development plans? This is all about establishing a communications loop with customers. If your product and company are stealth right now, you can still get this feedback, but it might be a bit less formal than if you have an existing product and customers. If you do have an existing product and the customers that hopefully go along with that, you should have this feedback loop in place from day zero.
• It’s better to do something small that lots of people need than do something big that no one wants. Think back to the dot-com bubble. Webvan was going to revolutionize the way we bought our groceries. Only it didn’t. There are many stories like this. On the surface, huge undertakings can be very attractive. But look a layer or two below and the cracks start to appear. Webvan barely got off the ground, and despite billions of dollars in investments, it was soon one of the biggest flops in history. Thinking a bit smaller, there’s ConstantContact, which I was part of for the better part of the past decade. We saw small businesses as a neglected segment. So we set about, with a small but powerful solution, to help those small businesses communicate better with their customers. Seemingly insignificant at first, this idea gathered steam over time and defined a category. Now ConstantContact is a public company with multiple products lines—all built on one little idea.

These observations lead me to an observation that I’ve discussed with my colleagues here at HSG and elsewhere over the past few weeks. There are two kinds of innovators: those that apply innovation to a customer problem and those that innovate and then search for a customer problem. Which camp do you fall in?