The Podcast

Craig Hamill spent his last stretch as Director of Innovation, Technology and Knowledge Management at UL Research Institutes, the safety science org behind the little UL mark on your power cords. He started as a level-one help desk tech building gaming rigs out of spare parts in the mid-90s, worked a college job at what was then the world's largest bakery on Chicago's south side, and spent recent years in research environments at UL and the University of Chicago. That range is the whole point of this conversation.

His line from our intro call was too good not to open with: innovation isn't moonshots, it's doing the right things at the right time and listening to people. Craig's argument is that the word has been plastered on so many websites it's stopped meaning anything, and that if you strip it back, innovation is just solving problems iteratively. Which sounds obvious until you notice how few organizations can name the problem they're solving with the technology they just bought.

The story that stuck with me is from the bakery. Craig is in a meeting full of ties and laptops when a group of linemen in working blues walks in, and the room wants to know why they're there. Those guys had been running that machine for 25 years. The first thing they did every morning was check the humidity and the outside temperature, because the entire line ran on timing. That's not in a textbook or a simulation, and no one designing on a spreadsheet was ever going to find it.

We also get into the other half: the risk of inaction. Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and the cab companies were all comfortable, and comfortable is what got them. Craig's point is that standing still doesn't hold your position, it just delivers you the most efficient possible version of what you already do, right up until someone else solves the problem for your customer. If you're the person in your org who keeps getting told there's no budget for this, that's the argument to bring.

Takeaways

Here’s a teaser…

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What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

Garmin's stock traded above $120 a share in 2007. A year later, after Apple shipped the iPhone 3G with a GPS chip built in and opened the App Store, letting outside developers build the navigation apps that came next, Garmin's stock was under $16.

The camera industry felt the same mechanism, just slower. By 2023, it was shipping about 6 million units a year, down from 120 million in 2010, a 95% collapse. Canon, Nikon, and Sony never got the chance to compete for those buyers, because the iPhone's camera arrived as a free feature bundled into a phone, a product none of them would have considered a competitor.

Garmin and the camera industry had every chance to compete. Neither one took it, because what replaced them showed up looking like a phone, not a rival product. This week looks at why, and at how the iPhone Christensen called a sustaining innovation against Nokia and BlackBerry took down three other markets through three different mechanisms.

Here’s what you’ll find: