Big Little Breakthroughs Notes

Intro
 Big Little Breakthroughs are small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time.
 Not always noticed, but build up to solve big problems and open up opportunities, more than
the big ideas.
 Expand your definition of what it means to be creative.
 The masterpiece, therefore, is the assembly of lots and lots of small creative pokes, not a
singular imposing work of divine inspiration.
 Trewin Restorick – ballot bin, cigarette but creative solution, found flaws in traditional
environmental charities,
 5% Creativity Upgrade: set the goal for a “massive boost in performance”

Chapter 1: Decoding the A-Ha

 Breakthroughs will often create new obstacles, but that’s how we progress.
 Caron Proschan – natural gum inventor
 Innoplasticity – creativity is expandable like your brain.
 Reservoir of dormant creativity waiting to be unlocked.
 BDNF – family of proteins that get released in the brain after exercise.
 Imaginative -> Creative (value) -> Innovative (utility)
 Mini-C: creative endeavor that lacks value, but many are needed to be creative.
 Little-C: has some value, but not highly recognized.
 Pro-C: has enough value to be professional level and provide income.
 Big-C: history-making.
 The five molecular elements of an idea are inputs, sparks, auditions, refinements, and slingshots.

Chapter 2: The Great Equalizer

 Coss Marte – Conbody
 We think of innovation primarily as a mechanism to drive growth, defense-focused innovation
can be a powerful weapon on your arsenal.
 Inventive thinking (offense-focused innovation) and creative problem solving (defense-focused
innovation) are two sides of the same coin.
 Dave Burd “L’il Dickey” – unorthodox rapper
 Relentless pursuit of doing things differently.
 You don’t need to be completely opposite in every area of your business to win, but exploring
oppositional approaches in all aspects may help you surface one or two actionable ideas.
 Mat Ishbia – mortgage lender hooper
 Lightbulb trophy
 Business Innovation Group – don’t hire to fill specific roles right away.
 Confidence lies at the intersection of creativity and grit

Chapter 3: The Frogger Principle

 Steve and Dave Joliffe: topgolf
  Innovation Premium: proportion of a company’s market value that can’t be accounted for in
traditional metrics.
 Innovation Tax: a market value that’s less than expected due to perceived innovation gap.
 70/30 rule: training/experience/planning delivers 70% of the results, creativity the other 30%.
 Develop creative skills in order to keep hopping ahead, or risk losing it all

Chapter 4: Build the Muscle

 Consistent routines harness creative abilities to deliver stunning work.
 Twenty hours of deliberate practice will allow you to learn the basics of almost any new skill,
broken down to 20 minutes a day for 2 months.
 Jenny Du – Apeel technologies
 Creativity grows through inputs, conditions, and repetitions.
 Inputs: fuel creativity with exposure to different creative mediums, even ones that aren’t directly
related.
 Conditions: physical environment, rituals, and rewards.
 Changing conditions can boost creativity. Use time to pitch bad ideas, recount failures, shift
scenery or isolate to focus on creativity.
 Repetition: repetitive practice unlocks creative brilliance, skills can only become ingrained by
way of repetition
 Ritual refinement is often the difference between mediocre and legendary work.

Chapter 5: Fall in Love with the Problem

 Chad Price – NC DMV
 The more time you spend examining the problem, the more innovative your solution will
become.
 Belief and empathy
 Belief: innovators are on the lookout for problems, drawn to the ones they believe the can solve
 Empathy: ability to sense other people’s feelings and emotions is a valuable asset for innovation
 Herd/Mehta: potato chips for pregnant women
 Catherine Hoke – Defy Ventures, inmate reform

Chapter 6: Start Before You’re Ready

 Duncan Wardle – Disney employee that sent buzz lightyear to space
 First couple attempts are not so good. But you keep adjusting, and by the time you get six
months later, you are way ahead of that person who’s taking their first swing.
 Start with a penny and double it every day for a month and you’ll exceed $3mil.
 Mallory Brown – humanitarian
 Why we wait: too much effort, fear
 We tend to think that getting started is all about generating the absolute perfect plan, but it’s
really more about getting every possible idea out of your head so you can later sort the good
from the bad.
 Ayal Laneternari – baby bottles
 Greg Schwartz – StockX shoes
Chapter 7: Open a Test Kitchen
 Mark Rosati – Shake Shack Innovation kitchen
 The bigger you get the smaller you have to act.
 Safe, well-equipped environment where you can invent, test and refine
 High volume of experiments
 Amy Ferraro – Mass Mutual, balloons and experimentation
 Rich Sheridan – Menlo Innovations, joyful workplaces
 Gear, participants and ingredients
 Gear: equip your test kitchen with whatever will help you unlock fresh thinking
 Participants: small teams with diverse, rotating members
 Ingredients: TV cooking show – limited number of strange ingredients or farmer’s market –
abundant options
 A/B testing
 Doug Peterson – NZ sail racing team
 Design, build, test, analyze
 Design – generate as many ideas as possible and figure out tests that are quick and cheap
 Build – construct the actual tests
 Testing – run the experiments again and again, isolating one variable at a time
 Analysis – reviewed results, compare to previous experiments and try to understand, which
leads to conclusions, new hypotheses and new experiments.

Chapter 8: Break It to Fix It

 Ole Kirk Kristiansen – Lego guy
 Continual re-invention
 Step 1: Deconstruct - the first order of business is to carefully disassemble the current approach
into its individual components.
 Step 2: Examine - Now that the components are isolated, it’s time to examine them with the
diligence of a fastidious scientific researcher.
 Playlist – organized list of possibilities.
 Step 2 Playlist:
1. What is this thing made of?
2. What’s missing?
3. What was the thinking and context that led to its initial creation?
4. Why did this work in the past?
5. What’s different today?
6. How has the customer’s need changed since this was originally conceived?
7. What are the core rules, truisms, traditions, or beliefs that are currently holding this
together but could possibly be challenged?
8. Where else in the world does a similar problem or pattern exist?
9. What technical advances have emerged since this version’s construction that could be
implemented for improvement?
10. How durable is it, and where are the likely fault lines or soft spots?
  Step 3: Rebuild - With insights from Step 2, we now begin to reassemble the pieces with the goal
of upgrading the end result.
 Step 3 Playlist:
1. What is one new component I could add?
2. What’s one thing I could subtract? Or substitute?
3. If I could wave my magic wand to make this better, what would the end result look like?
4. How can this be reassembled or rearranged to save time or money? Improve quality?
Solve a new problem?
5. How do other people solve a similar problem in my field? Outside my field?
6. What ideas could I could borrow from nature or art that could inspire an upgrade?
7. How might I make it bigger, such as adding more horsepower or computing capacity?
Smaller, such as with a leaner footprint, less waste, and faster delivery?
8. If I have several possibilities, how can I build a prototype to quickly test them before
proceeding?
 The insider approach centers on building a better version—an upgrade—of what you’re already
doing.
 Outsiders, who used the approach to enter a new field altogether.
 Ryan Williams – Cadre, breaking the secret backroom commercial real estate deals
 Mark Wallace – Wallace Detroit Guitars
 Khan Academy

Chapter 9: Reach for Weird

 Johnny Cupcakes – tshirts
 Playing it safe is actually risky.
 Innovators push themselves to explore the unexpected.
 Olga Khazan – jewish refugee
 Reach for weird is all about challenging yourself to explore oddball solutions instead of quickly
accepting obvious answers.
 Exercises for Harvesting Strange:
o Bad Idea Brainstorm: Make a list of every horrible, illegal, immoral, unethical, or just
plain lousy idea you can think of. After you’ve exhausted all your bad ideas, do a second
round where you examine the depraved concepts to see if there’s a little something
inside each bad idea that could be flipped into a good one.
o The World’s First: In this exercise, you’re only allowed to brainstorm ideas that begin
with the phrase “the world’s first.”
o Role-Storming: Instead of brainstorming as yourself (and being solely responsible for any
ideas generated), here you get to brainstorm as if you are someone else. In other words,
you’re generating ideas in character.
o Judo Flip: list out traditional ways to tackle a challenge, then write down the opposite for
each.
o Option X: after narrowing down a list of possibilities, ask whether there are other
options.
 Dustin Garis – Chief Troublemaker at P&G
Chapter 10: Use Every Drop of Toothpaste
 Kolja Kugler – scrap metal band
 Use imagination to compensate for any lack of external resources
 Notable innovations are born from scarcity
 A key principle of design is that you are most creative with constraints. Taras Kravtchouk –
Tarform Luna electric bike
 MacGyver your way out of a jam
 Kip Keino – runner from Kenya
 Jeff Citty – Innovation Academy University of Florida
 Always set deadlines and use small blocks of time to micro-dose on imagination.

Chapter 11: Don't Forget the Dinner Mint

 Will Guidara – Eleven Madison Park restaurant owner
 Dinner mint – over-delivering on a promise, providing more than was asked, represents a small,
additional creative flourish that elevates work product from commonplace to transcendent, to
build habitual instinct
 95-5 doctrine – 95% of the time manage down to the penny, 5% spend intentionally “foolishly”
 Small investments in creativity can yield disproportionately large returns.
 A dinner mint can represent any unexpected addition, from extra ideas to time savings to
physical goodies.
 Alan and Dale Klapmeier – airplane parachute
 Isolate on a single differentiator and focus creative expression on irresistible dinner mints for
that area
 Sidra Qasim and Waqas Ali – shoe fit
 Edge-storming: isolate single opportunity point, ideation sprint where only ideas that take the
concept to the “edge” are shared, set aside all execution, cost, and risk factors, then ratchet the
ideas back to something reasonable
 Dinner Mint Concepts:
o Variety: massive selection
o Speed: fastest delivery
o Humor: make the process funny
o Functionality: plus-up offering using imagination
o Impact: charitable tag
 Heather Hasson and Trina Spear – fashionable scrubs

Chapter 12: Fall 7 Times, Stand 8

 Kevin Kuntz – Gap disaster
 The fall seven, stand eight philosophy is best described as the intersection of creativity and
resilience.
 We’ve been convinced that unless innovations are perfect on conception and quickly
implemented, they are failures.
 How does innovation surface:
o New ideas are messy and flawed.
 o Not all ideas pan out and that’s a good thing.
 Lisa Mulvaney – P&G historian, wall of failures
 Dr. Samuel West – museum of failure, innovation needs failure
 Dr. Tom Rifai – wellness company Reality Meets Science
 After a failure, SLIP: Stop, Look, Investigate, Plan
o Stop: pause for a moment to accept what happened as a learning moment and tell
yourself that you’re only human and you didn’t die.
o Look: take a look at the situation in an objective, realistic, and balanced way. Own it and
decide what happens next.
o Investigate: evaluate what happened in a supportive, judgement-free way. What
could’ve changed the situation for the better?
o Plan: making a deliberate choice of what to do now.
 Nicholas Horbaczewski – drone racing league

Chapter 13: Your Shot

 Recap