In recent years, filmmakers have explored the concept of innovation and its impact on the world in a variety of ways. From biopics about trailblazing inventors to stories about the consequences of technological progress, these movies have not only entertained audiences, but also provided thought-provoking insights into the world of innovation. Here are our top 5 innovation movies that will leave you feeling inspired.
1. The Social Network (2010)
This biopic chronicles the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook and one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. The movie paints a vivid picture of the challenges and successes of an ambitious young innovator who changed the way people interact with each other.
2. The Imitation Game (2014)
This biopic focuses on the life of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who was instrumental in cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. The movie explores the power of innovation and its potential to save lives and shape our future.
3. Moneyball (2011)
This movie tells the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who revolutionized baseball by employing advanced analysis to build a winning team on a tight budget. This movie is a wonderful example of how innovation can be applied to any field to improve performance.
4. Hidden Figures (2016)
This biopic tells the inspiring story of three African-American women mathematicians who played a crucial role in the successful launch of the first US space mission. The movie highlights the importance of diversity and the power of innovation to break down barriers.
5. The Man in the White Suit (1951)
This classic comedy stars Alec Guinness as a young inventor who develops a revolutionary fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. The movie explores the power of innovation and how it can disrupt entire industries.
Conclusion
Each of these movies provides a unique perspective on innovation and its power to change the world. They are sure to leave you feeling inspired to pursue your own innovative ideas.
Personally, I was surprised to see ‘The Man in the White Suit’ on the list, and not my favorite ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, so I guess I will have to see if Netflix or Prime Video has this movie from the fifties. It sounds intriguing.
Another favorite of mine is ‘Flash of Genius’, a movie about the inventor of intermittent wipers and his painful fight against the patent infringement of the major car companies.
Image credit: Pixabay
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First Apple changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple to better reflect a business focus that was extending beyond computers to music players, smartphones, digital music sales, and more.
And last week Apple announced a flurry of new products including:
iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s plus
All new Apple TV
iPad Pro
watchOS 2
iOS9
What was clear from the announcements is that Apple’s view the future of computing and entertainment is an App-centric one.
First Apple created Apps for the iPod. Anyone remember the iPod? Apple barely does. They still make iPods, but they’ve been dropped from the main menu on Apple’s web site and relegated to the text links at the bottom of the page. Then they create Apps for the iPhone and the iPad and the watch. And this past week Apple announced their App-centric vision for the future of television.
What is this vision?
It’s pretty simple really. Want to watch major league baseball (MLB) on your television, buy the MLB app. Want to watch HBO, buy the app. Cartoon Network? Get the app. You get the idea.
Why does Apple have this vision?
This App-centric vision of entertainment grows their ecosystem and enables Apple to make money not only from hardware sales, but also from commissions in the sale of all of these Apps. And as people buy more apps, they lock themselves further into Apple’s hardware, by design.
Apple’s App-centric vision for the future of television is good for creators of popular, quality content like HBO, the National Football League (NFL), Premier League Football, CNN, BBC, and for movie-centric aggregators (Netflix, Amazon). The evolving App-centric approach to television also has the benefit to the content creators of enabling them to build Apps that yes play full-screen video (what people expect), but also to integrate information, commerce and social elements into their Applications as they see fit. The downside is that content creators will lose the perceived safety that cable network bundling offers.
But the smartest, best run content creators are more likely to gradually embrace this App-centric possible future, and as a result Apple’s App-centric television future is likely to be a disaster for cable companies and other television-centric aggregators (Hulu, Sling). Why would you need an intermediary like a cable company when you can go straight to the source?
Cable companies could however try to beat Apple to the App Store model and potentially also beat them to the Spotify model for television if they move quickly. But are speed and courage what cable companies are known for?
YouTube and Facebook could also be big winners in Apple’s App-centric television future as both sites could become the home for a treasure trove of free sample shows, a place for people to discover new content to subscribe to. Facebook has made a big push into video the past few years, making this potential area of growth possible for them.
Apple missed the App-centric transition in music, and they had to go out and overpay for Beats to try and catch up to Spotify and others. They’ve also missed the early days of the App-centric transition in paid video apps as well, with Netflix enjoying the early success. They don’t want to get completely left behind, so they are making their big push towards an App-centric television future. The only question is how?
Will Apple look to create a subscription service like Netflix or Spotify as their App, or focus on promoting content creator Apps (NFL, CNN, etc.) through an App Store, both, or something completely different?
No matter which direction Apple chooses, it’s clear that with Apple it is all about the apps. So will Apple change its name to App-le? Probably not. But, they’ve made it very
clear that their vision for the future is an App-centric one. Will they be able to realize it?
What makes people willing to pay $50 for a t-shirt that’s just like the one that ten other people are wearing in the club?
What makes people pay a premium for Apple products with features introduced by other companies months or years before?
If you are truly trying to be innovative, instead of creative or inventive, you MUST understand how your prospective customers assign value for the new solution you are about to introduce. This may require lots of customer interviews, ethnography, forced choices, and other upfront research, but it’s worth it, because if you don’t build your potential innovation on a new, unique insight then it has no chance of succeeding in the marketplace. And as I’ve said before, to achieve innovation you have to focus not just on creating value in the product or service itself, but all three sources of value:
Value Creation
Value Translation
Value Access
So, let’s get back to the $50 t-shirt…
Here in Seattle we are proud of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, who became a chart topping rap music music act by choosing not to follow the traditional way of making it in the music business so they could not only maintain their creative freedom, but also to make more money. Their mega-hit “Thrift Shop” pokes fun at fashionistas and has helped to make thrift shopping cool instead of embarrassing. Thank you to their combination of skills, they’ve been able to do a lot of the hard work themselves to promote their music, including making this video:
By remaining independent, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are free to collaborate with whomever they want, when they want, and with sponsors who add value in specific ways consistent with the current project they are working on, instead of a record company extracting a rent from all the artist’s activities (whether they are adding value or not). Here is one such project they undertook with another local artist, Fences, and sponsorship from a company headquartered here locally – T-Mobile USA. It’s a great song and a pretty cool video if you haven’t heard or seen it before:
I for one am grateful that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis didn’t sign a record deal, and record executives have candidly admitted that they would have totally ruined the act by forcing them to change to be more “marketable.” The success of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (and others) serve to highlight the disruption in the music industry value chain that continues to occur, creating discontinuities that artists like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis can take advantage of. This is of course as long as they have the digital and social skills to get the word out and help their music spread.
Is there disruption happening in your industry’s value chain?
How can you take advantage of the discontinuities?
Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:
Somewhere across the vast reaches of social media (I can’t remember where) I came across a small but growing internet television service called Aereo that allows you to stream live television over the internet on any device or even to record up to two shows at once like you would with a DVR – for only about $80 per year. Imagine a roof antenna or rabbit ears on your TV that happened to be somewhere you never had to see them. Aereo makes that possible. Here’s how:
1. They’ve made the TV antenna unbelievably small
So small it fits on the tip of your finger. But it still gets awesome HD reception.
2. They’ve connected those antennas to the Internet
They designed a way to put tons of these antennas in data centers, along with massive amounts of storage and super-fast Internet connections.
3. They give you control of your own antenna
They’ve built a simple, elegant interface to let you control this antenna. With any device you want, over the internet. All without boxes, cables, or cords.
The company has been around for about one year now and is now expanding to 22 additional cities. Cable Television Distributors are of course fighting back against this potential disruption, but Aereo maintains that their solution is legal. The bigger questions though are:
Is Aereo disruptive? Does it have the potential to make people switch? (possibly when combined with Hulu and/or Netflix and Amazon Prime)
Will Aereo be able to gain enough momentum to make cable television stations jump on board what might become part of an expanded premium offering?
What do you think?
UPDATE (2022): Eventually the cable companies won in court and Aereo was forced into bankruptcy where Tivo ended up buying them for $1 million. Sad but true. And now we have multiple offerings like YouTubeTV that have not been forced to cease operations – but at a much higher cost.
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A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an innovation speaker at an event, I noticed a large building by the side of the freeway advertising Indoor Sky Diving. The sign peaked my curiosity to investigate what indoor sky diving could possibly mean and so I set up a visit with iFly Seattle co-founder Lysa Adams.
My visit surfaced three key innovation-related concepts I would like to discuss:
Challenging Orthodoxies
Changing Perspectives
Tunnel Vision
1. Challenging Orthodoxies
Rowan and I talk a lot here on Innovation Excellence about how challenging orthodoxies is one way to identify insights to drive innovation efforts, and it made me wonder:
Have they successfully challenged the skydiving orthodoxies that you need the following to experience the thrill of skydiving or ‘flying’?
To jump out of an airplane
To carry and deploy a parachute
To learn several parachuting skills before progressing to sky diving
What if you could experience experience sky diving without the parachute and the airplane and the training?
Well, after my visit it was clear that iFly and SkyVenture have successfully challenged these orthodoxies with the indoor flying centers they’ve built here in Seattle and 22 other locations around the world including Hollywood, Dubai, and Singapore.
The facility itself seemed to be well-designed, recycling the air through two fan-driven intersecting circles of air that are accelerated from about 30mph through the basement up to 100-160 mph through the chamber up and back around again. Integrated into the space around the necessary apparatus are meeting rooms for corporate team-building events and party rooms for private functions. Organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Boeing, and the military have used the facility. It’s a pretty a cool facility and it was even a fair amount of fun just to watch others fly from the integrated viewing area.
So what is indoor skydiving and how can you experience the thrill of skydiving and ‘flying’ without the plane or the parachute? Well here is a video that shows an amateur learning the basic skills in their first session:
In a vertical wind tunnel people are able to fly in any of the four different skydiving positions – stomach, back, sitting, and head down (after mastering the previous one) – supported by wind speeds typically of 100 miles per hour or higher (an indoor hurricane). The vertical wind tunnel at iFly Seattle is state of the art, allowing wind speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
I had the opportunity to learn how to fly and try it out for a couple of minutes, and I looked pretty much like the novices in the video above. I was flying successfully by my second minute, floating up beyond the reach of the instructor temporarily, and never felt any of the fear I might have felt if I had done my ‘flying’ by jumping out of an airplane. It was an amazing experience, and I could see how it could be very addictive.
So other than challenging orthodoxies, what does any of this have to do with innovation?
2. Changing Perspectives
Innovation often comes from looking at things from a different perspective, or from observing something potentially valuable to your target customers in another context that you can adapt and bring to them as a new solution offering.
This change in perspective can come from using creativity tools like Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or other tools like mind mapping, brainstorming, brainwriting, SCAMPER, SIT, or from building and tapping into a Global Sensing Network.
Or it can come from physically changing your orientation. In the case of sky diving, sometimes sky diving teams have to get down on their bellies on wheelie boards on the concrete to show each other the tricks they plan to do in the air or in the vertical wind tunnel. It’s hard for the brain to imagine in a vertical orientation what is going to take place in a horizontal orientation, and this simple physical shift makes all the difference.
If it doesn’t come natural to our brains to imagine the horizontal from the vertical, imagine the trouble our brains have imagining different business contexts without being immersed in them. We often have to go see the other context for ourselves as a result, but a Global Sensing Network can help avoid this need to some extent. But this requirement to see things for ourselves highlights something very important. Because changing perspectives presents a challenge for our human brains, it presents an opportunity for us to work to achieve competitive separation.
Imagine the competitive advantage your organization could build over the other organizations in your context if you could build up your perception shifting muscles to recognize the relevant challenges and opportunities in other geographies and contexts faster than the competition?
3. Tunnel Vision
Do you remember what is like the first time you learned to drive a car? Do you remember how much you had to focus on every little detail from how hard you were pushing the accelerator to how fast you were moving the steering wheel left or right? But how much attention do you pay to these things now?
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
When it comes to innovation, most organizations suffer from innovation tunnel vision because as they look to involve more employees in their innovation efforts, they don’t give their employees the opportunity to learn and practice new innovation skills. Instead in many organizations we expect employees to just be innovative.
When it comes to creativity skills that tap into our right brain capacity, it is important to remember that as we master right brain skills they move to the left brain. And, when your left brain is occupied, then the right brain can go into a more creative mode. This is why you have many of your most creative ideas in the shower, or while you are driving, etc.
When the left brain is occupied it is less likely to intervene and criticize the ideas your right brain comes up with while they are embryonic and partially formed and kill them before you develop them further. When the left brain is not jumping in and trying to determine whether the ideas are logical or not, the right brain can focus on pure creativity.
This is why it is so important to create things like a common language of innovation, a shared innovation vision/strategy/goals, and to have a structured innovation process. If these things are all very clearly understood across the organization, then your innovation tunnel vision opens up a bit wider to allow you to identify more relevant insights and come up with better ideas. But you can’t stop there. If you want to engage all employees in innovation in your organization (or even a subset), and you want to open up the innovation tunnel vision in your organization even wider, then you must provide innovation training to every employee in the organization (or your chosen subset).
The faster you can get your employees to a level of comfort with your innovation language, vision/strategy/goals, process, and tools, the sooner they will be driving innovation with their knees, eating a Big Mac, and changing your innovation soundtrack – all with the windows down letting in new stimulus and fresh air into your innovation efforts.
Every organization has innovation tunnel vision, the question is how wide or narrow your field of vision is and how much you’re doing to pry the blinders farther apart.
Conclusion
We all are innovative in our own way, which is why I created the Nine Innovation Roles. But at the same time, we all have a certain level of innovation capacity, and if we develop that capacity we can achieve much more. If you want to get better at innovation as an individual or as an organization, you must learn new skills and you must practice them. Otherwise you will be an innovation belly flier forever. Thanks to Darren (my instructor at iFly Seattle – who used to be involved with Cirque du Soleil) and to Lysa Adams I was able to fly for the first time, but if I want to progress to back flying or sit flying on the way to head down flying and doing tricks, I must practice – in the same way that you must practice innovation in your organization. To conclude, I’ll leave you with this video of one of the instructors showing off and some team flying:
If you ever get the chance to try out indoor skydiving or ‘flying’, I highly recommend it as an amazing, fun experience. The cost runs about $60 for some basic instruction and a couple of instructor monitored flights (without the whole parachute or jumping out of the plane part). Happy innovating (or flying)!
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Now that my local Blockbuster has gone out of business, I’ve made the jump and joined Netflix (although I will miss taking trips to Blockbuster with my daughter).
The first disc in my queue to arrive was the venerable, enjoyable Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I was very excited to share this musical celebration of innovation with my daughter last night.
The story of course puts innovation (and learning from failure) front and center, and is a lot of fun at the same time.
The star object is of course the car, but the best supporting object as it were, is a sweet with holes in it.
At first nobody thinks much of the sweets with holes in them made by one of the Dick Van Dyke character’s inventions (“your sugar is getting too hot” comments Truly Scrumptious), but then he discovers that these sweets with holes in them can work like little miniature flutes and he thinks he is on to something. But, after demonstrating them at the candy factory a mob of dogs swarms the place, and he has to flee the scene (no sale). It’s only at the very end that the sweet failure is again transformed into a treat for dogs and everyone is going to become very wealthy as a result.
It’s a great lesson in changing perspectives, learning from failure when it does occur and also illustrates that sometimes you have to adapt an invention from your intended target market to another one in order to transform the invention into a successful innovation.
But, learning from failure is highlighted in an even more fun (and musical) way in the ‘The Roses of Success’ number.
If you’d like to see the video of the song, here it is:
And if you’d like to give the words a closer look, here are the lyrics (courtesy stlyrics.com):
Every bursted bubble has a glory!
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you’ll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!
Oh yes!
Grow the roses!
Those rosy roses!
From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
(spoken)Yes I know but he wants it to float. It will!
For every big mistake you make be grateful!
Here, here!
That mistake you’ll never make again!
No sir!
Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
Generates the steam for two more tries!
(Oh) There’s magic in the wake of a fiasco!
Correct!
It gives you that chance to second guess!
Oh yes!
Then up from the ashes, up from the ashes grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Those rosy roses!
From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
Disaster didn’t stymie Louis Pasteur!
No sir!
Edison took years to see the light!
Right!
Alexander Graham knew failure well; he took a lot of knocks to ring that bell!
So when it gets distressing it’s a blessing!
Onward and upward you must press!
Yes, Yes!
Till up from the ashes, up from the ashes grow the roses of success.
Grow the ro
Grow the ro
Grow the roses!
Grow the ro
Grow the ro
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!
Grow the ro
Grow the ro
Grow the roses!
Those rosy ro
Those rosy ro
Those rosy roses!
From the ashes of disaster, grow the roses of success!
Start the engines!
Success!
Batten the hatches!
Success!
Man the shrouds!
Lift the anchor!
Success!
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Somewhere across the vast reaches of social media (I can’t remember where) I came across a small but growing internet television service called Aereo that allows you to stream live television over the internet on any device or even to record up to two shows at once like you would with a DVR – for only about $80 per year. Imagine a roof antenna or rabbit ears on your TV that happened to be somewhere you never had to see them. Aereo makes that possible. Here’s how:
A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an 
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
