Blackberry - Lessons learned from failures in innovation
David Jitendranath
AI Strategy Developer, Advisor, CxO -- Architect of the absurdly brilliant
I recently watched the movie “Blackberry” on a flight back to Denver. For those who are GenX like me, we were in our late 20s or early 30s when the blackberries came out. We saw these “crackberries” as they were called, used by our bosses and “executives”. They were a status symbol that signified ambition and success. It was fascinating to see how much their innovation was ahead of its time. Well before the iPhones, Blackberry founders dreamt of a computer on a phone. Watching the movie, It is incredible to learn how an innovative company with 60% market share in the smartphone market called ‘Research In Motion’ (RIM) can get wiped out.?
In this blog, I focus on some lessons we can learn from failures in Blackberries’ innovation practices.
Stopping the creative practices
Blackberry engineers had the culture of having a movie night each week. This movie night served the engineers as a means to get into their creative zones. They were able to make analogies from movie characters. Expand their thinking on what alternative endings to the movies could have been. When sales increased, the company tasked these research engineers to deliver the phones. In order to meet the delivery deadlines what ended up being sacrificed? were the movie nights.
Innovation is a creative process. It requires us to consistently practice activities and habits that help us stay in the creative zone. If your “work” requires you to completely stop these practices. What usually ends up getting sacrificed is the innovation you bring to the table. We may be living in a different world if those research engineers had continued their movie nights
Too big for a single mind
In the movie, when the iPhone is launched, Blackberrie's co-founder single-handedly tries to create a breakthrough for Blackberry. They outsource all production to China while the co-founder spends crazy hours locked in his office with a pile of phones to come up with his breakthrough.?
Good and high quality innovation is always too big for a single mind.
Think about quantum physics, we mistakenly attribute that innovation to one man with the crazy hairdo, Einstein
It is a fact that the innovation and breakthrough of quantum physics did not come from a single mind.
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Equating innovation to productivity
The blackberry team hires a scary looking COO, Jeff purdy.
When Jeff walks into Blackberry’s office and sees all the engineers having a movie night, he comes up with this supposedly brilliant idea that they should produce the phones in China. That may have been brilliant if they had allowed those engineers to continue their research and created a separate delivery team. However, Jeff mistakenly equates innovation to productivity.?
It wasn't productivity that brought the breakthrough idea of Blackberry (computers on a phone) in the first place. It was a lot of imagination, daydreaming and movie nights.?
Believe it or not, innovation is 50% curiosity & observation, 30% imagination, and 20% expression of that imagination. There is very little thought to productivity for an innovator.?
It naturally happens when they cannot contain what needs to be expressed as a result of their breakthrough imagination.
A minute has only one minute
Cell phone carriers were originally selling minutes. With advances in carrier infrastructure cell phone companies were able to push larger data wirelessly between devices. Hence cell phone carriers started selling data, minutes became unlimited. All cell phone companies offered unlimited minutes. Blackberry failed to subsume this structural development. In the movie, the CEO of AT&T tells the co-founder of blackberry “A minute has only one minute” implying selling data is more scalable for cell phone carriers.?
Markets are constantly evolving and adjusting based on advancements with structural innovation (more on this in my upcoming book) . What sold yesterday will not sell tomorrow. Innovation initiatives will have to adopt its research and activities to subsume new developments.
If you want to run a forward thinking innovative company. Always stay true to your essence of innovation. Continue to look inward, reflect on some of the innovative moments you've had. Never cease to practice these activities and habits that brought you that breakthrough in the first place.
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