Innovation = Butterfly Effect

For those who are new to butterfly effect- it’s a more dramatic fashion of depicting the sensitive dependence of a system on its initial conditions. To be more dramatic- flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas. It all comes from the Chaos Theory.

Perfectly deterministic systems, governed by mathematical equations may seem to behave absolutely randomly with a slight change in the seed (initial condition), as for its recursive nature. The whole of nature is governed by this Chaos Theory- Quasi Randomness. It’s a very interesting field of study and has been obsessing me for quite sometime now. I leave it to your interest and time to explore this field further. For the time being-

Here I am drawing a parallel between Innovation and the Butterfly Effect. More importantly the Quantum Innovations.

What I am essentially arriving at is that for innovations these are the novelty of the ideas that matter to produce the 10 X results. Remember, investing $1 million to produce $1 million doesn’t qualify to be an innovation. Innovation refers to investing $1 million towards an effect of $100 million. What matters is where do you invest this $ 1 million. This is the leverage effect. The beauty is in choosing the right point of investment and what follows is an avalanche. Seasoned campaigners and serial entrepreneurs precisely have the knack of identifying this area and putting their bets.

Take for instance:

• Microsoft very early guessed that the PC boxes will soon get commodatized, hence invested into Operating System to the result of making it one of the largest firm’s on earth and its shareholders billionaires

• Ikea did the same for design to produce some of the most contemporary yet highly usable furnitures across the world

• Sony’s seed was miniaturization

• Tata Motor’s butterfly effect came from Re-engineering the car

• Indian IT Industry’s small initial change was the Global Delivery Model.

• Overnight delivery was this idea for Fedex.

• For Apple is became the beautiful package called iPod.

• For McDonald’s it was franchise…

Here I am by no means discounting the effort that it take to drive the idea to market. What I am impressing upon is the merit of this brilliant idea. Remember, though ideas are worthless unless implemented, yet it’s the novelty of an idea that determines the 10x effect of the outcome.

So coming back to the butterfly effect.

The way flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a tornado, an Idea can change the course of an entire generation. Remember- the Atomic Bomb, Genetic Engineering, Transistor, Mission to Moon. All of this happened first in between somebody’s ears before we all saw it.

So think BIG and think DIFFERENT. You never know what you might stumble upon. A complex problem doesn’t require a complex solution, but a complex thinking. I just hope you understand the difference between complex and complicated here!