In order to innovate, you need to break away from what’s comfortable, says founder and CEO Jeremy Gutsche
In order to innovate, you need to break away from what’s comfortable.
That’s a lesson Jeremy Gutsche, the founder and chief executive of trend-tracking platform Trend Hunter Inc., has spent the past 20 years applying at organizations around the world, from Fortune 500 companies to NASA.
“It’s easy to stay on the path we’re on and that’s what causes us to miss opportunity,” Gutsche said. “And if you’re successful, your path is even more paved.”
Gutsche uses the transition humans made from hunters into farmers as an example: the move paid dividends at first, but repeating the same steps that led to the previous year’s harvest eventually stopped yielding the same results.
“Those are the traps that hold you back,” Gutsche said. “To make innovation happen, it’s about disruptive thinking and trying new things and taking some of those risks. But largely, it’s about trying to break from the traps of path dependency.”
“We realized it was the beginning of a new inflection point for everybody,” he said.
At Trend Hunter’s Future Festival World Summit, which is being held in Toronto between Oct. 1 to Oct. 3, Gutsche said AI is going to be the main topic of discussion. The summit gathers hundreds of innovators from around the world to discuss trends and the research Trend Hunter is conducting on behalf of various brands. “(The attendees) spend a day learning the trends, a day experiencing them, and then a day working with their teams to workshop through what their big plans might be for the next year,” he said.
But that chaos can be a breeding ground for opportunity, he said.
Henry Luce, he pointed out, published the first issue of Fortune magazine mere months after the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the start of the Great Depression. Luce figured the scores of Americans who had just lost their jobs would pay for a glimpse of what was really going on behind the boardroom doors.
Despite being priced at a hefty $1 per issue, the equivalent of the cost of a wool sweater at the time, Fortune ended up securing half a million subscribers and raking in US$7 million in modern-day profit during the Great Depression, Gutsche said.
“To spot a need like that, you need to be watching the trends and not stuck in the path and the comfort of the 10,000 years of evolution and farming, or whatever led to last year’s harvest.”
Gutsche has worked with numerous organizations over the years as an advisor or keynote speaker, but lists his time spent with NASA in 2015 as a career highlight.
He visited the Johnson Space Center and spoke to employees exploring the various scenarios for putting humans on Mars.
“It helped that they basically paid me with a couple days of astronaut training,” he said, adding that he got to drive a Mars rover and saw the James Webb telescope before it went into space. He also confessed that he got in trouble for “touching space things.”
One of the biggest challenges Gutsche said the Mars team was facing at the time was how to get its siloed teams working together and making compromises in order to see the big picture — a challenge, he noted, many other organizations grapple with as well.
“It was largely about trying to get people to come together when otherwise you’re just working on little spokes of a wheel,” Gutsche explained. “We all hear that all the marketing team isn’t always talking to the finance team, or the Toronto office doesn’t always collaborate with Vancouver.”
He recalled one scientist and former astronaut standing up and announcing that he had 17 missions cancelled in his time because every time a new U.S. president took office, NASA’s objectives changed as well. This revelation changed the atmosphere of the room and got the group collaborating.
“I think if you bring people together in any organization and allow them to work on that giant strategic picture, they become much more innovative because they know where their part fits in,” he said. “They know what compromises to make.”