Larry Schmitt: Innovation Comes from the Community

In this interview Larry Schmitt talks about how he feels innovation comes from the community. He feels it’s the qualitative aspect of why do customers choose the things they do, and want the products you serve. Larry talks about how a company named Menlow use personas to influence the design of the product. They know what the product needs to do. They have an idea of something they need to build and they build it in the best way possible and figure out how the different types of people will react to the product and how they will observe and feel about the product. What Larry has done with his company Inovo is adopt that personal technology early in the process to figure out what should the product or service be but use many of the same techniques that companies such as Menlow use in terms of this high tech anthropology. According to Larry he feels that you have to force the right type of conversations and think about the problem in the right type of way. He talks about how we should think of both the rational and emotional aspects of how humans deal with the world and deal with new things. He gave a great example dealing with the I-phone. When the I-phone came out there were those early adopters that rushed to get it and Larry wandered was it a rational response or emotional. He felt that it was a combination of both but more so an emotional response. Those are the type of things that drive innovation and depending on if the I-phone meet peoples expectation that will decide whether it is truly an innovation but the initial response to the I-phone was emotional. He also talked about how Steve Jobs knew early on how people would respond to the I-phone because he empathizes with the user and puts himself in the users shoes and looks at it from their perspective. Larry defines innovation as something that gets adopted and valued by the community. Innovation comes from the community. He says you can have thousands of ideas but your not an innovator until the community says you’re an innovator and the way they say you’re an innovator is that they highly value the product you produce. Some of the questions he felt that those creating innovative products has to ask themselves are will the people that buy there product recommend it to their friend and will they like the product 3 months from now or at a later time. Those are things that have to do with how the product is built. This was an interesting interview that I really enjoyed listening to and it gave me a great understanding of the term innovation and how it can be applied to creating a product. Good luck with all of your future endeavors. DeAndre Turner Eastern Michigan University