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Do you know more examples?
Feel to share your feedback. We’ll update this deck in the coming weeks.

The full slide deck can be downloaded as PDF (reduced to 6MB, thx @marklightfoot). Sharing is appreciated.

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Since I left Acumen about eight months ago to work with Ray Chambers, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Financing the health related MDGs and Malaria, I have been thinking a lot about the question: How do we find ways for the innovation of the social enterprise sector to meet the scale of the World Bank, USAID, United Nations, or emerging market governments? I believe this collision will create new systems, shatter old ones, and ultimately make us more effective and efficient at delivering products and services to the poor. So what might this look like?

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I’ve often said that failure is a great teacher, but its lessons are too harsh. Entrepreneurs will fail all the time, yes, and there’s no alternative to failure. You can’t avoid it altogether. What you must avoid, however, is letting it consume you and destroy your self-confidence. If you let yourself become afraid to innovate — to go for it — you haven’t just failed. You’ve become a failure.

Failure makes many of us less confident and less aggressive. We become gun shy. That’s not surprising. Unfortunately, the cold reality is that once you’ve failed as an entrepreneur, you need to have blind confidence and a healthy sense of aggression to prove to people that you actually can succeed. You need to try again, and brace yourself to be criticized, lectured, doubted, and flat-out ignored by investors and sometimes even your own team. If at first you don’t succeed, you’re in for the fight of your life.

When I first started Bullhorn in 1999, our original concept was the product of some brainstorming between me and my co-founder. His idea was, “Why don’t we build a platform for people to display their creative work on the internet?” Then I added, “We could make it a marketplace for those people to get jobs.” Nobody had ever told us that this was a problem that needed solving, yet we thought it was a great idea. So did our original investors. In fact, when we took the idea to creative professionals, they really liked it as well. Unfortunately, when we took it to the businesses that were making hiring decisions, it was a total flop.

So our first business model failed. After a few months, as our cash dwindled, we thought up yet another problem that we could solve. Our investors loved that idea too. But, much like our previous efforts, we discovered that no one actually suffered from the problem we were out to solve. Our second business model failed, as well. Then the dot-com bubble collapsed. Our early investors quickly turned from loving their investment in Bullhorn to hating it and they shut us off from any additional capital. We decided to forgo salaries to stretch our cash. I was paying my rent by maxing out my credit cards. Then a business dropped in our laps. We met someone with a problem that needed solving and we were uniquely poised to solve it. We realized we had a game-changing idea on our hands: creating the first software-as-a-service applicant tracking system for recruiters. When our new product started to take off, we needed more money to get to the next level. Unfortunately, our investors looked at me like I was the boy who cried wolf and rejected the idea out of hand. The sales traction and momentum was not compelling to them in any way. They told us it would never be a big business. Fortunately, they were dead wrong, but we didn’t feel so confident at the time.

I had identified our winning product, but I was late to the game. So what did I do? Did I pick myself up off the floor, dust myself off, and power ahead? Not really. My team and I still had total faith in our concept, but the reality of having failed before made me nervous to take risks. I didn’t have the confidence to push my investors to support the idea and decided to essentially bootstrap the business, which worked, but cost us precious time. The business succeeded and the rest is history 13 years later, but we would be three times the size we are now had I been stronger.

We entrepreneurs are often good at one of two things — identifying when something isn’t working, or ignoring the risks and suspending disbelief. When you’ve failed before but now know you have the right idea to succeed, you need to silence your inner skeptic and then work to silence your outer skeptics. You’ve learned to identify failure. You know what it looks like. Now, you need to focus on identifying success. Once you’ve done that, you can move on to suspending your critics’ disbelief.

Just because you pursued the wrong idea once (or twice, or even many times) doesn’t make you incapable of recognizing the right idea. A calming dose of skepticism can be great, but as an entrepreneur, sometimes you just need to charge ahead, no matter how many times failure knocks you down.

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Unhappily shocked by Sputnik’s unexpected 1957 success, President Eisenhower quickly pushed the Pentagon to establish the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its ostensible mission: “to prevent technological surprise to the U.S. military, and to create surprises of its own.”

Anticipating and enabling “technological surprise” has become even more challenging, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar recently told an MIT audience, because more people in more places have more access to more technology that ever before. Surprises can come from anywhere. In an era of greater global trade, knowledge transfer and transparency, Prabhakar unsurprisingly reports DARPA’s core value proposition demands disproportionately greater imagination and ingenuity. Predictability breeds complacency. Predictability is DARPA’s cultural, technical and organizational enemy.

The more Prabhakar talked, the clearer it became that DARPA’s intimate historical relationship with surprise offered a powerful conceptual model for serious innovators worldwide. What role should surprise play in defining one’s innovation brand in the minds of customers and competitors? To surprise or not to surprise? That is the innovation question. (This question from a marketing perspective was recently explored on this site.)

For Apple, the iPhone and iPad were unquestionably strategic surprises explicitly intended to disrupt established industries and disorient entrenched competitors. Steve Jobs, who had always sought to surround his company in auras of mystery and secrecy, was a master of injecting the unexpected into the zeitgeist. Indeed, Apple assiduously cultivated “expect the [delightfully] unexpected” as part of its innovation brand.

While seen neither as flashy nor as glamorous as Apple’s offering, Amazon’s Kindle and Fire platforms similarly signaled strategic surprise. Jeff Bezos transformed perceptions surrounding Amazon as a global retailer by making clear they wanted to be a global innovation ecosystem as well. Amazon had made itself accessibly and invitingly unpredictable.

After initially dismissing tablets as inferior to laptops, Microsoft surprised a number of its partners and developers by introducing Surface. A defensive surprise, to be sure, but one acknowledging Microsoft’s competitive environment had completely changed.

But the greatest determinant of effective innovative surprise is not technical capability — it’s expectations.

Surprise is about expectations. Successful surprises subvert, destroy and/or exceed expectations. The great innovation tension in business is appropriately managing expectations. With apologies to Clay Christensen, this other “innovator’s dilemma” asks, “Is it better to be ‘predictably surprising’ or ‘surprisingly predictable’?” That is, do customers and clients prefer the comforts of predictable improvements and enhancements that fall squarely within educated expectations? Or would they rather the thrill and novelty of innovations that challenge and intrigue them in unexpected ways?

If you’re an Apple or a Samsung or an Amazon, is your brand better off building expectations around “no surprises” innovations that happily soak your customers in the warm bath of familiarity? Or do you gain greater brand equity by creatively disrupting the very expectations they’re predisposed to bring to your products and services?

The simple thought-experiment and test I advise innovators to explore is substituting the phrase “pleasant surprise” for “innovation” whenever they discuss new offerings and upgrades. There’s a world of UX difference between a significant innovation and a significant pleasant surprise. In fact, as many innovators discover to their sorrow, many of their most innovative features and functions are frequently regarded as unpleasant surprises.

How intimately do your designers and marketers link and measure the value of an innovation to the pleasure of its surprise? The great paradox, of course, is that the more people expect surprises, the less surprising those surprises are.

And surprise, like any other differentiator, can quickly hit diminishing returns. But, as DARPA’s successful history as a surprise-based innovator suggests, understanding the differences and distinctions between “proactive” surprise and “reactive” surprise can pay huge dividends. What’s surprising is how few innovators appreciate that.

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