Innovation

I have just returned from Engage!12: Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas.  The brainchild of Rebecca Grinnals and Kathryn Arce, Engage! is a remarkable conference for remarkable wedding professionals to talk about doing remarkable things.  After attending each of the previous eight Engage!s, it is, well, remarkable to me how it just keeps getting better.  I will not summarize the experience other than to say that every other wedding conference that tries to do what Engage! does is a poor man’s substitute.  Engage! inspires you to make your creative (not just wedding) business the best version of itself.

All of which brings me to the idea of innovation.  Jonathan Fields wrote a brilliant post on the subject today.  To Jonathan (and me), innovation is about sawing off the limb of all that you know, daring to really walk another way.  Incremental change is not innovation.  When you tweak what is already in place to create the new and improved model you wind up with the same old same old, only shinier.  What I spoke about at Engage!, and to anyone who will listen, is the idea that this moment in time is an inflection point.  Today, innovation is not just an opportunity to expand your creative business, but a prerequisite to your long-term success.  When Google Sketchup costs @$500, video production available on all things Apple and wonderful renderers a click away on Design Taxi, making the intangible tangible for your client has never been easier.

To be clear, I am talking about your business model, the way you do things (the why, the how and the how much) that supports your art.  The actual art (whether film or digital, virtual or actual) and its evolution, I leave to you, the artists of the world.  What I said at Engage! some of you might find outrageous.  So be it.  If you are not willing to focus on making the intangible tangible, getting paid for your ideas and their presentation first and foremost, you are going to get run over by those that do. Our very state of being today begs that you profit from ideas and make only a comfortable living from their production.  In five years, I just cannot see how any creative business will look remotely close to what it does today.  FYI, the first IPhone was released June 29, 2007.  Yes, the world is moving that fast.

In the spirit of Jonathan’s post, using Pinterest to show your ideas is an example of incremental change, lipservice to innovation.  Inspiration and examples are wonderful tools.  However, inspiration boards are not design and are not an effective means of telling your client’s story back to them.  Then again, if you have not challenged yourself to truly innovate, you might feel inspiration boards are enough.

If you are photographer and I asked you to figure out how to solve projecting your image onto, say, the Eiffel Tower, you might be daunted and then set out trying to solve the challenge.  A graphic designer redesigning the Apple logo?  A florist covering Central Park in a floral mosaic?  Now what if I asked the same photographer, graphic designer and florist to charge ten times what they do now?  One hundred?  Most would say not possible.  Why?  Because, to do so, requires innovation and an offer of new value to clients.  Presumably (bad assumption I know, but just go with me), if the photographer, graphic designer and florist charges $100 for their work today, then that is fair value.  Raising prices to $1,000 without any change in value offered would mean seriously overcharging their clients.  I do not believe in simply raising rates as it is more a reflection of insecurity and greed than anything else.  Developing a better mouse trap on the other hand, and charging appropriately for it is the stuff of business legend. Can anyone say IPhone/IPad/ITunes? Keurig Coffee Machine?  Netflix?

To paraphrase Cindy Novotny (to me, THE rock star speaker from Engage!), challenge yourself to have your creative business be outrageous in its business model.  If you have never charged for your design, what would it mean to charge a $100,000 design fee?  What if $100,000 were not enough?  How about asking for a three-year commitment if you are used to going from gig to gig?  Set out to solve the challenge of your business model with a fresh mind unencumbered by your own preconceptions of the possible.  If you start with the idea that no client needs your creative business, then you can honor how deep his want goes.  As the world is transformed by the magic of your artistic imagination, so too your creative business.  Please always remember, brilliance is just crazy in hindsight.