In my humble opinion, I believe that Umair Haque is one of the most innovative thinkers of our time. But, to be consistent with his own arguments, that doesn’t matter. What matters for Umair is ‘awesomeness’ and he gets that through his ability to deconstruct complex thoughts. Innovation, he claims is not enough for success today, but awesomeness is. Umair is the Director of the Havas Media Lab, a company that works to strategically advise investors, entrepreneurs, and those working on strategic innovations awesomeness in business models and management.

Umair writes regularly on the Harvard Business Review under the title of ‘Edge Economy’ and he truly is on the cutting edge of thought. In his recent article Umair argues that in this day and age, innovation will not be enough for success. What is required now is awesomeness.

In thinking about the economics of innovation there are 3 emerging concepts that are expressed in this article.

1. Innovation makes yesterdays goods and services obsolete, thus the result of innovation is recession and depression.

When Apple released the first iPhone it didn’t have copy/paste functionality. It was a easy feature that everyone immediately realized it was missing. But Apple waited over 18 months to release an iPhone that included this functionality. Do you really believe they didn’t know how to include this feature? How easy it would have been for them to push a software update just like they did with 3.0 and give everyone the functionality a month or 6 months after the release. But that innovation would not have been economical. They waited so that they could extract all the value possible from the original release, then maximize the value of said software upgrade. Innovation is not enough economically speaking, but I think we’ll all agree that copy/paste aside, the iPhone is awesome, thus it’s success.

2. The challenge of the 21st century isn’t entrepreneurial it’s creative.

Bijan Sabet wrote a post recently about how his friend had the concern that VC’s aren’t funding technology problems but only companies that solve market/customer problems. Because that is what VC’s are funding, that’s what entrepreneurs are focusing on. People aren’t innovating, they are reorganizing, scheming, and ‘middlemaning’ to create businesses. This is a long term problem.

The larger problem that our society is facing is how to keep up with the innovation curve that we’ve seen over the last 20 years in the next 20. Our economy is now heavily reliant upon technological developments and will continue to rely on those developments for growth. If this trend of slowing core innovation continues we could be in a tough spot 10 years from now.

3. Innovation isn’t always innovative, and can be harmful.

Innovation means, naively, what is commercially novel. Yet, as the financial crisis proves, what is “innovative” is often value destructive and socially harmful. Financial “innovation” turned out to be unnovative: it has destroyed trillions in value

Innovation: sometimes it inspires, but often it harms, and through such a critical lens you can see that maybe innovation isn’t enough anymore.

Intro to Awesome

If innovate was the old business mantra, awesomeness is the new one. If innovation is not enough for success as show above, then what is it that businesses need. Mr. Haque says that awesome is necessary for success now. I had a short convo with Umair via Twitter about awesome and here’s what he shared.

In my view the best way for an organization to become awesome is to focus on the awesomeness of the individuals that make up that organization. Take Threadless for example. The founders of Threadless were first great web designers before entrepreneurs and thus the culture at Threadless is design focused, artistic, and extremely creative. Culture starts with the founders. So if you want your company culture to be awesome, you better be awesome as the entrepreneur!

Awesome, in it’s most basic form is something people talk about, something that drives conversation and cannot go unnoticed. Mint.com selling for $170 Million after only 34 months of operation…that’s awesome! DubFX making unbelievable music with just his voice and a loop machine is awesome (that’s why it’s the most popular post on this blog!). There are so many examples of awesome that it seems simple to repeat, but that’s far from the truth. Awesome is extremely difficult for companies, so hire people, surround yourself with people who are awesome and it will grow from within, it must grow from within. I sincerely look forward to Umair’s next book on awesome.

image via konaboy