Here's a short speech I delivered to the IPA 44 Club's SXSWi debate at Google HQ London last week. I talked about the themes I found prevalent at SXSWi this year: namely the importance of a start-up culture and obsession with scientific discovery for successful innovation in businesses of all sizes.

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SXSW 2013 themes:
Culture, code and data
@martinbailie

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The answer’s Culture, Code and Data.
Now what’s the question?
4 big innovation themes:
1. Think big but start small
2. Maintain a start-up culture
3. Find patterns in data
4. Create serendipity through culture

3. 1. Think big, but start small
3
Science = Skepticism + Curiosity
Experimentation: For all disciplines, progress is achieved through experiments.
Engineering: Ask more questions than anyone else.
Stephen WolframElon Musk Al GorePeter Thiel

4. 2. Maintain a start-up culture
4
Intuit: A company of entrepreneurs making new things through constant iteration
Intuit’s mission:
‘Change people's lives so profoundly they can't imagine going back to the old ways’
30 yr old startup
Scott Cook

5. 2. Maintain a start-up culture
5
Product audit
Winning products had:
-Attacked a big and unsolved customer problem
-They didn't always solve that problem
-They had durable competitive advantage
Budgeting
Intuit success to date
14 business experiments so far:
10 fail
2 success
1 pivot
1 too soon to tell
Budget split Life stage Objective KPIs Team
70%
Core/oldest
products
Small growth Maintain profit ‘Rowing team’
20% Young/mid
Increase share and
profit
Profitable
growth
‘White water
rafters’
10% New Prove leap of faith
Solving user
problems
‘Diving for
sunken
treasure’

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3. Rapid customer experiments
a) Leaders set the challenge & experimentation culture
b) Vision and ideas set
c) Leap of faith assumptions collected
d) Experiments
e) Learn and pivot
2. Maintain a start-up culture
1. Deep customer empathy
'The journey of discovery starts not with new
vistas but new eyes' Proust
2. Go broad to go narrow
Go broad then uncomfortably narrow
(problem) then broad (multiple solutions)
then narrow (merge to one solution).

7. One that worked
7
2. Maintain a start-up culture

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The term ‘Viral’ is lazy (sharing is not always
passive).
Central to success is the role the audience plays:
we need mutual trust so plan 'within' the
culture, not 'at' an audience.
Differentiate Hearing vs Listening.
Monitoring vs observing context.
Audience segments are not reality, they are
shortcuts to seeing groups. Keep testing them.
‘Influencer’ thinking is a broadcast shortcut.
Influence many groups, not just a few.
3. Find patterns in data
Convergent Culture
Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, Sam Ford
Convergentculture.org / MIT

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The New Serendipity
Colin Raney (Ideo), John Perry Barlow (EFF),
Joichi Ito (MIT), Kevin Rose (google/digg)
4. Create serendipity through culture
1. Invest your life in what you love
2. Embrace enthusiasm
3. Don't complain. Make it better.
4. You've gut to trust and empower
5. Experiences > money
6. Surround yourself with like minded
people
7. Step away from ego and
collaborate whenever you can
1. Thinking of money constrains thinking.
2. You need the execution gene combined
with the dreaming gene to make things
happen.
3. Selfishness kills serendipity.
4. You create more luck through
generosity.
Tina Roth Eisenberg
@swissmiss, Creative mornings,
Tattly, TeuxDeux app

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Go forth and iterate.
@martinbailie