Barriers to Innovation

My last post was an optimistic ode to the endless innovation currently possible, due to the state of technology, entrepreneurship and related support systems. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Today, I want to discuss some sobering limitations that thwart the introduction and uptake of new things.

Several broad categories of barriers to innovation spring to mind:

  • regulation
  • fitting into existing infrastructure
  • consumer habits
  • figuring out who is going to pay
  • short term vs long term thinking
  • benefit twice removed

To illustrate these, I’ll discuss barriers in a couple of hypothetical situations where delivering a solution seems easy.

Consider the challenges to providing real-time transit information. This was inspired by a comment I overheard: “in X,Y and Z city, you know exactly when the next bus will arrive; why can’t we have that here?”

Why indeed?

The technology exists to track a vehicle, create algorithms to integrate the traffic flow, rate of bus progress, passenger demand and weather conditions to estimate and adjust time of arrival for buses and trains. Multiple options exists for providing this information to transit customers, such as pixel boards at stops, a downloadable app or text message service. The information is useful to customers to plan their commutes and use their time wisely. Providing real time updates enhances the customer experience, because it’s more satisfying knowing that your bus will arrive in 14 minutes than not knowing and having it appear after you have fretted and peered into the traffic for 6 (much longer) minutes. Happier customers are repeat customers. So, there’s value to be shared between provider and customer.

Why can’t they have it everywhere?

I can think of a bunch of (hypothetical) reasons.

1. Perhaps the current fleet of vehicles aren’t GPS enabled. Perhaps there is no way of announcing the information at the stops, since all that currently exists are metal signs. (infrastructure issues)

2. The bus drivers union may object to such a system because it tracks driver performance in an unfair way. Or the legal team could be concerned about liability of promising something not under the control of the transit authority. (regulations)

3. How will the new infrastructure be paid for? Through fare increases, increased bank loans, or decreased dividends to shareholders? Although the value can be seen, is it enough to make people reach into their pockets? (who will pay?)

4. The cost to implement this new system will have to be paid long before rider retention can be proven. (short term vs. long term thinking).

To illustrate the other two barriers, I’ll use plastic utensils, especially straws. Much has been made of the earth- and ocean-clogging features of these implements of consumption lately. We need an alternative. Why do we use straws to consume beverages? (This is customer habit.) Innovations that replace the straw must overcome habit. And why do we have plastic utensils, food containers and other disposable, polluting conveniences? Because they are convenient. Eating your meal and cleaning up afterwards are things you will enjoy right now. Pollution of the oceans may only come to your attention years later. And you’re not sure how plastic in the waters effects the environment. It’s difficult to understand the vastness of the consequences of disposables in the sea when you put a single straw in your bubble tea. (benefit twice removed)

Yes, there can be significant barriers to implementing a genius idea that is good for people, business and society as a whole.

And yet, the answer is innovation. Business innovation. Get around the regulations or change them. Show stakeholders short and long term benefits. If there is value in an innovation, someone will be willing to pay. People only cling to their habits if they don’t see the benefit of changing.

Innovation is possible, if you understand the barriers and come up with ways to get over, under or around them.

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What’s New in Innovation?



Technology is not limiting.

Data is not limiting.

Knowledge is not limiting.

Being an entrepreneur is not limiting.










All we need is to just do it5.





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How Smart do you Want your Things to Be?







Here are my smart wants:








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Great Networking Events

Is networking a skill required by established entrepreneurs? Apparently it is1, even though many entrepreneurs consider themselves too busy doing exactly what they need to do to build their business for the random unplanness of networking.

There are zillions of blogs with advice for attendees on how to navigate the social and logistic challenges of networking. Here, I ponder what differentiates a great event from a mediocre one, inspired because I’ve discovered PitchitTO/York/Durham/etc 2. The Pitchits are 3 for 3, as far as I’m concerned. Being the analytical type, I need to dissect to find the ingredients that makes them so good.

I recommend networking to entrepreneurs for three reasons: learning, community, and building the business. Controlled serendipity is a rush. There’s magic when you bump into the person who:

1. can explain something you’ve been trying to figure out (or you’re the explainer and help someone else), [learning]

2. has the same challenges you do, [community]

3. wants to hire you to do a project you know exactly how to do [business].

Recent examples I experienced from each category:

1. On marketing. Do you find it hard to speak convincingly about your own abilities – key if you provide knowledge-based services? Someone said to me: ‘Consider it a natural ability that you should share.’ Wow! That sounded so much more palatable than pushing services. It turned ‘I’m selling this thing and I think you should buy it’ into ‘Let me help you because I know how’. [learning]

2. Sleepless nights. Even though I do a lot of speaking in front of (sometimes) critical audiences, it makes me nervous. Sometimes, so nervous I can’t sleep. Hearing someone else, a successful, public-speaking someone else, recount the same experience, only worse, gave me great comfort that even when it looks easy, it isn’t. [community]

3. Clients. Yes, I’ve found clients at networking events. [business]

A good networking event makes it easy for every attendee to find people to learn from, share with, and do business with. And this happens how? I won’t pretend to have the perfect recipe, but can make a few observations based on years of attending everything from the dullest events where no one moved from their front-of-the-room-facing seats, to ones that were so high energy I needed several hours to calm down afterward.

Here’s what I think makes a good event:

  1. The right physical space. Find an interesting, quirky setting. Maybe it has natural beauty, sunlight, water, or a forbidden quality. Make it somewhere people feel good. If they have to sit down, have them do it at large tables. Small ones form hard-to-enter cliques. Treat the attendees like house guests. Give them food, drink, bacon even.
  2. Invite well. We all know the marketing rules about reaching the right audience – publicize to find unconnected but like-minded people and those with a breadth of experience from seasoned to fresh out of school. Stack the deck of attendees with people you know will mingle and be inclusive. It’s a numbers thing3 – if enough of the attendees are determined to talk to everyone, then everyone will talk to everyone.
  3. Awesome leadership. It works in large corporations and small, and networking events. Good leadership – vision, coaching and walking the talk, will set the tone. The message should be loud and clear that everyone is there to help each other and learn from each other and do business together (see above three principles).
  4. The Program. Putting effort into crafting a stimulating program will get people talking. Inciting excitement gets the room riled up and ready to chatter.
  5. Fun. The culmination of all of the above, the atmosphere, the attendees, the leadership, and the event schedule, should be fun – enjoying life while making things happen.

Finding networking events that deliver all these things won’t happen all the time. And there is an element of personal fit. Not every venue, topic, or style energizes everyone in the same way. My latest find – the Pitchit events – have all the right elements – atmosphere, appropriate crowd, supportive message from the organizers, presentations every entrepreneur can related to, and serious fun.

Go find the perfect event for you. There will be people there you should know.


1For example, this academic study suggests so:  Morris, M., Webb, J., Fu, J., Singhal, S. (2013) A Competency-Based Perspective on Entrepreneurship Education: Conceptual and Empirical Insights. Journal of Small Business Management 51(3), pp. 352–369.

2 Pitchit is a new GTA thing where several startups are given ten-ish minutes to present their business to the crowd which contains a variety of potential investors and fellow entrepreneurs.

3There’s a mathematic model here somewhere, but let’s settle for: if there are three people, one of whom is determined to talk to everyone, and the other two who are cliquing, everyone will talk to everyone because the outgoing one will intervene with the other two. To get the idea of how many zealous networkers you should invite: multiple by one third of the number of expected attendees after subtracting the people who look like they are networking but are really running the event. Divide the program time by the time it takes for a good networker to have a conversation. Combine these factors. Do this in hexadecimal and it should predict the logarithm of the number of new dollars invested because of the event. 🙂

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What I Discovered at Discovery 2016 – Business with a Social Agenda









I found additional social innovation on the Discovery show floor, there were aisles dedicated to initiatives with accessibility-providing-technology, such as that lists restaurants, bars and cafes, describing how accessible their physical space is. There was also an area highlighting social enterprises.



2This is the subject of a book she is currently promoting, .

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Advanced Technology Current ‘State of the Art’

Medicine – Assistive Devices


Robots or other automation to do routine tasks.


The Environment









1for example



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Look at Tech, It’s Growing Up.












Other delicious morsels of business strategy I heard:






³here is the list of speakers. apologies in advance if I don’t attribute every phrase I heard correctly.


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It is really in your DNA?

Corporations might be legal persons but they don’t have DNA.


















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On Drugs: Emerging Business Models (an update)




But couldn’t.













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Brief Encounters with Artificial Intelligence

I’m preoccupied with how artificial intelligence will impact society even though artificial intelligence isn’t very smart or common yet. A couple of recent observations (the type that come with the metaphorical light bulb over the head1, not made with binoculars from a shelter hidden in the shrubbery) brought me to a greater understanding of how artificial intelligence may fit into everyday life.

First encounter: I picked up my phone and thumbed to my favourite cab company. I hadn’t called them in a year and a half, and was surprised to hear an automated attendant answer instead of the woman with the gravelly voice who called me ‘dear’. It said if I wanted to be picked up immediately at the address I was calling from, I could push ‘1’ and it would happen. I did and did and was (want to be picked up at the address, pushed 1, and the cab arrived shortly thereafter). As we cruised towards my destination, I chatted to the driver, telling him that while the call seemed very efficient, I felt odd about it.

What was lacking? Why was having a machine arrange to pick me up, when that was the very reason I’d called the cab company, disconcerting? If the dispatcher had asked if I wanted to be picked up at home, or the usual place, I’d be glad of the personal service.

For me, the missing link was someone who actually cared if the cab came to get me. Someone who wanted to do their job well and understood that if I was going to the train station it was to catch a train, and being late could have a ripple effect: missing the train, then maybe being late for a job interview and therefore mortgage payments. The gravelly-voiced lady may never have given a rat’s ass if I got where I needed to go on time, but generally, people can empathize with the consequences of being late. Yes, a machine can list the potential consequences, but it can’t remember the time it got a flat tire on the way to a wedding rehearsal where it was the best man for a nervous groom who needed his best buddy’s support.

My second encounter is more subtle. I’m knee-deep in business theory, pondering what gives companies like Harley Davidson and Tim Horton’s their competitive advantage. Causal ambiguity is a thing, which I’ve always liked the sound, and the meaning, of. It’s rather similar to the idea that the sum of the parts is less than the whole. Sure you can make motorcycles growl and sputter in an outlaw kind of way but what makes a Harley the motorcycle of choice for everyone from rock stars to the pastor of an upwardly mobile flock? Why is Tim’s a thing half the Canadian population will wait in line for when the competition across the street has the same product (coffee)? Casual ambiguity. Don’t know how – but it works.

The best explanation we have right now is that casual ambiguity is the sum of a vast number of elements, each subtly different than the norm. Will artificial intelligences be able to dissect casual ambiguity into its multitude of components? It’ll be interesting to see what the AIs come up with to explain the appeal of Hello Kitty or the allure of certain notorious socialites.

On the same topic (competitive advantage), but a more mundane level, human nature dictates we develop processes, or rituals. These get passed down through generations, whether it’s a ham recipe or a manufacturing process for golf balls. Scholars of Operations Management know that the best processes morph overtime because every little detail can’t be recorded, so instructions are interpreted and revised. Will AIs eliminate this natural drift, detailing processes with an infinite number of stepwise instructions? Me, I take detailed instructions, read them until I understand the concept and then construct the functional details.

Humans make mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are good and we discover something new. Sometimes they’re neutral for many cycles and get propagated through the system then someday turn out to be of benefit.

AIs won’t make mistakes, so there will be no drift in the processes they oversee or serendipitous finding of new things. AIs follow instructions with a precision that leaves nothing to the imagination.

So, we humans, with all our squishy emotions and random actions, are useful after all. We care – who can deliver good customer service without caring? And we err. To err is human, not to err – divinely artificial.

1Does that metaphor still work with a compact fluorescent bulb?

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