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The Role of
Empathy
Creativity From Knowledge
Rearranging Elements
Innovative
Openings
Innovative Openings
 One of the most basic rules of opportunity
development is that you cannot create your own opportunities. You must see
openings in the competitive environment that shape opportunities for you. We are
now going to tell you that strategic innovation at once both violates and
confirms that rule.
Quoting Sun Tzu is always difficult
because each line of Sun Tzu's work requires so much explanation that it can
only be done well at book length. However, explaining this one quote is
important:
You must use surprise for a successful invasion.
Surprise is as infinite as the weather and land.
Surprise is as inexhaustible as the flow of a river.
The Art of War, 5.2:4-6
What made Sun Tzu think that the land was
infinite? Did he know so little of geography? Just the opposite. He realized that innovation creates
the strategic element that he calls
"the ground." The precise definition of this element is our source of resources. Innovation creates
the value in resources. Since innovation is infinite, innovation can convert
worthless ground into worthwhile ground. Out of wasteland, new valuable ground
is created.
You are proving Sun Tzu's ideas right now. You are reading this on the
Internet. This is exactly the type of new ground that Sun Tzu knew the
infinite human imagination could create. The vast territory of the Internet
didn't exist twenty years ago. Today it is valuable property in which millions
of people are competing for billions of eyeballs.
Individuals, making little improvements in areas that they know, have opened
up all huge new territory that exists today. Every industry, every field of
science, and even new governments are created out of nothing from the human
imagination.
So new opportunities can be created by our own individual acts of innovation.
However, none of our actions alone creates that opportunity. It is combining our
actions with those of others. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both driving forces
behind the personal computer revolution, but it was the potential in the larger
environment that made their success possible. Their efforts only leveraged that
potential. Opportunities are created not by our efforts alone but by all
our efforts together.
The Chinese character that Sun Tzu used to describe human
creativity and imagination is usually translated into "surprise." The problem
with that term is that it focuses too much attention on the emotional result as opposed to the process
for creating it. While the emotional reaction to innovation is certainly an important and
necessary element of strategy, we have seen that we must make our innovation
work. To do that, we must leverage our connections to other people and our
knowledge of how the world works. We must then have the courage and the
techniques to innovate safely. The value of catching people unaware and exciting them through innovation
is immense, but the real value of innovation is in the beauty of how it all
comes together.
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