Who would dominate the drone industry? It was an open question back in 2012, as two fierce rivals battled for market share: Berkeley, California–based 3D Robotics (3DR), and Dà-Jiāng Innovation Science and Technology Co. (DJI), of Shenzhen, China.
Culturally and organizationally, the two ventures couldn’t have been more different. 3DR was flat and relied on the bottom-up ingenuity of a large open-source community of drone enthusiasts. DJI, meanwhile, was hierarchical and dominated by the vision of its founder, Frank Wang.
Those different organizing strategies grabbed PhD candidate Robert Bremner’s attention as he worked with his advisor Kathleen Eisenhardt, Stanford W. Ascherman M.D. Professor in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. He began to examine how organizational design and experimentation can help or hinder ventures. “Depending on how you structure your company, that can play a big role in its success,” he says. In the face-off between 3DR and DJI, he had an ideal case study.
Bremner’s analysis, drawn from interviews he conducted, news articles and other public records, revealed that, although DJI proved to be the ultimate victor in the drone industry, each company’s approach had strengths and weaknesses. Both flat and hierarchical structures can succeed, Bremner found. It just depends on what kind of problem you’re trying to solve.
For instance, 3DR’s bottom-up approach is useful for finding a path forward when it isn’t clear what is blocking your company’s or product’s success. “An example in the drone industry is the drone architecture,” Bremner explains. “DJI was focused on helicopters, but safety was a huge issue that wasn’t fully recognized at the time.”
For 3DR, the answer to the drone architecture problem arrived serendipitously as members of the open-source community started using quadrotors instead of helicopters or planes. The quadrotor design had existed since the early 1900s, but 3DR implemented it in a way that was more affordable than ever before. That kickstarted the company’s growth, and the quadrotor spread through the industry like wildfire.
Sometimes, though, it’s obvious what problems need to be solved for a new technology to take off in the market. “The challenge might be finding the right solution or just implementing it,” Bremner explains. In cases like these, hierarchy wins.
In the drone industry, the obvious but unsolved problem was figuring out who wanted and needed drones. The quadrotor made drones more accessible, but it was obvious to industry insiders that the technology was still missing a “killer app.” In solving that problem, Bremner noticed that DJI’s approach excelled. “Hierarchy is good because it enables organizations to quickly and systematically test different alternatives,” Bremner says.
DJI experimented with ideas including public safety, utilities inspection, and agriculture, attending trade shows and working closely with experts in each field. Ultimately, the team settled on marketing drones to filmmakers and video producers. “What we saw was, at that point—when the bottleneck to growth in the industry was clear but there was still a lot of uncertainty as to how to solve it—DJI’s approach worked really well,” Bremner explains.
DJI’s hierarchical structure helped the company in other ways as well. “An issue that the team at 3DR ran into was the challenge of building a complex hardware product, like a drone, when you have a distributed team of part-time engineers working for you,” Bremner explains. “They were all brilliant—3DR had a ton of engineering talent—but when employees have free reign over what to do and how to do it, it becomes a struggle to rally them to work through really complex issues.”
Inspired by events in the drone case study, Bremner has turned his attention to experimentation in the video game industry. “One thing that was common in the drone industry, and certainly elsewhere, was rushing to get a prototype on the market to see if it would stick,” Bremner explains. “For DJI, this really worked. But sometimes it really backfired.”
Traditionally, video game developers have relied solely on internal user testing to determine whether a new game was ready for prime time. In the last decade, however, many companies have turned to a new development model called early access, in which they launch an unfinished game to test it on the market. The model is similar to the lean startup method, which emphasizes “being as lean as possible, saving resources and just getting your product out there in the market,” Bremner explains.
For developers with limited budgets, early access is an appealing option. “It’s easier to launch the game, get market feedback … and then improve it or move on to something else from there,” Bremner says. “The question is, what are the risks for taking this type of approach?”
To answer that question, Bremner has begun a quantitative study, which looks at how many people purchase and play each game each day, as well as how long they spend playing. “There is a pretty clear pattern where, over time, games launched in early access start to engage a higher proportion of users than regular games,” he explained.
The catch is, for certain types of developers, these improvements don’t translate into sales. Small independent developers, Bremner’s observed, might take a reputational hit by releasing early versions of not-quite-ready games. “Gamers might simply stay away because of the negative impression formed by a few early players,” he says.
Though the research is still in progress, Bremner says it suggests one reason why entrepreneurs should be cautious when applying concepts from the lean startup method. “I think it’s easy to get carried away in the hype of something like lean startup or early access, so that we forget that there might be situations where the process might not work as intended,” Bremner explains. And there may well be other scenarios where different methodologies are better suited to startup success: “I’ve made it my mission to figure out what those edge cases are,” he says.
Stanford Engineering Professor Bernard Roth, a founding faculty member of the university’s renowned design institute, told audience members attending one of his recent talks at Stanford University how to “stop wishing, start doing and take command of your life.”
That’s the subtitle of Roth’s new book, The Achievement Habit, and he summed it up in terms verging on blasphemous to the science-loving attendees of the April 13 talk. He disputed the wrinkled, green Jedi’s famous line in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
To that, Roth stated flatly, “Yoda was wrong.”
Risking the wrath of sci-fi fans everywhere, Roth explained that there is indeed a “try” and a “do.” “There’s really nothing wrong with trying to do something, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with doing it,” he said. “The problem is when you think they’re the same thing.”
That assertion is at the heart of Roth’s teaching over the past 40 years, at Stanford and in workshops around the world. Initially offered as classes in creativity, Roth’s teaching has grown to encompass all that goes into “design thinking,” which is rooted in engineering’s focus on building solutions to problems and involves human-centered need finding, prototyping and iterating.
More commonly known on campus as “Bernie,” Roth is a Jedi in his own right. He is the Rodney H. Adams Professor of Engineering at Stanford and is a longtime veteran of the university’s design scene, first joining the faculty in 1962. He has a worldwide reputation as a researcher in kinematics and robotics, and his most recent activities have moved him more strongly into experiences that enhance peoples’ creative potential through the educational process.
Roth currently serves as the academic director of the d.school, known formally as theHasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. It has become a hub for innovators throughout campus, where students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, law, education and the humanities converge “to take on the world’s messy problems together.”
At his talk for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar (MS&E 472), Roth acknowledged that his current thinking seems to run contrary to the ethos of design thinking, which focuses on the problems of others, not the ones doing the thinking. But let’s face it, we all have problems — and Roth was intent on proving that the tools for unlocking solutions that he has developed would work for everyone in the audience.
In keeping with his emphasis on “doing,” rather than simply talking, Roth showed attendees how to reframe problems in a way that increases what he called the “solution space.” He told audience members to:
Think of a problem in your life.
Ask yourself what solving that problem would do for you.
Turn the solution into the question you need to answer.
For instance, one person told Roth that he is slow to get out of bed in the morning. And when Roth asked him what getting out of bed would do for him, the man said it would allow him to get more work done during the day.
“So the question is how to get more work done. It has nothing to do with getting out of bed,” Roth replied. “I can figure out a way to stay in bed and get more work done, as an example.”
In his book, he calls this “moving to a higher level,” and he applies it to profound problems that everyone faces. He starts with the question “How might I find a spouse?” and then turns it into a declarative sentence that sounds more like a challenge: “Find a spouse.”
He then asks, “What question is ‘Find a spouse’ the answer to?” This unlocks a long list of possibilities, including:
How might I get companionship?
How might I get taken care of?
How might I stop working?
How might I have (more) sex?
“Each of these questions, regarded as a problem, has many possible solutions,” Roth writes inThe Achievement Habit. “Finding a spouse is just one solution to each of these. In actuality, it may not be a very good solution to any of these problems.”
However, Roth also cautions that doing isn’t always a virtue, and in his book, specifically calls out Silicon Valley’s obsession with change. In this high-speed, hyper-competitive business environment, companies are always doing something new out of fear that they will stagnate and fold without constant innovation.
The problem, Roth writes, is when we let that notion rule our personal lives.
“Often the things we strive for only represent more of something we already have: money, fame, appreciation, love,” he explains. “It’s an endless chase; as the saying goes, you can’t get enough from more.”
An entrepreneur, as the quintessential self-starter, naturally looks inward for inspiration when the road gets rockier and the hurdles higher. But no matter how awesome you are, people can’t always be walking nuclear reactors that generate a constant supply of motivation in a contained, self-sustaining way.
And you don’t necessarily need to max out the memory of your tablet with a bunch of the latest books by big-name motivational speakers. You need only look around you to replenish your emotional reserves when the entrepreneurial journey begins to wear you down.
Perhaps the most obvious source of motivation outside yourself are the people around you. Imagine you’re the head of a fast-growing startup, confident you’re about to receive a $50 million infusion from several large investors. Then, all of a sudden, you get a call that they’re backing out. Visions of laying off all your loyal and hardworking employees – who laid everything on the line up to this point — cause you to break out in a cold sweat.
This is precisely what happened at the biotech startup Invitae at a critical point in their pre-IPO days. But the shared determination of everyone on the team, from the founders to the bankers representing them on the phone, pulled them through, Invitae President and Chief Operating Officer Sean George says in this video clip:
Motivation can also be found in the mission of your venture — that is, if it’s lofty enough. Again, the path of entrepreneurship is riddled with adversity, and day after day, people will want to dismiss your idea and say you can’t do it. Sooner or later, you’ll wake up one day and ask yourself whether it even makes sense to keep going.
For Ron Gutman, founder and CEO of HealthTap, his startup’s mission is “to help people live healthier, longer and happier lives” through on-demand patient treatment services made possible through an app that connects paying members with a network of over 67,000 doctors. A mission as important as that, Gutman says with a smile, “never gets old.”
A less obvious, but very valuable source of inspiration is the challenge itself — but not so much in the sense of someone simply rising to the occasion. As personal-brand expert Tristan Walker described when he came to speak at Stanford last year, an obstacle is simultaneously “a blessing.”
The founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands learned this after speaking with filmmaker Tyler Perry, and he shared the advice with Stanford Professor of the Practice Tina Seelig at the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series: that every challenge an entrepreneur faces yields a lesson on how to deal with it next time.
In that sense, the lesson is simply a gift, Walker goes on to explain in this final clip. And once you understand that challenges are just gifts in disguise, you’ll always be able to find motivation in the face of adversity.
What is the sum of 5 plus 5?
What two numbers add up to 10?
The first question has only one right answer, while the second has an infinite number of solutions, including negative numbers and fractions. These two problems, which rely on simple addition, differ only in the way they are framed. In fact, all questions are the frame into which the answers fall. And as you can see, by changing the frame, you dramatically change the range of possible solutions.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Taking photos is a great way to practice this skill. When Forrest Glick, an avid photographer, ran a photography workshop near Fallen Leaf Lake in California, he showed the participants how to see the scene from many different points of view, framing and reframing their shots each time. He asked them to take a wide-angle picture to capture the entire scene, then to take a photo of the trees close to shore. He then asked them to bring the focus closer and closer, taking pictures of a single wildflower, or a ladybug on that flower. He pointed out that you can change your perspective without even moving your feet. By just shifting your field of view up or down, or panning left or right, you can completely change the image. Of course, if you walk to the other side of the lake, climb up to the top of one of the peaks, or take a boat onto the water, you shift the frame even more.
A classic example of this type of reframing comes from the stunning 1968 documentary film Powers of Ten, written and directed by Ray and Charles Eames. The film, which can be viewed online, depicts the known universe in factors of ten. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, the film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out, until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward — into the hand of the sleeping picnicker — with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.
This magnificent example reinforces the fact that you can look at every situation in the world from different angles, from close up, from far away, from upside down, and from behind. All day long, we are creating frames for what we see, hear, and experience, and those frames both inform and limit the way we think. In most cases, we don’t even consider the frames — we just assume we are looking at the world with the proper set of lenses.
Being able to question and shift your frame of reference is an important key to enhancing your imagination, because it reveals completely different insights. This can also be accomplished by looking at each situation from different individuals’ points of view. For example, how would a child or a senior see the situation? What about an expert or a novice, or a local inhabitant versus a visitor? A wealthy person or a poor one? A tall person or a short one? Each angle provides a different perspective and unleashes new insights and ideas.
At Stanford’s Hasso Plattner School of Design, or ‘d.school’, students are taught how to empathize with very different types of people, so that they can design products and experiences that match their specific needs. When you empathize, you are, essentially, changing your frame of reference by shifting your perspective to that of the other person. Instead of looking at a problem from your own point of view, you look at it from the point of view of your user.
Another valuable way to open the frame when you are solving a problem is to ask questions that start with, Why?
For example, if you are designing anything — from a lunch box to a lunar landing module — you soon discover that different people have very diverse desires and requirements. Students are taught how to uncover these needs by observing, listening, and interviewing and then pulling their insights together to paint a detailed picture from each user’s point of view.
Another valuable way to open the frame when you are solving a problem is to ask questions that start with, Why? In his need-finding class, Stanford d.school Professor Michael Barry uses the following example:
If I asked you to build a bridge for me, you could go off and build a bridge. Or you could come back to me with another question: “Why do you need a bridge?” I would likely tell you that I need a bridge to get to the other side of a river. Aha! This response opens up the frame of possible solutions. There are clearly many ways to get across a river besides using a bridge. You could dig a tunnel, take a ferry, paddle a canoe, use a zip line, or fly a hot-air balloon, to name a few.
You can open the frame even farther by asking why I want to get to the other side of the river. Imagine I told you that I work on the other side. This, again, provides valuable infor- mation and broadens the range of possible solutions even more. There are probably viable ways for me to earn a living without ever going across the river.
The simple process of asking ‘why’ questions provides an incredibly useful tool for expanding the landscape of solutions for a problem.
This type of thinking can be applied to any industry. For example, the directors of the Tesco food-marketing business in South Korea set a goal to increase market share substantially and needed to find a creative way to do so. They looked at their customers and realized that their lives are so busy that it is actually quite stressful to find time to go to the store. So they decided to bring their store to the shoppers.
They completely reframed the shopping experience by taking photos of the food aisles and putting up full-sized images in the subway stations. People can literally shop while they wait for the train, using their smartphones to buy items via photos of the QR codes and paying by credit card. The items are then delivered to them when they get home. This new approach to shopping has boosted Tesco’s sales significantly.
Companies need to continually reframe their businesses in order to survive as markets and technology change.
Reframing problems is not a luxury. On the contrary, all companies need to continually reframe their businesses in order to survive as markets and technology change. For example, Kodak defined its business as ‘making cameras and film.’ When digital cameras made film photography obsolete, the company lost out badly, because it wasn’t able to open its frame early enough to see its business as including this new technology. On the other hand, Netflix began delivering DVDs of movies by mail. It framed its goals much more broadly, however, seeing itself as being in the movie-delivery business, not just the DVD-delivery business.
Framing and reframing of problems also opens up the door to innovative new ventures. Scott Summit, the founder of Bespoke, created a brand-new way to envision prosthetics for people who have lost a limb. The word ‘bespoke’ comes from Old English and means “custom-tailored” — and that is exactly what his company does: it makes custom-tailored limbs for those who have lost them.
Scott’s biggest insight was that some people with artificial limbs are embarrassed by their disability and want to hide their unsightly artificial limbs as much as possible. He reframed the problem by looking at an artificial limb not just as a functional medical device, but as a fashion accessory. Essentially, he decided to make prosthetics that are cooler than normal limbs.
Bespoke makes its customized limbs using a brand-new technique for 3D printing. Its designers first do a 3D scan of the surviving limb to make sure that the new limb is completely symmetrical with the surviving one. After they print the new limb, they cover it with materials that match the user’s lifestyle. For example, a new leg can be designed to look like a leather cowboy boot, or it can be covered in brushed chrome to match the user’s motorcycle, or it can be cut out to look like lace to match a fashionable dress. Not only is the leg functional, but the wearer is actually proud to display it publicly. Essentially, the prosthetic was transformed from a medical device into a fashion statement.
Reframing problems takes effort, attention and practice, but it enables you to see the world around you in a brand-new light. As indicated, you can practice reframing by physically or mentally changing your point of view, by seeing the world from others’ perspectives, and by asking questions that begin with Why? Together, these approaches will enhance your ability to generate imaginative responses to the problems that come your way.
