Disciplined, customer-grounded innovation outperforms “move fast and break things.” In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn discusses how to turn ideas into profitable reality without falling for the hype.
Rob Artigo: Today, Ray, we’re talking about innovation discipline, how to turn ideas into profitable reality without falling for the hype. So Ray, why does disciplined, customer-grounded innovation consistently outperform the move fast and break things approach?
Ray Zinn: A true product that has legs, as they say, or longevity, is what you want to have. Based on the pet rock kind of concept, it’s more of a one shot approach. Do you remember the pet rock, Rob?
Rob Artigo: Yeah. Yeah, I do. It was a rock that had eyeballs glued onto it.
Ray Zinn: It was stupid. It lasted what? About a year maybe? Anyway, it was a-
Rob Artigo: It was a sensation. It was a rage.
Ray Zinn: Yeah, it was … Gambling on a one shot, one deal product is very, very risky. You want to go in with products, innovate products that have longevity, have legs, that they’re not going to end up like the pet rock.
Rob Artigo: The dot com era was filled with pet rocks that had dot com after it.
Ray Zinn: Right.
Rob Artigo: So that was one of the things. If you had dot com, people thought that you were somehow a future commercial success, or at the very least, a good short-term gamble. And many times it was just like today, you’d find that nobody goes to a website called petrock.com. There probably is a website out there called that. So please don’t go there and think that I am telling you to. But you get the point, Ray. I’m saying that there are lots of shiny objects out there over the generations that you can point to and say, “Boy, that was a bad idea.”
Ray Zinn: Yeah, it’s a hype. And people are trying to jump in and take advantage of this dot com era, which lasted just what, two or three years, and then it was defunct. People lost a lot of money that jumped on that bandwagon. We were not one of them. And so we were injured badly because of it, but we weren’t slaughtered or we ended up dead. So yeah, if you’ve got a pet rock company, you’re doomed.
I think this AI hype right now is another one that we have to seriously consider because if you’re going to build it just to get the hype as you would or to hop on the hype bandwagon, the AI bandwagon, I think you’re going to be in serious trouble. So be careful about hype, things that are hyped up. And again, I really feel that AI is one of those hyped things that can cause this problem. We’re seeing that in the stock market with all the hype that happened more around the first of the year. The stocks ran way up. People got over exuberated with those AI type companies. And now they’ve come back down to earth. In fact, the market since about the 1st of May have come back dramatically.
Rob Artigo: That’s an interesting idea. I hadn’t really thought about that. And that’s the AI being a pet rock in a sense that somebody gets the hit of the pet rock and then somebody else makes a pet rock because I suppose you can’t patent a pet rock with a rock with eyeballs on it. So eventually with AI, you’re going to have a situation where everybody’s AI is really good. So there’s not going to be any difference between the AI. It is going to be a automatically saturated market.
Ray Zinn: Be careful about having AI attached to your company. If you have AI attached to your company, you run the risk of it becoming … Your company will become another pet rock. So don’t include AI in the name of your company.
Rob Artigo: Okay. Well, let’s move back into what you did at Micrel. Decades of successful innovation, a very competitive industry semiconductor. What does disciplined innovation actually look like in practice compared to the flashy hype-driven model we often see today?
Ray Zinn: Well, we looked at our products having more uses. In other words, we weren’t a single track company. We didn’t make just products that fit a one single solution. Our products had multiple solutions. We weren’t captive to one single market. And I know that to some degree, my investor was unhappy with the fact that we were not joining the hype group as you would, that our products were more like standard products. And it did impact our growth to some degree because of the fact that we went more general as you would in our product line as opposed to being a one shot type markets.
Rob Artigo: Where do you think most companies go wrong with innovation? What are the common traps?
Ray Zinn: When they jump on these hot markets, these pet rock markets, that’s the ones that failed because they bet the farm on one single thing. It’s a dangerous path to go on. I look at the automotive market and they all tried to duplicate what Tesla was doing because they saw how successful Tesla was with the electric car. And most of these companies, these big automotive companies that have jumped on the electric market have not done well. The electric car or the electric vehicle got really hyped because they were offering rebates and other things and these people jumped on it. And these big companies jumped on it and they lost money because they didn’t have their filter on.
Their eyes were somewhat glazed over by the fact that there was so much hype on electric cars. The infrastructure still isn’t there to support electric cars for everything as you would. They’re good commute vehicles, but they’re not necessarily long distance vehicles. I think that to some degree, these companies, these large companies, automotive companies have restricted or have phased out or back their electric opportunities as you would, electric vehicle opportunities, because they can see that it’s more hype than reality and there’s just not the infrastructure there to make it a universal changeover form. So we’re back to gas as you would, as opposed just to pure electric.
Rob Artigo: Yeah. Hybrid I think is ultimately what it’s going to come down to because it’s like driving around in something that all the eggs are in one basket and you can’t rely on those energy routes or avenues to be operating at 100% all the time. Join the conversation at toughthingsfirst.com. Your questions and comments are always welcome. Follow Ray on X and Facebook and also LinkedIn. And of course, pick up the books, Tough Things First, The Essential Leader, and the Zen of Zinn series one, two, and three. And now of course, Ray’s new book, Zen of Zinn Daily. Until next time, do the tough things first, right, Ray?
Ray Zinn: Absolutely, and you’ll succeed.
