Innovation Iceberg

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Available Variations:

• 12"X18" 99 pieces (Conquer in an afternoon)

About original artwork: 
This piece is part of a series of 4 inspired by my role as a Founder-in-residence for a Venture Builder. There is dual significance to the iceberg analogy in the context of innovation; first because of the invisible yet sizable amount of hard work that goes into Zero to One of Entrepreneurship (as coined by Peter Thiel). The path for creating something truly new, something that is extraordinarily novel, is rife with ambiguity (think of when the Wright brothers dreamt of the first motor-operated airplane, or of the time when the Internet was being made, and nothing like it existed before). There are more questions than there are clear answers, multiple different paths to choose from, multiple failures to learn from, and all for good reason. The intangibility associated with this phase of innovation makes it difficult to articulate the true value of an iterative process. Once the web of this initial ambiguity has been untangled, the tangible outcome obscures all the toil involved in the process. All that hard work becomes rather invisible, much like the depth of the iceberg that extends way below the surface of the water and is impossible to gauge from the top. 

The second association is with respect to the need to truly understand the needs, aspirations, and behaviour of the users to create something new. The start-up ecosystem is filled with examples of failed products because their failure to understand either one or all of the above. User Research methods help in getting to the bottom of these unmet needs, unarticulated wants and behaviours, by constantly asking ‘Why’. This getting deep into the weeds of a problem to be solved and identifying its root cause, not its symptom, is synonymous with finding the depth of the iceberg. There is a lot that lies beneath the surface and successful innovators recognize the value of getting to this depth.

Medium: Pen on Paper.