Transcript

Frictionology: Jennifer Sullivan at TEDxChapmanU

so today i'm going to talk to you about ideas innovation and the importance as you heard of friction and so i just want to start off by saying i am not a scientist but i know a little bit about exploration my father was an archaeologist my mother was an artist so you could say i have a little bit of arts and sciences in my dna this is actually our time machine um this is this is my family tree i had five generations living in my family this actually includes my father my grandfather my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother so i actually got to meet her even though i was just an infant she was born in 1881 at la montague and that was the gilded age and for those of you who skipped history class or don't remember what the gilded age was it was a time in american history when innovation was king and the us became a leader in technology and a leader in innovations and so from 1860 to 1890 500 000 patents were issued for new inventions and that's actually 10 times the number issued in the previous 70 years so within that time period within that 30-year time period something was happening you can see this was the time of edison this was the time of tesla this was the time of bell and what was happening was there was no friction there were there was opportunity and there was no competition and so patents were being filed and innovations were being improved upon and so there was this amazing uh time in our history where the no competition equaled monopoly kodak is uh is another example of a great company that started in this era in 1888 george eastman invented roll film which is the basis of the invention of motion picture film and the kodak moment was born so it became kind of this uh amazing lexicon in our in our history and actually during most of the 20th century kodak was the dominant was the king and in fact at its peak in 1976 kodak had 90 percent market share for roll film but things were changing at the advent of the digital camera things started to to really change for kodak and its competitors polaroid went bankrupt in 2001. in 2007 the iphone uh much anticipated iphone was released and then in 2010 instagram launched and instagram is two and a half years old and has a hundred million active users so you're looking at these companies that are very young companies evolving and really gaining rapid market share very very quickly and so in 2012 kodak who didn't evolve filed for bankruptcy and according to apple their latest campaign is every day more photos are taken with the iphone and than any other camera so suddenly everyone has the tools to be annie leibowitz but even annie leibowitz can't make a living as a photographer so what is the future of photography what is the future of the industry well polaroid was purchased and so it has a new investor group that's interested in building up their business involving their business in 2011 they signed lady gaga as the face and the creative director of their brand in 2012 very quietly kodak started selling off its patents they raised about 500 million dollars so it's very interesting to see what they'll do and also polaroid is starting to evolve into retail stores and growing their business on mobile but i ask you what if kodak had just purchased instagram giant company startup company it would have changed the trajectory of their brand and so this is what brings us to frictionology because it's all about the intersections of understanding where there are opportunities understanding how to pivot understanding how to leverage entertainment to be relevant and so i start this with mtv and mtv changed my life in 1981 video killed the radio star was a hit on mtv and mtv was really important because when it initially launched it was out to target baby boomers and what they ended up reaching were teens and who were buying music and they invented something that hadn't really happened before which was the music artist it wasn't just about buying a record and buying a song it was about buying the artist so that was very important and again i bring these things up because this was in my lifetime so it's very interesting to see within my young lifetime um that these things have evolved very very quickly tech my first computer was a trs-80 it was a radio shot computer it was awesome and it really did become this fascination immediately i wanted to know what else could it do and so you know we're now in a generation in the new generation of kids coming up the millennials are really you know beyond that uh inquisitive and and wondering what what else does it do so you know we've evolved time magazine in 2006 said you are the person of the year there are new rules and so the new rules of engagement are really about making things accessible being open source being dynamic being scalable being inviting and especially being free we don't want to pay for things we want things that are that are easy that are accessible and that really don't cost us anything so let's talk about the role of friction so you know life on earth uh has existed for 3.5 billion years now 85 of that was at the microbial level but one might say that we were evolving even then but technology growth has doubled every 200 years since 1400 and that's very important that idea of that short period of time and innovations and technology growing and growing and growing rapidly increasing is very interesting and that's because of friction now when there's an opportunity someone comes up with an idea we need this and they they create a need state when there's a need state they create a monopoly because they own the idea but once somebody sees the idea doesn't like the friction because they have to pay for it they have to subscribe to it they have to give something up to get it they create something better that causes competition and competition is great because then there's abundance and everybody's out there and there's lots of opportunities there's lots of choice but then consumers need to cut through the choice i don't know about you but there are so many apps out there and so many different options as it relates to channels on television and everything else you know i don't know where to look i need curation so good friction is the idea of curating what's out there and cutting through to the things that that matter and what ends up happening is the good friction weeds out the noise and a leader rises to the top until that leader has a monopoly and then the process starts again so this idea about friction is something that's very cyclical friction right now is advertising so we're being you know pulled and pushed in all different directions from advertisers um bandwidth you know there's only so much amount of information that we can we can actually store which brings me to memory shipping is friction money is friction time is friction but friction is where the money is so whenever we're talking about friction it's all about where are we going to be able to make money in one area where there's good friction and we want friction is security we want privacy you know when we're in a digital age when things are moving so fast it's important that we're keeping ahead of things and so friction in the in the realm of security is very very important it's also important in protection so when innovations are happening at such a rapid pace it's very important that there are protectable ideas out there especially in an age where ideas change and are improved on a second by second basis so bad friction so what is bad friction artificial scarcity is a way of bad friction so the music industry when we look at the history of the music business a very large part of the music distribution era was cds and cds compared to other distribution vehicles in the past were relatively successful until the advent of the internet now the music industry didn't know what to do with the internet and when napster came in 1999 it completely changed the the music business and in fact the cd sales tanked so you know competition equals abundance so now we have all of these different competitive uh sources for finding information so we need curation curation is good friction andy warhol who said everyone has their 15 minutes of fame um is is an interesting person to talk about in the era where 15 minutes makes all the difference in the world steve jobs said think different and when either we're talking about science or we're talking about art or we're talking about technology it's important to think different zig when your competition is zagging apple computers this is their financial history pretty amazing right so how did that happen where how did they make all that money well apple's pivotal moment wasn't when they invented the ipod a lot of people think oh you the ipod that changed the trajectory no no no the ipod actually they actually went backwards in sales but in 2003 you can see itunes music store opened so the itunes store opened after the itunes store opened apple's sales went through the roof so what does that tell us think different selling content isn't a business content is the best way to sell other stuff so the ipod wasn't as relevant until there was music to put into it so now jump forward just a few years um itunes is in competition with subscription services like spotify so what's interesting about spotify and it's and the like is that again the business model has changed the ugly truth about the music business is this is actually a chart that i found really interesting um it talks about how music artists make money so the top there that self-pressed cd they would need to sell 143 of those cds to make us minimum wage of uh 1 160 so that's how many plays they would need to stream on rhapsody 102 655 and on spotify they would need 241 677 plays so that's interesting in that music artists now have to be creative and they have to think of other ways to make money i'm not sure if you're familiar with amanda palmer um she's a fellow tenster um amanda palmer uh did a kickstarter campaign this past year um for her concert tour and her album and raised 1.1 million dollars with 20 almost 25 000 backers on kickstarter and this ricocheted through the music industry and music artists and other creatives are looking at kickstarter and those types of vehicles for raising money and and becoming is very successful in their business so let's talk a little bit about pop friction pop friction is all about um this idea that when you look at po popular popular means successful means commercial you look at friction that means it's about money it's about it's about sales so when we're talking about uh entertainment it's really a way of getting into the emotional connection to the to the consumer to the audience you can see here and sometimes it goes beyond reason this is a photograph of someone getting the cast of star wars tattooed on their back it's like gravity it's it is gravity it's crazy gravity because fans fall in love with their favorite artists this is definitely a bieber concert fans trust those who help them discover new content they also trust that they can be the next executive and a r so you know justin bieber discovered on youtube the ways of discovering music artists is actually it's compartmentalizing and it's actually becoming a much faster process as well and fans are loyal to brands who curate experiences this genius loves company album sold three million records which for the music industry was fantastic but for starbucks created an environment and a culture and it told a story to the customers that they could relate to because access is good friction and so when brands are able to connect to content that actually tells a story they build loyalty and they have lasting connections to their customers good friction also drives sales and you may be familiar with this campaign with lady gaga uh her perfume line she sold six million bottles in the first week last year so it was about not just buying a perfume it's about buying lady gaga and a perfume and the best kinds of good friction create a movement beats headphones is a great example of this it's a three-year-old company as of last year 600 million dollars in sales they had 80 percent share of premium headphone sales in 2012 q4 as a three-year-old company and my final case study here in the music industry is harlem shake now who has heard the harlem shake who has posted a video of themselves doing the harlem shake no one i met some people today that did um it's it's an amazing phenomenon the harlem shake came out of nowhere on youtube and immediately created a viral sensation where artists people weren't just listening to bowers harlem shake they were actually getting their friends together producing their own version of the video and uploading that as well and the music industry and the nielsen and other other publications had to take notice so billboard you know it debuted number one on billboard's hot 100 and it's the first song of all time to debut from an artist that we hadn't heard of the week before so again friction is where the money is and chaos is good so whenever we change things whenever we go against the grain whenever we create friction and wherever we find opportunity it's great it it causes change in society it causes change in industry just like in the gilded age and it's very important then that there is appropriate friction because when there's competition there's opportunity where there's competition there's creativity no friction can be a problem because we don't want to be floating blobs staring at screens we want to be engaged and we want to be a part of this and so my inspiration um and something that you know really appeals to me is that i can come up with the next big idea i can be the next mark zuckerberg you can be the next mark zuckerberg michael eisner while he was at disney created this idea that it's important to create conflict internally so that you can have appropriate friction so that you can encourage uh change you can encourage uh innovation we're in a an idea society and the most important thing to do where we have ideas everywhere is challenge them shake them up change them come up with new ways to to make them work and speaking of making making them work we say diy is a major trend it's actually miy make it yourself we're in a creative creative culture right now where just because we have the tools to do things we can actually change the way that businesses operate you look at things like 3d printers they're selling them at staples now so you know you may have been able to you know send a song to your friend via napster 10 years ago but now you can send a file to make a shirt you can send a file to make a cup what is that going to look like in 10 years and so i'll leave you with this idea of the singularity so this concept is the idea that we're escalating you know 10 years ago is when the personal computer was invented a hundred years ago was when the telephone and electricity and radio were invented and then a thousand years ago was when the last leap was so if we're exponentially going a thousand one hundred ten and another ten that brings us to zero so what happens in that time period is extremely important and so i ask you to think about friction think about how we can use opportunities to challenge monopolies to challenge ideas to innovate and improve so that we are able to figure out time and i will end on time i'm a little bit over but what i'll tell you is that we um we're in a very good time in the world and i hope that all of you will take from this learn from this and be inspired by it thank you very much you