Communicating The New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation

WHY THIS BOOK? WHY NOW?

What if you are working on a problem no one knows they have?

—Editor of this book to the author of this book

If you are holding this book in your hands, you may already be persuaded that communication is critically important to success when pursuing new products, services, businesses, or systems. Powerful ideas—the lifeblood of any modern economy—will be embraced, ignored, attacked, or rejected according to how well they are understood or represented.

You may also be holding this book because you believe something fundamental has changed, something that is making communication of The New more difficult, and standard communication techniques less effective. I have experienced this too, and I believe that a number of factors have come together to create a new context for communication:

We are working on problems of increasing complexity. This complexity is hard to manage, structure, and explain—and yet it is essential to establishing the relevance of The New. We cannot ignore the complexity nor reduce it to an elevator pitch without trivializing our work.

The creation of The New involves more people. The creative types—the scientists, designers, agency people, etc. have always had a hand in The New. Now, in an economy where speed of execution matters, we also need the “developers” —the engineers, marketers, and IT specialists. Most critically, The New must be understood and embraced by the “doers” —the sales staff, managers, and stakeholders of all kinds ...