55: How Story-Listening Defeats Innovation Bias

When Graham Brown witnessed trends around how teenage girls in Japan were using pocket-bell pagers to message each other in the mid-1990s, he knew a significant shift was happening and saw the potential for SMS messages before mobile providers had introduced the feature on early mobile phones. But when Brown excitedly approached mobile phone companies with his observations, he was told, "We don't market to kids." Ironically, it would be teenagers who would teach mobile companies how to make money from data packages much later on.  In this episode of the podcast, we explore how, throughout the history of technology, young people have often been the ones to drop clues about future trends through their digital social interactions - often going so far as to corrupt technologies to make them better.  We also talk about how story listening can help brands defeat innovation bias, and stay open to the way technology needs to evolve.