Feb
2

The 4-Chord Formula 4 Success

blunt-and-hogan.jpgI heard a brilliant clip off the Scott Mills podcast the other day when traveling to Seattle. It’s about an Australian band called the Axis of Awesome. They found a formula for writing a hit song (essentially the same 4 chords) and demonstrated it by playing those chords and then singing a medley of hits based on the same foundation. Astonishing and absolutely worth the 5 minute listen. My mate Matt blogged about it last week at industrialbrand too.

Beyond just the obvious humor, it did make me ponder a magic formula in creativity. One of the main rules in innovation is that if your new product requires a significant behavior change it won’t be successful. So immediately, for anything new to win, it must be based on current consumer experience and behavior. If we’re to invent a cynical “4 chord formula” for innovation it might be:

1. Don’t shatter the paradigm completely

2. Innovate on small things first, rather than big

3. Never re-invent the wheel

4.  Never take people out of their comfort zone.

For all you new product concept writers out there - see how many of the above you actually break. That’s far too depressing for a Monday, so my charge for readers today is to think of a challenge ahead of you or your business and rather than apply a solution that you know might work immediately (let’s call that the “4-chord solution”) - do something else instead.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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