5 Counterintuitive Innovation Principles That Have Created Countless Classic Hit Products

In 1979, Kozo Ohsone, a little-known engineer at Sony, launched a small stereo cassette player with headphones that allowed people to listen to music anytime, anywhere without disturbing others. No one had asked him to develop this product at the time. His colleagues told him it was absurd, as no one would be willing to wear headphones in public. His supervisor insisted that no one would buy a cassette player that could not record.

But Akio Morita, Sony's chairman, immediately recognized the potential of this new device. It is said that he had long wanted to listen to operas on long-haul flights, so he firmly believed that other people would have the same demand for their favorite music.

The lessons brought by the Walkman still hold practical significance today. It shows that consumers will ultimately choose convenience over technical specifications; wise companies know when to follow consumer demand; and truly breakthrough innovation can only be achieved through counterintuitive thinking.

Western innovation often follows a familiar logic: identify market opportunities, build the best solutions, add a wealth of features to products, and then launch them to the market with great fanfare. This approach is logical and data-driven. But precisely because of this, many product roadmaps are cluttered with a large number of features that no one has requested or will ever use.

Meanwhile, Japan has been quietly rewriting the rules of innovation for the past 50 years. This is not thanks to more advanced technologies: the early Walkman did not have excellent sound quality, and the screen of the first-generation Game Boy was very poor. Its innovation does not rely on smarter marketing either: emojis were barely promoted at all, and anime was created purely for local audiences, with overseas users only considered later. Yet these products achieved huge global success with staggering sales.

Why is that? Japanese innovators have stumbled upon a set of principles that help directly remove the psychological barriers that hold back innovation. Any company can apply these principles and achieve success.

Principle 1: Convenience Always Trumps Technical Sophistication

In 1989, Sega, NEC and Atari all equipped their handheld game consoles with the most advanced color screens and cutting-edge processors to compete for market share. But Gunpei Yokoi, a Nintendo engineer, took the opposite approach when designing the Game Boy. This game console had an old-fashioned black-and-white LCD screen and used a chip from the previous generation for its processor. Judging by the specs on paper, it stood no chance of success. Yet it went on to become one of the best-selling game consoles in history. How did that happen?

Yokoi called his approach "lateral thinking with withered technology". The Game Boy's "inferior" screen and slow processor made the product easy to manufacture and affordable for children. At the same time, this design made it more durable, with a battery life of up to 40 hours, while competing products usually only lasted 4 hours. Most importantly, the Game Boy had all the best games, including Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and later Pokémon.

Yokoi came to a fundamental realization: consumers do not care if the technology is the most advanced. They "hire" a product to make their lives easier. In the words of the "jobs-to-be-done" theory, what children want is not the game console with the best performance, but the most fun one.

The lesson revealed by this story is not limited to Japan. Take Crocs for example. Fashion magazines have declared this foam shoe outdated more times than disco has been pronounced dead. Yet the clogs have remained consistently popular. Why? Because Crocs, like Nintendo, understood the same principle: when a product solves a real problem, people care less about whether it looks good. Crocs are exactly the kind of shoes that require zero effort to put on. Medical workers, parents, and people walking their dogs at 5 a.m. choose Crocs not for their appearance, but because they can slip them on in seconds, and simply rinse them quickly with water when they need to be cleaned.

Key Insight: Convenience is often more important than features. Those fancy configurations that seem to add product features can also increase barriers to use such as complexity and cost. Products with slightly inferior technology can instead gain a strategic advantage.

Principle 2: "The Street Finds Its Own Uses for Things"

When science fiction writer William Gibson wrote the line "The street finds its own uses for things", he was talking about futuristic cyberpunk technologies. But this saying also perfectly describes Sony's experience of creating the Walkman. Sony executives once firmly believed that this product would only appeal to children studying for exams late at night. However, ordinary consumers had different ideas.

Urban residents wanted to use it to escape the boredom of their subway commutes, joggers wanted to listen to music while running, and teenagers wanted to have their own private world of music. The end result was that total sales of the Walkman reached 200 million units.

The development of emojis followed a similar pattern. In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita, a designer, created the set of symbols for the mobile internet service of Japanese telecom operator DoCoMo, initially only as a decorative element. But teenagers quickly discovered these symbols and began to use them extensively in text messages. Soon, Apple and Google integrated emojis into their respective devices one after another. What Kurita originally envisioned as just a set of "clip art" eventually became the fastest-growing "language" in human history.

This was not down to luck, the key lay in listening. Every product holds possibilities that its creators never anticipated. But only those creators who are humble enough to observe how people actually use their products, instead of clinging to the original functional design, can discover these possibilities.

This rule also applies to markets outside Japan. Musical.ly, the predecessor of TikTok, was originally a virtual karaoke platform. But users began to post their own short videos on the platform. Soon, communities such as FoodTok and BookTok sprang up rapidly, forming a powerful force that not only helped many people launch their culinary careers, but also turned unknown authors into best-selling writers overnight. None of these application scenarios ever appeared on any product roadmap.

Seizing the opportunity, ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, followed the trend, restructured its algorithm to prioritize content that users actually wanted to watch and interact with. The result was the birth of a platform valued at over 200 billion US dollars, with use cases that even its founders could never have imagined.

Key Insight: Users will do your R&D work for free. This requires you to overcome the urge to defend your own vision and resist users' "misuse" of it.

Principle 3: Embrace the Power of Constraints

In 1985, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto needed to create a hero for his new game Donkey Kong. The problem was that he only had a 16×16 pixel grid to work with, a canvas so small that it could barely show any details.

Miyamoto solved this problem by "subtracting". By giving the character a hat, he no longer needed to draw hair; adding a small moustache allowed him to create a highly recognizable face even without a mouth or nose; the overalls used visual contrast to distinguish the arms from the body. Every design choice solved a problem at the pixel level.

"Constraints force us to be creative," said Miyamoto. It was these constraints that pushed him to create one of the most recognizable characters in modern history in a grid barely larger than a postage stamp.

Twitter (now renamed X)'s iconic 140-character tweet is also a vivid example of this principle. This was not a deliberate design choice, but because within the 160-character limit of SMS, after reserving 20 characters for usernames, only 140 characters were left. Twitter cleverly leveraged this constraint, giving birth to a kind of internet-era "haiku".

You can also reverse the problem and look at it from the consumer's perspective. In the 1960s, convenience store chain Trader Joe's first started in California. Later, 7-Eleven entered the local market. Unable to compete with this giant, founder Joe Coulombe decided to take a different path. What if he did the tedious work of "product selection" for customers? The 50,000 products that an average supermarket carries were reduced to 4,000. This "less is more" mindset has made Trader Joe's one of the most profitable grocery retailers in the United States.

Key Insight: Constraints are opportunities. If you look at them with the right perspective, constraints are no longer obstacles, but become solutions.

Principle 4: Develop Products for Markets That Do Not Yet Exist

Transformative innovation does not just serve markets, it creates markets. And those markets that do not yet exist will never show up in questionnaires.

In 1967, Shigeichi Negishi, an amateur singer, dreamed of hearing his own singing through a loudspeaker. So he connected an 8-track cassette player, a microphone and a cross-fader, inserted an accompaniment tape, and called his family over. In this way, he accidentally held the world's first karaoke party in his kitchen.

Eventually, the karaoke machine became a global phenomenon. But at the time, it was seen as a weird contraption, as hobbyists still dared not sing in public. It was not until later that a peer came up with an idea: pay bar staff to encourage hesitant customers to step up to the microphone. As more and more people got to experience being a star for the length of a song, karaoke became popular across Japan and the rest of the world.

The challenge is that innovation naturally triggers resistance. For innovators, the key question is how to eliminate as much friction as possible and help people overcome their inner doubts.

In fact, this principle has long been put into practice. In 2009, Mike Cessario, an advertising creative, noticed a strange thing: the water that rock musicians on stage were drinking was being put in Monster Energy cans. Sponsors required musicians to hold Monster cans, but they needed to hydrate instead of consuming caffeine, so they secretly replaced the drink in the cans with water. Eight years later, Mike Cessario launched Liquid Death, a punk rock-style canned water brand.

Market researchers would probably shout: "Water is free. There is no problem to solve here."

However, Liquid Death proved otherwise with intuition that data cannot capture. From the perspective of the jobs-to-be-done theory, the core demand of consumers is not just to hydrate, but to express their identity. This "hardcore" looking soft drink has attracted a large number of consumers: teenagers who want to look cool, non-drinkers who want to fit in at parties, and concertgoers who want to enjoy the fun without getting a hangover.

As of March 2024, this canned water company has reached a valuation of 1.4 billion US dollars.

Key Insight: Distinguish between "serving a market" and "creating a market". To create a brand new market, you must understand the "jobs" that people need to get done, even if they cannot always articulate them clearly.

Principle 5: Recognize What Data Cannot Tell You

In this day and age, we seem to understand consumers better than ever before. A/B testing, data analysis, questionnaires, behavior tracking and other methods are emerging one after another. However, the abundance of information is a double-edged sword. It can kill innovation in its infancy before it even gets off the ground.

The strength of data lies in telling you what consumers think of existing products. But its weakness is that it cannot predict how consumers will perceive things that do not yet exist. It is well known that focus groups once rejected ideas for minivans, VCRs and the iPhone.

As the publisher of Weekly Shonen Jump, the world's largest manga magazine, Shueisha has a deep understanding of this contradiction. Every week, they ask young readers to rank their favorite works through questionnaires. Works with low rankings are often discontinued, which is a data-driven publishing model.

But at the same time, Shueisha gives the editors of Weekly Shonen Jump a great deal of autonomy to make decisions based on experience, intuition, or even just a gut feeling. Take Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball for example: the series has sold a total of 300 million copies, and spawned a multi-billion dollar anime and gaming empire, making it arguably the most well-known Japanese pop culture IP in the world. Yet when Dragon Ball was first serialized in 1984, this quirky, comedy-focused manga performed extremely poorly in reader surveys. The data showed that the work should be canceled. But editor Kazuhiko Torishima did not think so.

Torishima believed that Toriyama had even greater potential, and encouraged him to step out of his comfort zone. Later, Toriyama adjusted the creative direction of Dragon Ball, transforming it from a comedic adventure story into an epic martial arts masterpiece. The response from readers was overwhelmingly positive, and this popularity has not faded to this day.

If decisions had been made entirely based on data back then, Dragon Ball would have been canceled in its first year. If Shueisha had blindly followed the survey results, they would have lost not just one IP, but an entire cultural empire.

Slack is another typical case. In 2009, Stewart Butterfield's game company was developing an online game called Glitch, but no one wanted to play it. However, in the process of developing Glitch, the team created an internal communication tool and named it Slack. Butterfield realized that other companies might also find this tool useful. The problem was that he had almost no experience in the enterprise software space, and the instant messaging market was already fiercely competitive. But Butterfield chose to ignore the data and trust his intuition: if his team enjoyed using Slack, maybe other people would too. In 2021, Salesforce acquired Slack for 27.7 billion US dollars, even though the tool was never originally intended to be a product.

Key Insight: Use data to understand the present, but trust your intuition when judging the future. Data tells you the reality of the situation, while intuition speaks to the possibilities of the future.

. . .

The enduring success of Japanese products proves a low-profile innovation knack that everyone can learn from. These principles are not unique to Japan, but Japan has applied them in almost all industries for far longer and more extensively than almost any other country and region.

The next time a good idea hits a wall, resist the urge to pile on more features. The best innovations are not pushed forward by brute force, but by clearing a path. The most transformative Japanese innovators succeeded not because they made products bigger, but because they made it easier for people to say "yes". Just as the creators of the Walkman realized: think based on innovation principles, and you can rewrite the rules; follow the rules blindly, and you will always be constrained by them.

David Schonthal, Matt Alt | Text

David Schonthal is a professor of strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in the United States, and co-author of The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.

Matt Alt is a Tokyo-based writer and author of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World.

Zhou Jingyi | Editing

This article is from the WeChat official account "Harvard Business Review" (ID: hbrchinese), the author is HBR-China, and it is published with authorization from 36Kr.