What Steve Jobs, Howard Schultz and a Pet Waste Station Taught Me About Innovation

By Avi Kosch

Founder & CEO

NEXGEN DNA, Inc.

Some of the most transformative products in modern history began with an idea that already existed.

Steve Jobs understood that. He once repeated a line he attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Taken literally, it sounds terrible. But Jobs wasn’t advocating theft. In the same interview, he spoke about exposing yourself to the best things people have created and bringing those influences into your own work. His point was less about copying someone else’s product than about understanding great ideas, learning from them and allowing them to influence what you create next.

There is also a certain irony to the quotation itself. Its exact origin and attribution to Picasso have long been debated. But Jobs unquestionably said it, and the philosophy behind it tells us something important about innovation: great ideas do not always begin with a blank sheet of paper.

Sometimes they begin with something millions of people already use and one person willing to look at it as though they were seeing it for the first time. The question isn’t always, What can I invent? Sometimes the better question is: Why couldn’t this be better?

Apple Didn’t Invent the MP3 Player

When Apple introduced the iPod in October 2001, portable digital music players already existed. Apple’s own announcement acknowledged the category, describing the iPod as the “next generation” of portable music players using internal hard drives and comparing its size and transfer speed with players already on the market.

Apple hadn’t discovered digital music. It hadn’t invented the MP3 format or the idea of carrying music around with you. What Apple did was reconsider the experience.

The first iPod held up to 1,000 songs in a 6.5-ounce device. Its scroll wheel allowed users to navigate a large music library with one hand, while Auto-Sync transferred and updated music through iTunes. Apple took storage, software, synchronization, navigation and industrial design and made them work together as one experience. Six years later, the company announced that it had sold its 100 millionth iPod.

The lesson isn’t that the iPod succeeded because Apple copied an MP3 player. It is almost the opposite. Apple looked at a category that already existed and refused to accept that the existing version represented the end of the idea.

That pattern would become familiar. Apple did not invent the mobile telephone, the tablet computer or the wristwatch. Yet the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch each entered categories people already understood and challenged expectations of what those products could do. Being first and being transformative are not the same thing. And that distinction matters far beyond technology.

Howard Schultz Didn’t Invent Coffee

Coffee had already been around for centuries when Howard Schultz traveled to Italy in 1983. Coffeehouses weren’t new either. But Schultz saw something in Milan that he believed the American market was missing.

He wasn’t simply watching people drink espresso. He was observing what happened around it—the barista, the ritual, the conversation, the atmosphere and the familiarity between customers and the people serving them. The coffee bar wasn’t merely somewhere to purchase caffeine on the way to somewhere else. It was part of the day.

Schultz returned to Seattle with a vision of bringing elements of the Italian café tradition to the United States and creating what Starbucks would eventually describe as a “third place” between work and home—a place for conversation and community. The idea wasn’t immediately embraced. Starbucks at the time was primarily focused on selling high-quality coffee beans, and its founders did not want to transform the business around Schultz’s vision.

So Schultz left. In 1985, he founded Il Giornale, inspired by the ritual and atmosphere he had observed in Milan’s coffee bars. Two years later, after Il Giornale had opened three locations, Starbucks’s founders decided to sell. Schultz raised $3.8 million, acquired Starbucks’s assets and adopted the Starbucks name.

What followed was extraordinary growth. By 1995 Starbucks had 677 stores. By 1999 it had 2,498, and by 2002 the number had reached 5,886. But strip away the scale, the logo and everything Starbucks later became, and the original insight was surprisingly simple: Howard Schultz didn’t invent coffee. He saw an existing experience and imagined a different one.

There Is a Difference Between Copying and Learning

There is nothing particularly innovative about looking at a competitor’s product, duplicating it and changing the logo. That is copying.

Innovation asks harder questions. Why does this product work? Where doesn’t it work? What do customers like about it? What frustrates them? Which limitations are unavoidable, and which ones have simply survived because nobody has bothered to challenge them? Perhaps the most important question is this: If we were designing this today, knowing everything we know now, would we still design it this way?

Jobs’s comments are revealing because immediately before delivering the famous Picasso line, he talked about exposing yourself to great things other people had created and bringing those influences into your own work. He credited the Macintosh team partly to the breadth of the people behind it—musicians, poets, artists, historians and scientists as well as computer engineers.

Great ideas can migrate. A lesson from hospitality can influence technology. A lesson from accessibility can improve something used in a park. A lesson from logistics can change the design of a waste receptacle. Innovation becomes much more interesting when we stop insisting that every idea must originate inside the industry where it will ultimately be used.

“That’s Just How It’s Done.”

There are few sentences more dangerous in product development than “That’s just how it’s done.” Every mature industry develops conventions. Some exist for excellent reasons. Others reflect manufacturing limitations that disappeared years ago. Some began as decisions made by a market leader decades earlier and survived because competitors copied one another until a design choice stopped looking like a choice at all.

Eventually, nobody asks why. The product has always been that height. The container has always held that amount. The door has always opened that way. The maintenance employee has always had to check that manually. Gradually, a limitation becomes part of the category.

Sometimes the greatest obstacle to innovation isn’t a problem nobody can solve. It’s a problem everybody has stopped noticing.

That idea has shaped the way I think about product development. I don’t believe every existing product needs to be redesigned. Sometimes a simple product works perfectly well exactly as it is. But when the same frustrations appear repeatedly—when users compensate for the design instead of the design working for the user—that deserves attention.

Inconvenience is information. So is wasted time. So is an unnecessary movement. So is the sentence, “I wish this thing would just…” Listen closely enough and customers will often describe the next version of a product without realizing they’re doing it.

I Didn’t Invent the Pet Waste Station

I didn’t invent the pet waste station. Commercial pet waste stations existed long before PooStation, and there would be no credibility in pretending otherwise. There were already posts with signs, bag dispensers and waste receptacles, and communities had been purchasing them for years.

But after looking carefully at the category, I kept coming back to the same thought: Why had so many limitations simply become accepted?

Why did a commonly installed commercial station hold approximately 400 bags when greater capacity could provide more operating reserve? Why were receptacles commonly around 10 gallons when additional capacity could reduce pressure on maintenance schedules? Why did someone disposing of pet waste have to touch a lid with their hand? And what about someone who couldn’t conveniently operate a foot pedal?

There were other questions. Why couldn’t maintenance personnel see that a bag roll was depleted without opening the dispenser? Why shouldn’t a station used along walking paths and community common areas provide illumination after dark? Why couldn’t the access door secure itself when it closed? And why did so much of the category appear to be designed around dispensing a bag while giving comparatively little attention to the employee who might service that station hundreds of times over its life?

Those questions became PooStation.

PooStation was engineered to hold approximately 1,200 bags—roughly three times the capacity of many traditional 400-bag dispensers. The waste receptacle was increased to 20 gallons. A hands-free foot pedal was paired with an accessible hand lever. An EMPTY indicator provides a visible maintenance cue. An integrated LED adds nighttime visibility. The access door self-locks when closed. Oversized drawstring liners simplify waste removal. The station was engineered around durability and repeated commercial use.

But PooStation isn’t simply a collection of additional features. The larger dispenser is about creating reserve. The larger receptacle is about capacity. The foot pedal is about cleaner hands-free disposal. The hand lever is about accessibility. The EMPTY indicator is about giving maintenance personnel information before they open the dispenser. The self-locking door is about eliminating a step that otherwise has to be performed—and remembered—every time the station is serviced. The LED is about making a community amenity more useful after the sun goes down.

Each feature answers a question. Each question began with something the category had learned to accept. None of those ideas, taken individually, is the equivalent of inventing the personal computer. They don’t need to be. The point of innovation isn’t to make the grandest possible claim. The point is to make something work better.

Listen First. Design Second.

One of the mistakes entrepreneurs can make is falling in love with the solution before fully understanding the problem. I prefer the reverse: watch first, listen, ask questions and pay attention to the workaround someone has created because the product doesn’t quite do what they need.

Talk to the person purchasing the equipment, but also talk to the person using it, cleaning it and repairing it. The person signing the purchase order may experience a product once. The person maintaining it may experience it hundreds of times. Those are very different perspectives, and both matter.

That is one reason accessibility became important in the development of PooStation. My own experience following a serious accident changed the way I look at ordinary interactions with products and environments. A task that seems effortless when you are standing comfortably can look very different when mobility is limited.

Good design should notice that—not because every product can solve every problem for every person, but because designers should at least ask who may have been unintentionally excluded by the assumptions built into a product.

The same principle applies to maintenance. A self-locking door may eliminate only one small action. An EMPTY indicator may save only a quick check. A larger dispenser may simply create more reserve, while a larger receptacle may provide additional time before capacity becomes the reason for another service visit. But products are rarely experienced once. They are experienced repeatedly, and small improvements, repeated hundreds or thousands of times, stop being small.

Better Is an Innovation Too

We tend to tell the history of innovation through inventions—the light bulb, the airplane, the personal computer, the Internet. Those stories deserve their place because they changed the world, but they can also create an unrealistic definition of innovation, as though an idea matters only if nothing resembling it existed the day before.

Most businesses will never invent an entirely new category. They shouldn’t have to. The world is filled with products, services and experiences that already work reasonably well, and reasonably well is not the same as finished.

Steve Jobs looked at technology that already existed and repeatedly asked how the experience could become simpler, more intuitive and more useful. Howard Schultz walked into Italian coffee bars and recognized that what they were selling wasn’t only coffee. He saw an experience that could be interpreted differently for another market.

Neither lesson says to copy Apple or Starbucks. The lesson is to look harder: observe, question and learn. Borrow principles, not products. Remove unnecessary steps. Design around the person who actually has to use what you’re creating.

Then put it into the world and allow the customer to decide whether your version really is better. Because calling something innovative doesn’t make it innovative. The improvement has to matter to somebody.

Look Again

The next great idea may not begin with something nobody has ever seen. It may begin with something everybody has seen so many times that they stopped looking at it.

A music player. A cup of coffee. A pet waste station.

Apple looked again at the music player. Howard Schultz looked again at the coffeehouse. Neither lesson is that success comes from copying what somebody else has already built. The lesson is that sometimes the opportunity is hiding inside something familiar.

That is how I came to PooStation. I didn’t set out to invent the pet waste station. I set out to ask why a product communities had been purchasing for decades couldn’t be more sanitary, more accessible, more convenient for the pet owner and better designed for the people responsible for maintaining it.

The answers became a 1,200-bag dispenser, a 20-gallon covered receptacle, hands-free foot-pedal operation, an accessible hand lever, an EMPTY indicator, a self-locking access door, oversized drawstring liners and integrated LED lighting.

But those are the answers. The more important part was asking the questions.

Because the opportunity isn’t always to invent the category. Sometimes it is to notice the inconvenience everyone else stopped noticing, question the limitation everyone else stopped questioning and imagine what the category might look like if you were willing to start asking why again.

That is the philosophy behind PooStation. Not change for the sake of change. Not another version of what was already there. A next-generation pet waste station built by looking again at what everyone else had learned to accept.

Because innovation doesn’t always begin with invention. Sometimes it begins with attention.

Listen first. Design second.

Happier Places Cleaner Spaces™

Sources

PBS — Triumph of the Nerds: The Transcripts, Part III. Steve Jobs discusses Apple’s exposure to ideas developed at Xerox PARC, the importance of drawing from great work across disciplines, and repeats the “Good artists copy; great artists steal” line he attributed to Picasso.

Apple — “Apple Presents iPod,” October 23, 2001. Apple’s original iPod announcement documents the 1,000-song capacity, 6.5-ounce design, scroll-wheel interface, Auto-Sync integration and Apple’s comparison with existing hard-drive portable music players.

Apple — “Apple Announces iTunes 2,” October 23, 2001. Documents the integration of iTunes and iPod and the automatic synchronization of music libraries and playlists.

Apple — “100 Million iPods Sold,” April 9, 2007. Apple announced that the 100 millionth iPod had been sold approximately five and a half years after the first iPod reached customers.

Starbucks — Company History / About Us. Starbucks documents Howard Schultz’s 1983 trip to Italy, his fascination with Italian coffee bars and his vision of creating a place for conversation and community between work and home.

Starbucks — “Il Giornale.” Starbucks’s historical archive documents Schultz’s departure to establish Il Giornale in 1985, the company’s three locations and the 1987 acquisition of Starbucks’s assets for $3.8 million.

Starbucks — Company Timeline. Starbucks’s historical timeline reports 677 stores in 1995, 2,498 in 1999 and 5,886 in 2002.

PooStation / NEXGEN DNA, Inc. — Product Development and Specifications. Product-development observations and current PooStation specifications, including approximately 1,200-bag capacity, 20-gallon waste receptacle, hands-free foot-pedal and accessible hand-lever operation, EMPTY indicator, integrated LED, self-locking access door and oversized drawstring liners.

About the Author

Avi Kosch is the founder and CEO of NEXGEN DNA, Inc., an innovation company focused on practical solutions for pet-friendly communities and the built environment. Drawing on more than two decades of entrepreneurial experience in product development and manufacturing for hospitality and commercial environments, Kosch believes a well-designed commercial product should not only look and perform as intended on the day it is installed, but should be engineered to preserve that appearance and performance through the realities of everyday use. His approach to product development begins with observing how people actually interact with products and questioning limitations that have simply become accepted. His work includes the development of PooStation, a next-generation pet waste management system inspired in part by his personal experience with accessibility following a serious accident.