I look at innovation primarily through the lens of \u201cHow does it make people\u2019s lives better?\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
It\u2019s not about what. It\u2019s about why.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Innovation isn\u2019t about what\u2019s under the hood. Let\u2019s face it\u2014people don\u2019t care how many patents you have. People want to know how technology makes their lives better. How am I able to do something today I couldn\u2019t do a year ago? How can I do something better today than I did yesterday?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Initially, headsets were for telephone operators. Nothing revolutionary\u2014they just helped operators make better phone calls. When there was a human need to capture voice and not noise, headsets solved the problem. Innovation made phone calls better for humans.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But then people decided they wanted to listen to music and<\/em> phone calls. Innovation came to the rescue again, with headsets designed to optimize the music experience while still making phone calls really well. Headsets became vastly more valuable with applied innovation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Forget about making better phone calls or listening to music. The new challenge\u2014the human challenge\u2014became how do I get my work done in this environment?<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Oddly enough, noise cancelling technology wasn\u2019t a big priority for audio engineers. As audio purists, they pretty much disdained anything that degraded audio quality, and noise cancelling knocked out a full 3%! Sure, there were some situations where it made sense, like in a plane. It was easy to engineer, given the consistent noise that an engine makes. But cancelling out human conversation? The varieties of voices, intonations,decibels\u2026it simply wasn\u2019t worth it to innovate when it meant loss of audio quality.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But it\u2019s amazing what happens when the challenge becomes personal.When the purists ended up in open offices, they suddenly realized the value of noise cancelling headphones\u2014they felt the pain! \u00a0Yet even with noise cancellation, they recognized a need for greater innovation to promote focus. They played around with a variety of ideas\u2026and ended up with a waterfall.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Turns out you can hear a keyboard from 15 feet away\u2014but the noise made by a waterfall actually mutes the annoying sound, helping people focus without normal distractions. A truly unique solution\u2014engineers viscerally understanding a problem and coming up with a clever way to combat it. And when customers visited the facility and saw how elegant a solution it was, they asked us to build it for them. The success of Habitat owes its genesis to engineers who just wanted to focus at work!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n So what\u2019s next? As customers continue to care deeply about one thing (What\u2019s in it for me?<\/em>),true innovators will design with the user in mind. At Plantronics, we obsess over details like weight and thickness, remembering that while 10 grams may seem like nothing when weighing a ribeye steak, it\u2019s huge when you consider what it feels like if you wear headphones all day for a living. Removing 10 grams of weight is a brilliant way to make people\u2019s lives better.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n We\u2019re working on some really cool stuff set to launch this spring, innovation that leverages the best of current technologies and mashes them up to meet real needs\u2026real human needs.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n For instance, imagine losing your Voyager headset. Let\u2019s face it\u2014it happens to all of us. We\u2019ve forgotten to put it where we \u201calways put it,\u201d and now we have no idea where we\u2019ve left it. Turns out, however, that a six-year-old consumer electronics company just up the peninsula can do more than find your lost keys. By building Tile<\/a> technology into our products and leveraging their vast cloud-sourced ecosystem and finding power,we\u2019ll make it impossible for you to lose your Voyager, no matter where it is.That\u2019s innovation with genuine value, innovation spawned from our closeness to human beings, to our ability to understand the needs and the ways in which life can just be\u2026better<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The sky is the limit when it comes to great ideas, and you can expect to hear more from us in the weeks ahead. For me, innovation is simple: solve problems<\/em>. Build a product. Build a company.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Make lives better.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I look at innovation primarily through the lens of \u201cHow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24135,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1373,509,547,524,1387,525,536],"tags":[12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3347"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24141,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347\/revisions\/24141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Consider headsets.<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
And then came the open office.<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Yep. A waterfall.<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n