Across Alternative Industries: From commercial printing to a pregnancy calendar

One of the six paths towards value innovation is to look across alternative industries. Let's take a brief quote from the book: "alternatives include products or services that have different functions and forms but the same purpose."

One of my inventions is the online pregnancy calendar. It's become relatively common now, but I built the first pregnancy calendar -- a website which contextualizes information during fetal development -- in early 1996 when my wife was pregnant with our son.

I'd like to say the pregnancy calendar was a well thought out and brilliant invention. The truth isn't quite as glamorous, but is more valuable from an understanding of where to look for new business ideas...

At the time I was working for Merrill Corporation on a print production control system. Merrill (a great company, and worth an entire separate post) is a leader in the creation of compliance documents for the securities industry. Way back when this meant printing books of financial disclosures to be mailed to investors and government agencies. These books would have to be produced at the last minute, changing with market conditions, then distributed around the country to Merrill's various print plants.

At the time I was looking for a method to allow the different print plants to coordinate scheduling the print jobs. They had a primitive Unix-based system but scheduling is an inherently graphical function, so they relied mainly on white-boards. The web browser had been invented not long before and table support was relatively new. I had the thought to use HTML tables to show production schedules that could be viewed and manipulated from different plants around the country.

As a learning exercise, at home, I wanted to see if it was possible to dynamically generate calendars in HTML. Once I created my test calendar I needed to populate the cells with data. The house was filled with pregnancy books and I thought it'd be neat to see how my son was developing tied to real dates.

So I pulled out data from all the pregnancy books and arranged them into a text-based database using their relative offsets. For example, "Day 8 -- Blastocyst cells separate: a baby head and tuchas form." I finished it, half tongue and cheek, and gave it to my wife, who gave it to friends, and on to other friends. Next thing I knew my learning project was on CNN, and being written about in the WSJ, NY Times, and lots of other media.

Most importantly, had I not started to look at industrial print plant scheduling I would never have cooked up the idea of a dynamically generated pregnancy calendar. I'm sure that somebody else would have eventually, but it wouldn't have been me: I would've missed the market. By looking across alternative industries -- even inadvertently -- I accidentally created a category killer that continues to dominate the online landscape to this day.

End note: For those who realized it while reading ... yes; I may have been the first to render calendars with contextualized content in HTML tables. Was I actually the first? Who knows. Could I have patented that? I hope not, but the way the PTO was recklessly issuing patents back then, probably. Would I do things any differently today with the patents? Nope. Even though I was told "sell this at a discount, or we'll make a knockoff" I still believe that software patents are rarely justified. Larry Page's brilliant Page Rank algorithm is the type of breakthrough that may make them acceptable, but nothing less than that. In any event, I suspect Google would've been just fine without the patents; the hassles from patent trolls is outweighed by the benefit to genuine innovators.