“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

For over a century this saying has been inspiring entrepreneurs… but does building a better mousetrap actually work? Does the entrepreneur with the highest quality product win? Does the artist with the most skills and knowledge rise above his peers? Does success really come to those who can outcompete others?

Well, actually… No…

Building a better mousetrap doesn’t work as a saying or metaphor for success.

In fact, it’s not even true for actual mousetraps!

 

Innovations in Mousetraps

Since the U.S. Patent Office opened in 1828, there’s been around 4,400 patents for mousetraps. That’s 4,400 improvements.

How many of those 4,400 improved mousetraps were commercial successes?

… Around 20.

That’s a success rate of 0.45%, or 220 failures for each commercial success.

 

Why Creative Success Isn’t About Building a Better Mousetrap

Why is the success rate so lousy? The “build a better mousetrap” saying is fundamentally flawed because it falsely assumes that “creativity” is inherent in a creative product itself. But creativity can’t be found in the mind of the creator or in their creation. It’s greater than any individual.

Too often, we assume that the “creativeness” of a product is inherent in itself. We view it as if it’s objective. In actuality, the creativeness of a product has less to do with the actual product and more to do with what other people think about the product.

In fact, it’d be more accurate to describe creativity as “the fit between a creative product and a group of creativity consumers.”

A good analogy for this is seeing creativity as a jigsaw puzzle. Your creative product is one piece of that puzzle. By itself, it’s nothing. Second, the actual shape of the jigsaw piece you make isn’t that important, it’s whether the piece will fit into other pieces.

If creativity is about fit, then what we create is just as important as how we communicate our creations. Said different, creativity requires some level of persuasion. It requires the product be deem worthy of being included in the industry by gatekeepers, purchased by consumers, or believed in by followers. Creativity requires impact.

 

Consumer Awareness

But in order to have that impact, it also requires that potential consumers be aware of a creative product. This gets to the second major problem with this saying: “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

It makes the assumption that potential creative consumers have perfect information. But this obviously isn’t the case. The majority of highly creative ideas won’t get seen because they’ll be buried in the noise. It’s our job as creatives to make people aware of our creative product and to persuade them to value it above other options.

The world won’t beat a path to your door. You’ll have to create that path yourself.

Creators can (and often do) leave communication and persuasion to chance, but even large corporations have fallen into this trap.

 

Why TiVo Became a Commercial Failure

A great example is TiVo. Despite almost everyone knowing what TiVo is and does, almost no one has an actual TiVo. Despite pioneering DVRs, TiVo failed miserably as a company because it simply didn’t effectively communicate why a TiVo would be important to people. The quality was there. The mousetrap was clearly superior. And yet, TiVo failed commercially.

Building a better mousetrap doesn’t equal success, it’s only the first half of the equation. Just as the creative process can be broken down into convergent and divergent thinking, so too can the overall process of creative success be broken down into creation and persuasion.

The 4,380 other mousetraps might have been (and many undoubtedly were) better than previous mousetraps, but the creators failed to persuade those that could help make that goal into reality.