Spurring Innovation by Making Some Noise

The great inventor is a myth. It’s the squeaky wheel that spurs innovation.

So says Angus Davis, who has some measure of experience in this area. Davis was a major player in the early development of the Netscape web browser that revolutionized Internet surfing. He also created Tellme Networks, a voice recognition software program that makes touchtone voicemail operations obsolete. Tellme was acquired by Microsoft in 2007.

Davis’ latest enterprise is Swipely, an online social network that tracks and rewards consumer purchasing patterns with one swipe of a credit card.

Behind any entrepreneurial venture, Davis notes, there is someone who has been the “squeaky wheel” in identifying key problems and the key people who can solve them. He drives innovation by “peppering” people with questions, “peppering” them with ideas.

He’s not “the guy programming the computer code,” but the one who gets the perfect team together.

“I don’t think that being a lone, independent thinker is a pathway to create anything that’s great,” Davis says. “It’s a pathway to become a mad scientist or a consultant, but if you want to become part of something really great, it needs to be as part of a team.”

When he started Tellme, for instance, the first thing he did was identify the “smartest people in the world” who knew something about speech technology. He found 14 of them through MIT’s Media Lab.

“I decided, I’m going to hunt down these 14 people, and at one point we had about half of them working for us at Tellme,” Davis says. “We were able, in a start-up company, to provide a very different channel for their greatness and inspiration.”

Another ingredient that greases Davis squeaky wheel is his obsession with making the human-technology interface almost invisible. That means making technology work for us, instead of the other way around.

“If you have to break out the manual, you’re a slave to technology,” he says. “What you want is the reverse of that—you want it where your life is better because of it.”

Swipely begins with this philosophy of convenience. Officially launched in March 2011, the online service enables users to accumulate points or rewards from vendors every time they use their credit cards.

“You can do it without having all the nonsense of cutting coupons, keeping a loyalty card in your wallet or checking in places,” Davis says. “I’m already using a credit card to pay for things, so why can’t that just keep track of my loyalty points? Why do I have to do all this unnatural stuff?”

And Swipely does more than just smooth over the customer’s experience. Davis refers to it as a “social commerce” company that will help local merchants by giving them a new way to build solid relationships with their patrons. Consumers are increasingly making shopping decisions based on the nature of these relationships, he says.

“We’re trying to build a lasting marriage between merchants and their best customers,” he explains.

Small businesses have a natural edge when it comes to personalizing customer service, but they can’t compete with the high-tech merchandising capacity of national chains. Swipely may be changing that.

“We’re arming these local merchants with the nuclear weapons of marketing, just like the ones used by their big box brethren,” Davis says. “We’re putting state-of-the-art customer relations marketing tools in the hands of these local merchants so they can make every customer who walks through their doors feel like Norm Peterson walking into Cheers.”

If Davis track record is any indication, Swipely will be a boon for Main Street and patron alike. In the meantime, he is applying his squeaky wheel to a seemingly impossible task in his own backyard: improving the quality of Rhode Island public education.

“I’ve always been attracted to interesting problems,” Davis says. That might be an understatement, considering the chronic and deep-rooted problems Rhode Island schools currently face.

But Davis remains unfazed. He is already on the move, peppering educational bureaucrats with his questions and ideas. True to form, he’s getting things done by “stepping up and speaking out.”

As he points out, “If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.”