The sound of innovation

If you are a musician who has shared recordings on the Web, you probably know about SoundCloud – the audio answer to visual social media sites such as Flickr or Vimeo. The service enables users to share audio with the added visual feature of waveforms. These physical images of a sound file provide listeners a map of the track and allow them to insert comments at any point.

SoundCloud’s founders, CEO Alexander Ljung and CTO Eric Wahlforss, met in a computer lab while studying at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2006. After forming their company in 2008 they relocated to Berlin, a city where – like their own digital music platform – the barriers between art and technology are often indistinguishable.

What brought the two of you together?

AL: The reason we started talking is that we actually heard about each other through mutual friends, they were saying, ‘You ought to meet this guy’. We finally met in a computer lab, where we both had Mac laptops and spotted each other. We were trying to do the same thing – which was to get the school’s calendar feed to play nicely with iCalendar … which we kind of bonded around.

As innovators, how did you draw on your experience at KTH?

AL: One thing I appreciated was that in most of the courses I think there was actually quite a lot of freedom in how to interpret things once you wanted to go beyond the scope of what the course was about.

Eric and I both have been people who start these projects that have usually a slightly ambitious scope. In every course where we were working together, we looked at the requirements and came up with some larger project around it and tried to shoehorn that into whatever was needed from the course.

In one course, the project was to explore different ways of doing user testing. One of the ways was to go to someone’s house and test something with them. But our approach was, first, we invented a new product which was for remote couples to stay in touch with each other through audio. Then we built a prototype – a physical thing; got it to work; created a product identity around it and an experience around it; and then installed it in a test couple’s home for a week so we could run our tests. We saw it as an opportunity to learn something new; but it was more exciting to us to do the whole thing – to create something ourselves and then make use of the test on the thing we were creating rather than just take some website that’s already out there. We both have that slightly delusional aspiration around any project we would do.

You can easily imagine people in other schools saying you have to go by the book. But I think people at KTH were very tolerant and helpful with our creative plans and our going a bit outside of the scope.

You have said that Berlin provided the right mix of technology and art for your company. Do you see technology innovation as being a mix of disciplines?

EW: Alex and I were in Silicon Valley for three months researching and meeting people, and we felt it was an extremely inspiring, interesting place in many ways.

But when you have a big cluster like that, where you sit down in a café and everyone around you is doing a start-up, there is a lack of cross pollination. We are a tech company, but we draw a lot of our energy from the audio world, in terms of music, radio and podcast creators. So we need to be situated in and understand that world.

In cities like Berlin or New York you have that cross pollination, and for me I draw a lot of my energy and inspiration from that. And it goes both ways  - you see ways where you could apply a certain type of thinking or technology to a world that traditionally hasn’t used technology to do certain things.

One of the things that’s fascinating about SoundCloud is the visual aspect of it. How did that come about?

AL: We did that in the beginning because of this idea of sharing feedback, so it was practical – you needed the waveform to place the comments where they made sense. But we ended up creating something that was even more powerful: it turned sound into a visual representation that can work around the web. People can see that here is some kind of sound and here is how I can interact with it. Plus there’s the benefit of when you see a sound with a lot of comments you kind of know there‘s an interesting social pull – a lot of people have been here and are talking about it. It wouldn’t be very honest if I said we thought of all of that at the beginning. We were just trying to find a way to say, ‘here the bass is too loud’ or ‘here you should cut out the drums’.

Would you say that innovation is also a result of the way users interact with your product?

AL: Yep, that’s part of it – but there has to be judgement and emphasis happening from somebody creating something. Sometimes people confuse having users help you with innovation with you putting up a blank paper and then people innovate for you. But there has to be an idea, a direction. You have to make an assumption and put it out where users can help you discover more things around that and maybe better ways of using it. In our case we didn’t understand the full implications of how SoundCloud could be used and it turned out to be more powerful than we thought; but there were a lot of judgement calls made. We believed it would be powerful to have a visual representation of sound and it would be powerful to have a way to say something about the sound at any point. A creator has to be bold and make a statement.

What are the ingredients of innovation?

AL: A big part of it is to get beyond the fear of failure, which is the biggest killer of innovation. You need a balance between not being afraid of failure, while desperately wanting to avoid it. That’s the core psychological mindset you need.

Practically it’s about making sure you have the combination of rational reflection combined with exploration and conflict and discussion. Other than that, I think a lot of innovation comes from just a curiosity about many different areas and being able to tie those things together.

How do you view the role of technical institutions like KTH in innovation?

EW: School is a very social experience, and for me it’s about creating that interesting social context and finding a few people who can inspire you. My first weeks at KTH were spent recovering from pneumonia. When I returned to class I had to prepare for my first big math test and I hadn’t studied math for a few years. So, I got this private tutor, a retired teacher, provided by KTH for students who are behind or having difficulties. He taught me not only about math but the history of math and gave a lot of context about why math can be incredibly useful and fun, and he motivated me in his special way - talking about things like the mathematicians. That was one of my favorite experiences at KTH. It was amazing.

By nature those kinds of relationships are hard to scale up because they are special, one-on-one or small group relationships. But universities should encourage more of that. One of the reasons I am still motivated is because I can keep these small contexts, having one-on-one meetings or small group meetings with people who are really good at what they do and inspire me. If universities could recreate that environment, just moving 10 percent of the time from the big classroom situation to do more of that, I think that is the future of learning.

Given the IT infrastructure in Sweden and the general literacy of young people when it comes to the internet and related technologies, we ought to be able to do that and stay at the forefront.

David Callahan