5 Mythical Beasts for Innovation

Lee-Sean Huang / ls@foossa.com / @leesean
Innovation Spirit Animals
How 5 Mythical Beasts Can Help You
Tackle Real-World Challenges
FOOSSA

Meet ﬁve spirit animals from Foossa’s
innovation menagerie
FOOSSA
Ouroboros Chimera Kitsune Hydra Trojan
Horse

More than just mascots, each mythical creature
embodies a mindset and a methodology for solving
social and business challenges.
Together they enhance our strategic toolkit for creative
action. Let’s learn more about these spirit animals:
FOOSSA

The Ouroboros is a snake or
dragon eating its own tail. It
symbolizes the circle of life and
the cycle of time.
The mythical Phoenix, reborn in
its own ashes, is an analogous
spirit animal.
FOOSSA
1. Ouroboros

Ouroboros teaches us to revive,
revise, and recontextualize old
concepts and wisdom.
Innovation in ﬁelds like agriculture
and medicine will require us to
reawaken ancient practices along
with developing new methods and
technologies.
For example, scientists have
recently discovered that an ancient
Anglo-Saxon potion can kill a
contemporary superbug.
FOOSSA

Ouroboros reminds us to look
backwards as we can move forward
with innovation. It explains why the
same classic stories get told over and
over again with new embellishments.
Ouroboros is the impulse behind
retro music and fashion. As the Cylon
Number 6 said in Battlestar Galactica,
“This has all happened before and it
will happen again.”
FOOSSA

Ouroboros In Action
While designing Happy Mango,
a new kind of alternative credit
rating service, we incorporated
social references in the
process of determining a user’s
credit worthiness.
In other words, friends or
colleagues of credit applicants
vouch for their trustworthiness
through the Happy Mango
platform.
FOOSSA

This kind of social reference for determining credit
worthiness is not a new concept. In fact, it comes from a
previous era where small local banks banks were the
norm, long before we had FICO scores or online banking
platforms.
Lenders would consider personal character references
from prospective borrowers to help determine their credit
worthiness.
We have taken old practices and brought them back in a
new digital context.
FOOSSA
Ouroboros In Action

Lee-Sean Huang / ls@foossa.com / @leeseanFOOSSA
Learn more about historical perspectives in my
keynote at the Impacto Conference: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF7nsDwM4NM

A Chimera is a hybrid beast
with parts from multiple
animals. Chimera combines
and remixes disparate
elements. It echoes what
Steve Jobs said in a 1996
Wired Magazine interview:
“Creativity is just connecting
things.”
FOOSSA
2. Chimera

Chimera is the spirit animal of the cronut, the spork,
the skort and the Swiss Army Knife.
FOOSSA

One of my favorite comfort foods, Japanese
curry, is a Japanese interpretation of the
British navy’s version of Indian “curry.”
It is a culinary chimera serving up multiple
cultural inﬂuences on a single plate.
FOOSSA

Chimera is also an act of curation.
It is what makes a collection of
things and a team of people
greater than the sum of their parts.
FOOSSA

Chimera works at the scale of cronuts as well
as at the scale of countries.
Nation-builders like Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew and
Japan’s leaders during the Meiji Restoration embraced
the spirit of Chimera as they built their own modern
state institutions based on models drawn from various
other countries.
FOOSSA

Nation-builders like Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew and
Japan’s leaders during the Meiji Restoration embraced
the spirit of Chimera as they built their own modern
state institutions based on models drawn from various
other countries.

In Japanese folklore, Kitsune
(“Fox”) is a trickster figure, a
transgressor, and a misfit.
Kitsune is a shapeshifter,
changing from fox to human
female form and back again,
transgressing fixed ideas of
gender and species.
3. Kitsune

Misﬁts like Kitsune bend and
break norms. This is the source
of their charisma and power.
Kitsune teaches us that
breakthrough art and innovation
require us to know the rules;
break the rules; and then make
new rules.
Kitsune is the spirit animal of
outliers and disruptors. Apple’s
“Think Diﬀerent” campaign was
full of Kitsune spirit.

Kitsune is a rebel with a tune.
Some of the greatest musical
innovations emerged from
misfits and marginalized
peoples: jazz, hip hop,
flamenco, house. The list
goes on and on.
The vibrancy of rock, punk
and grunge comes from their
misfit edge.

Related Reading
Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya
Philips have written a book
called The Misfit Economy,
in which they examine
various sub-archetypes of
misfits and explore lessons
that these misfits can teach
conventional organizations
and entrepreneurs.

The Hydra is a many-headed
aquatic monster from Greek
mythology. If one of its heads
gets cut oﬀ, two more grow
back in its place.
4. Hydra

Hydra is the genius of
decentralized and strategically
redundant networks. It is the
resilience of the hive mind.
Hydra-like groups have the
ability to multiply, regenerate,
and mutate rapidly.
Hydra is the logic of open
source systems. More heads
are better than one. It is the
peer-to-peer logic that powers
Bitcoin and BitTorrent.

This ability to multiply and
regenerate is what allows the
Pirate Bay and other torrent
sites to spring up again soon
after they are shut down.
Hydra is also the evil genius
behind terrorist organizations
made up of independent
cells that wreak death and
destruction across
geographies.

On the side of good, we have The Awesome
Foundation. It is very much a Hydra organization
as well.
It is made up of nearly 50 independent chapters
united under a shared identity and a simple set of
common principles.
We forward the cause of awesome in the universe
through $1000 (or local equivalent) monthly
microgrants to projects related to the arts,
education, media, or community engagement.

The Awesome Foundation started with a few friends in
Boston, and with its decentralized Hydra structure, has
spread quickly into a worldwide movement.

Related Reading
Hydra in our terminology is
analogous to Brafman and
Bekstrom’s starﬁsh in their
book about the power of
leaderless organizations.

As the story goes, Trojan
Horse was a ruse that allowed
the Greek army to sneak into
the city of Troy. In the context
of innovation, we can think of
the Trojan Horse as a way for
getting a foothold somewhere
and using that foothold to
gain a favorable strategic
position.
5. Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse is a kind of
gateway drug. It gets you in
the door.
At its worst, Trojan Horse is a
crude bait-and-switch con job.
At it’s best though, it’s all
about patient, sly seduction.
It’s a progressive reveal rather
than a sudden ambush.

As design and strategy consultants, we often tap into
the power of the Trojan Horse.
Clients will hire us for something like a visual
rebranding or a website design, but then we realize
we need to work with them to solve a much bigger
problem or a diﬀerent one altogether.
The initial project is our Trojan Horse, it starts the
relationship, it gets us in the door, but once we are
in, we sometimes need to adjust the scope of a
project in order to best be of service.

In a recent Tech Republic
article, Tony Bradley discusses
“Microsoft’s Trojan Horse
Strategy to Rule the World.”
No longer able to maintain an
operating system near-
monopoly in today’s
environment, the strategy is to
get Microsoft applications on
rival platforms as a way to
maintain its market dominance.

For Amazon, the Trojan Horse
was books. Amazon started up
as an online bookseller, and
from there they built
themselves up into “The
Everything Store.”
Books were just the starting
point to build the Amazon
brand and supply chain,
preparing the way for the
company to expand into more
and more product categories.

What is Medium’s Trojan Horse strategy?
They started as a platform for medium to
long-form prose. With the recent interface
design updates, users can now publish
Medium stories from the mobile app, and the
aﬀordances have changed to accommodate
shorter-form content as well.
This makes Medium feel more like a social
network. Will it go head to head with Twitter
and Facebook? What sort of Chimera will
Medium become?

How would you integrate these 5
spirit animals into your practice?
Do you have your own innovation
spirit animals?
Let me know at ls@foossa.com.
@leeseanFOOSSA

5 Mythical Beasts for Innovation

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