A Missouri Street resident for 31 years, Matt Chanoff describes himself as inquisitive, happy, and optimistic. He trained as an economist at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C., and worked as an investor, consultant, and volunteer, engaging with startups, large corporations, academic institutions, and nonprofits.
He leveraged those skills and experiences to co-author a book with Mark Wegman, Merrick Furst, and Daniel Sabbah, The Heart of Innovation, published this month.
“My co-authors and I are very familiar with books and literature on the subject of innovation and what we’ve seen is that almost all of them are something like gardening books,” he said. “They say innovation requires a nurturing environment, they identify obstacles to innovation the way gardening books talk about weeds and pests. They propose brainstorming methods and suggestion boxes and safe spaces for new ideas. These things are all important, but what these books don’t do is say what innovation is and how to make it.”
Along with Furst, Chanoff spent the last decade engaging with startups at an accelerator they launched at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The pair developed an approach they call Deliberate Innovation, built on principles from Nobel-Prize winning research in behavioral economics, as well as developmental and social psychology, that’s intended to cultivate productive habits and instincts. Entrepreneurs can rely on this approach to identify weaknesses and blind spots as they innovate.
Sabbah, a former chief technology officer at IBM, and Wegman, an IBM fellow and chief scientist of software technology at the firm, provide a large-company perspective. Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, wrote the book’s foreword.
The authors start with definitions: invention means the creation of a new thing; innovation is the formation of a novel thing that becomes part of people’s lives. They describe the way new things are pulled into people’s lives as “authentic demand.”
“People are usually pretty indifferent to new things,” Chanoff said. “For the most part, they already have the tools and the skills to cope with what life throws at them. But when they don’t, when conflicts or challenges arise that they can’t meet, and they start losing a grip on the things that matter to them, then they will not not buy a product or service that bridges the gap.”
Chanoff insists on using the double negative because people and situations are never entirely predictable.
“But if there’s an authentic demand, then a person who doesn’t buy won’t remain indifferent; they’ll feel a conflict, like they violated something,” he said. An example of this is the Bay Bridge. “Like many successful innovations, the bridge wasn’t seen as an exciting, fancy new object, not like the Golden Gate Bridge. And before the 1930s, most people going from Potrero Hill to Oakland or Berkeley would take a ferry without a thought. But now more than a quarter million people use the Bay Bridge every day. Some will take the ferry, or drive all the way around, or even kayak, but for most of them the prospect of not using the bridge would feel problematic. That’s a successful innovation.”
The first half of The Heart of Innovation explores cases where people accidentally found a way to meet an unmet authentic demand or failed to. The second half provides a methodology for understanding potential customers’ unmet authentic demands, and devising products and services that meet them.
“I work with lots of innovators and startup founders and very often they’re stuck,” Chanoff said. “They’re spinning their wheels. Many brand-new founders don’t realize it because they have a lot of activities, a lot of things on their to-do list, but they’re really running in place. What I’d like people to know is that we see you, we see that problem, we understand it, and we’ve written a book to try to help you address it.”
Chanoff has ties to Kenya and Burundi, where he sits on boards of various charities. Those engagements began about 15 years ago when his daughter was in college and befriended a classmate, Kennedy Odede, who came from Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Obede was the first person from Kibera to attend university in the U.S. He started a charity, Shining Hope for Communities, to support education in Kenya, particularly for girls and young women. The aid organization initially offered a tuition-free school for girls, ultimately expanding to open healthcare clinics, distribute clean water, and place youth in jobs and internships. In 2022, Shining Hope for Communities was present in 77 locations around the country and had served more than 1.2 million people.
“I’m privileged to be on their board and I go to Kenya one or two times a year,” he said. “Through Shining Hope for Communities I’ve become involved in other organizations in Kenya and Burundi as well.”
One of those entities is the Tujenge Africa Foundation, which strives to create thriving educational centers to transform youth in post-conflict regions into innovators, leaders, entrepreneurs, and peace agents.
While Chanoff travels far and wide, Potrero Hill, where he lives with his wife, Lisa, is home.
“I love living on the Hill with its nice feeling of community, good weather, and access to the Peninsula and Downtown. If you see me walking my two pit bulls, Lulu, and Charley, come say hi. We’re all very friendly,” he said.
The Heart of Innovation is available at Christopher’s Books.
Mark Steensland 
Jessica Zimmer 
Thomas Hunter II