Innovating through pain
How to innovate in the middle of pain and crisis?
Pain shows you the problem no one has solved. Look at what hurt you, ask who else suffers from it and test a small solution.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
In a crisis, the natural urge is to shrink, cut everything and wait for it to pass. But many solutions that seem obvious today were born from someone who was in a tight spot and had no way out other than to invent. Pain, when it doesn't paralyze, points to what needs to exist.
What to do now
- Start with the pain, not the idea. Write down precisely what hurts: "the bank won't serve me," "I can't sell without a middleman," "I have no access to credit." A well-described problem is half of innovation.
- Ask who else suffers from it. If you feel it, others do too. Talk to those people. They'll tell you what they tried, what failed and what they would pay to solve it.
- Use what's at hand. A crisis isn't the time for big investments. What cheap or free tools exist today? Artificial intelligence, spreadsheets, social networks, messaging apps. A lot can be built with little.
- Make a minimum version. A prototype, a service done by hand, a test with ten people. The goal is to learn fast while spending little.
- Listen carefully to the "no." When people say it can't be done, ask why. Sometimes the answer shows a real flaw. Sometimes it shows no one has tried it your way.
- Protect the essentials while you innovate. Don't bet the household's food or other people's money. Sustainable innovation is the kind that doesn't wreck your life if it goes wrong.
- Take care of your mind. Innovating in a crisis takes energy. If the suffering is too great, seek support: CVV at 188; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS.
When it happened to Bairo
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez likes to say he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. That happened after his partners pushed him out of a business over an idea for touchscreen technology. That was when he realized, he says, something he had always known deep down: every no is the ground of a yes.
The clearest example came years later. In six months in front of the computer, he built the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness, a niche artificial intelligence to connect those who produce, those who trade and those who buy. He says the banks refused to integrate the solution.
Instead of stopping, he focused on the pieces he could build without waiting for a bank to integrate them: artificial intelligence, financial messaging under the international ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. Building is not the same as operating with the public: for that, each of these fronts has its own rules and authorizations. The banks that didn't want to integrate the idea ended up teaching him to build his own infrastructure.
The path
Innovating through pain is turning "it can't be done" into "then I'll do it another way." Bairo did it so many times that it became a method: every refusal pointed to a road no one was taking. Your pain today may be the map of the problem that you, better than anyone, know how to solve.
Don't confuse innovating with doing something huge. Most innovations start as a small adjustment to a process everyone accepted as it was. A simpler way to deliver, to charge, to serve. If you're going through pain, you're in a privileged position to see that adjustment. Write the idea down today, before routine erases it.