When it comes to IT spend, the 80/20 rule is everywhere, but nowhere is more important than talking about the ratio of spend devoted to innovation vs. maintenance. Ideally, retailers should be spending 80% of their IT spend, time, and management attention span on innovation, and 20% on maintenance. Of course, the reality is more like the reverse: 80% on maintenance, and 20% on innovation. It’s something that retailers find they can no longer ignore, if they want to keep up with the fast-evolving shopper.

When it comes to conferences, a vendor-run executive conference in retail should follow the same rule of thumb: 80% innovation, and 20% “maintenance ” (things like vendor product roadmap or strategy). If it’s tough for your solution provider to focus on material in that 80/20 ratio – if they find they have to focus more and more on product and less and less on innovation – then that should tell you something important about your solution provider, and their ability to help you innovate.

At this year’s SAP Retail Forum, I found the ratio to be just right – about 80% innovation and 20% on products and solutions. But even better, I found my own inspiration, which finally pieced together three ideas I’ve had floating around in my head. I knew deep down that they all had something to do with each other, I just hadn’t figured out how quite yet. Well, it all came together for me, in the form of one person: Dan Shapiro, the CEO of Glowforge.

Here are the three concepts:

The Maker Movement

This past summer, my then 14-year-old son attended a maker faire at the Denver Nature and Science Museum. He came back over the moon about a local maker space called Denhac. It’s a non-profit organization that brings together like-minded people into a space designed for “making ” – they have high-speed internet access, space on AWS, a couple of 3D printers, a laser engraver, a welder, lathe, workbenches with soldering irons, all kinds of electronic components, etc. etc. They offer weekly classes on things like lock-picking and programming. You can join in for a monthly fee that gives you 24×7 access to the space.

These maker spaces a popping up all over the place. The one thing they have in common is that they are all part high-tech, part recycling, part education, and part let your creativity run wild. There’s a lot of emphasis on learning to use tools of creation – like 3D printers. Thus the “maker ” moniker.

There is something real there – I don’t think this is a fad, like, say, cooking a week’s worth of meals in some industrial kitchen in a strip mall. There is a sense of community, a sense of connecting with skills – a sense that these communities are coming together to make sure that society as a whole is not losing touch with or at least continues to have access to tools of creation as those tools both become increasingly high tech, and more consumer-friendly. You don’t have to be an industrial manufacturer holding enormous assets in order to have access to high-quality 3D printing or laser engraving. And the tools get cheaper every day.

The Gig Economy

At the same time that the maker movement has been on the rise, and I don’t think it matters if it’s coincidental or causally related, there has been a rise of the gig economy. Sure, Uber, Lyft, all that jazz that has led to $1B+ VC-funded unicorns. And sure, there are lots of arguments (and lawsuits) out there over what that means for the individual.

But there’s a whole world out there beyond the extreme of something like Uber. When the tools of creation cost so little, anyone can make a decent living all on their own. There are plenty of stories of Etsy sellers and Amazon marketplace sellers who make a tidy living operating as an individual within the larger market. Yeah sure, you’re not going to retire at 30, but you sure could live a pretty solid middle class life and put your kids through college.

That kind of lifestyle doesn’t have just a retail angle. With Google and Apple app stores, we’ve already demonstrated that you can potentially make a living as an individual developing your own apps. And take that to the retail technology community, and you could potentially make a decent living developing plug-ins and apps that extend everything from Demandware to IBM’s Watson. In fact, there’s a whole platform/marketplace out there (see Iterate.ai) helping developers with ideas actually turn those ideas into solutions – not unicorn-level solutions, but enough to bring them a steady income. Enough to let them live the lifestyle of their choosing.

Stores And Services

And at the same time all of that has been going on, we at RSR have been talking a lot about the future of the store, and how services – not self-service – need to play a greater role in the store, to drive traffic to stores, and to do more to meet customer expectations for when they do actually come to a store.

I’ve been using companies like Petsmart as an example – a company where, like Apple, nearly 50% of the store floor space is devoted to “owner experiences ” rather than selling products. Petsmart defines its customers as “pet parents “, and has identified everything from adoption, training, grooming, boarding, and veterinarian services and beyond as services that can be provided to these pet parents and their pets. That’s half the store, with the other half for actually selling products.

This is a tough sell for most retailers. Many don’t have a strong enough brand value proposition to easily identify services that go along with the products they sell. And almost all retailers do not have enough room in the economics of their stores (or their business overall, for that matter), to just make the kind of radical transformation that is needed to move to more of a services model – not without taking on an extraordinary amount of risk while they’re at it.

Cards Against Humanity

So what does all this have to do with Dan Shapiro of Glowforge and the game Cards Against Humanity? Dan spoke at SAP’s Retail Forum, and when he did, he made an analogy that brought all three of these trends together for me, in a very aha! moment.

If you’re not familiar with Cards Against Humanity, I would caution you – it is definitely the kind of game that will bring out your worst tendencies, and your lowest level of humor. It’s a hilarious game, but not for the easily offended. Maybe not even for the moderately difficult to offend. Players take turn as the “dealer “, which means they pull a trigger/question card (the black cards). Other players select white cards that are possible answers to the question card, anonymously place them as answers, and then the dealer selects the answer they like best. Strategy is part down-hill slide into your worst possible impulses, and part gauging the worst possible impulses of the person selecting their favorite answer. If your answer is selected, you get a point. The first person to a set number of points wins.

Dan’s take on Cards Against Humanity is that it is not actually a card game. Rather, the cards allow you, for the low-low price of $25, to be as funny as a team of 20 very good comedy writers. That team of writers has done 99% of the work of the game – they have come up with answer phrases like “an ether-soaked rag ” or “a lifetime of sadness “, along with question cards like “What does Dick Cheney like? ” or “What are my parents hiding from me? “. The game enables players to do the last 1% of the work, which is coming up with hilarious combinations of questions and answers – all while taking credit for 100% of the work.

Dan took this one step further, saying that this what retail needs to do. In order to adapt to the changing shopper – the drive for “experiences ” rather than “things “, the search for companies of meaning to do business with, and the desire to reconnect with or develop “maker ” skills – retailers need to build a retail experience that is more like Cards Against Humanity and less like rows of shelves with stuff on them. Consumers can get stuff anywhere, these days. They don’t need to go to the store for that kind of experience. But can they get a personalized, custom product they assembled and styled themselves, right there in the store, maybe with a little help from a knowledgeable store associate? That’s a very different kind of store experience.

As retailers search for the future of the store, they would do well to think about these elements:

• The Maker element – how can consumers “make ” it their own?
• The Gig economy – how can you help or support them in their own efforts at a business or lifestyle?
• The Service future of retail – how can you bring these two together in your stores to deliver a superior experience, a unique, hard-to-copy product, and ultimately, a lifetime of loyalty from your customers?

The mantra of the future: how can the retailer do 99% of the work, leave the last 1% to consumers, and then celebrate consumer success as if she did all 100% herself?