In the mid 2000s, in the offices of Current TV in San Francisco, a small team makes a satirical animated show called SuperNews. Among them, a production assistant named Dustin McLean. Between two segments, he and his colleagues have a ritual. They watch old music videos from the 1980s, the ones that played on a loop in the early hours of MTV, and they invent replacement lyrics out loud. Not poetic lyrics. Lyrics that flatly describe what is happening on screen. The hero walks down a corridor. A woman looks out of the window. A guy plays guitar on a cliff for no apparent reason.

A corridor joke

These are afternoons of laughter, nothing more. Until the day one of them says, half seriously: someone should record that and put it back on YouTube.

The sentence hangs in the air. McLean takes it at his word.

The first time: Take On Me

The choice of the first target is obvious. Take On Me, by the Norwegian band a-ha, released in 1985, has one of the most iconic videos of the decade: a pencil animation mixed with live action, a hero who steps out of a comic strip to draw a young woman into his drawn world. It is beautiful, it is strange, and it is perfectly absurd when you watch it without the music.

McLean gets a karaoke version of the song on iTunes. He rewrites each line so it matches the image. His wife and two colleagues lend their voices. Where the original chorus launched into Take on me, the new version sings, at the precise moment the hero fights a man armed with a wrench, a resounding Pipe-wrench fight.

The video goes online in October 2008. It passes a million views in a month. The process even has a name: the literal video. The principle is clear. You keep the original image, intact. You change only what the song tells, so that it no longer tells a story of love or heartbreak, but simply the list of what the camera films.

A clip that called for parody

Very quickly, McLean receives dozens of requests a week. Which song would he make literal next? One comes up more than all the others: Total Eclipse of the Heart, by Bonnie Tyler.

You have to remember what that video was to understand why. Released in 1983, directed by Russell Mulcahy on a song written by Jim Steinman, it is a summit of excess. Bonnie Tyler wanders through an English boarding school plunged into darkness. Boys in uniform stare at her, their eyes suddenly lit with a white glow. Doves cross the rooms. Dancers appear. There are cinema fans blowing curtains, fencers, slow motion, and even what many viewers swore were ninjas. The video takes everything at face value, with absolute seriousness. It is precisely that seriousness that made it irresistible to subvert.

McLean, however, does not take it on. The reason is honest: he knows no singer capable of standing up to Bonnie Tyler's voice. So he lets it go. He puts it off. And meanwhile, elsewhere, someone else steps up.

David A. Scott's masterpiece

That someone is called David A. Scott. He is neither in San Francisco nor in Los Angeles, but in Corning, a small town in the north of New York State, where he produces advertising spots. He has already made a few literal videos in the spirit McLean launched. The sixth will be the one.

On 25 May 2009, he posts Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version. The voice is provided by a singer credited under the name Persephone Maewyn. And the text is a little gem of observation. When the camera sweeps the gallery of boarders with luminescent eyes, the song comments, disarming in its accuracy: it had started like Hogwarts, it became Lord of the Flies. Internet users will soon speak of a choir of the damned. Every grandiose image of the 1983 video is brought back to its comic reality by a line that says exactly what you see, and nothing else.

The explosion

What follows reads like a manual of virality before the age of algorithms. Links to the video appear on Entertainment Weekly's site, on Ashton Kutcher's Twitter account, on Perez Hilton's blog. In ten days, the video passes a million views. In three weeks, it crosses two million. It will end up totalling nearly eleven.

Along the way, Bonnie Tyler's song enjoys a second youth. Twenty-six years after its release, it returns to conversations, not for its dramatic power, but for the tender pleasure millions of people take in watching it gently poke fun at itself. The parody did not kill the original. It resurrected it.

A hundred imitators in a year

The most striking thing is not the success of one video, it is what it triggers. The process is so clear, so reproducible, that anyone can seize it. In the two months following the release of Take On Me, ten other users publish their own literal versions. One of the most popular takes Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley and passes two million views. Within a year, a hundred literal videos are counted from around the world, including in other languages.

This is where something deeper than a mere fad plays out. McLean did not just create a funny video. He created a model. A recipe anyone could follow, with their own means, on their own favourite clip. He patented nothing, locked nothing. The form spread because it was free to circulate.

Sony's shadow

That freedom had a limit, though, and it arrived from where you always expect it in these stories: copyright. In 2011, after millions of views, Sony had the Total Eclipse of the Heart video blocked on YouTube worldwide. The image and the song remained the property of their rights holders, and the subversion, however affectionate, rested on material that did not belong to it.

The video survived elsewhere, on Funny Or Die in particular. But the episode says something essential about this form of creation. It never starts from a blank page. It takes an existing object, already loved, already charged with memories, and adds to it a layer of meaning that was not there. Its strength and its fragility hold to the same thing: it needs someone else's work to exist.

What this story says about innovation

Let us take a step back, because this small adventure of web culture resembles, uncannily, many of the industrial adventures I have crossed for thirty years.

The first lesson concerns the origin of the idea. It was not born in a laboratory, nor in a creativity committee, nor at the end of a design thinking workshop. It was born of a corridor joke repeated for pleasure, until someone dared to take it seriously. Many real innovations have that texture. They linger in the state of a joke or a shared irritation before someone takes the tiny, yet decisive, step of acting on it.

The second lesson concerns the material. A literal video only works if the original clip already takes itself terribly seriously. It is the seriousness of Bonnie Tyler wandering through her haunted boarding school that makes the parody irresistible. The right starting material mattered as much as the idea. In innovation, the substrate you work on is never neutral: certain technologies, certain markets, certain products call for reinvention because they carry within them a tension no one has yet named.

The third lesson is the most useful for whoever leads research or development. The one who has the idea is not always the one who reaps its fruits. Dustin McLean invented the form. It was David A. Scott, in Corning, on the very song McLean had given up on, who signed its most watched masterpiece. The idea alone was not enough. It took execution, the right timing, and the right voice, that trivial detail of a singer able to hold the role, which had made the inventor himself step back.

Innovation, in all its aspects, often works this way. It is born of a recombination rather than a creation from nothing. It spreads fast when it takes the form of a simple model others can pick up. And it always ends up colliding with the question of value: who owns it, who can exploit it, where the border passes between the tribute that enriches a work and the use that dispossesses it. Sony deciding the fate of a parody with eleven million views is, in miniature, the debate companies live every day over their patents, their licences and their intellectual property.

For an R&D leadership, the story of the literal video offers a discreet compass. Look for the ideas that sleep in the state of a joke in your teams. Choose grounds that already call for reinvention. Accept that the inventor and the one who succeeds may be two different people, and organise yourselves so as not to let the value slip between the two. And never forget that the most viral creation in the world remains suspended on the right of the one who held the original material.

A corridor joke, an iTunes karaoke version, the voice of a singer found by chance in Corning. It took no more than that to invent a visual grammar we find everywhere today, from reaction videos to the fake honest trailers that populate our screens. The finest innovations often begin with a smile no one had taken seriously.

To go further

  • To watch: the original literal version of Take On Me by Dustin McLean, then that of Total Eclipse of the Heart by David A. Scott. The funniest thing is to rewatch the 1983 clip in all its solemnity first, before switching to the literal version.
  • To read: TIME Magazine's ranking The Top 10 Everything of 2009, which devotes an entry to the literal video of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and the well-documented Know Your Meme page on the history of literal music videos.
  • To follow: the legacy of the process, far more alive than one might think. Every filmed reaction, every edit that corrects a trailer, every video that flatly describes what it shows to reveal its absurdity, descends in a straight line from that boy with the luminescent eyes in Bonnie Tyler's boarding school.