I also enjoyed this Wall Street Journal article about innovation and Thinking Inside the Box.
How could business leaders rate innovation as so important yet feel so dissatisfied with their own organizations’ performance? Because what they really want to know is how: How do you actually generate novel ideas and do so consistently, on demand?
The article goes on to provide five suggestions for taking a different approach to innovation by taking an existing idea and doing things like removing essential elements, combining unrelated tasks, and so on. Less ‘pie-in-the-sky’ thinking.
They provide good real world examples of each. One such, under the combining unrelated tasks, was the online security measure where you have to type in the letters of a fuzzy image to prove you’re not a computer.
The unrelated task is that those images are old texts that haven’t been converted to digital format yet. So, as we all verify that we’re not computers trying to buy tickets to our favorite sporting events, we’re also helping someone digitize an old book.
Even though I found their examples interesting, I’m still skeptical that their recommendations would improve effectiveness in producing innovation on-demand.
I think there’s 20/20 hindsight bias in their observations. They key in on the innovations that work, but don’ts consider the innovations that used the same approaches and didn’t work.
What “works” isn’t obvious. Even the people who eventually get the most out of an innovation would never had guessed that they would find that value prop useful prior to its existence. The Sony Walkman is a good example:
Even Akio Morita, Sony’s chairman and the inventor of the Walkman, was surprised by the market’s enthusiastic response.
Here are the suggestions for innovation that I’d add to the authors':
Try stuff in the real market, even on a small-scale. It doesn’t have to be perfect or refined to the level of your other products to find out if you have something. The things that I’ve worked on that have worked were not pretty in their initial stages, but they still ‘moved some numbers’ and refining them didn’t seem to improve the effectiveness.
Don’t let your biases get in the way of trying something. Let the market test it.
I’ve seen too many things that are actually working get canned because someone with political clout didn’t like it. They didn’t like it because it wasn’t their idea. Or, they didn’t feel it ‘fit with the brand’, though customers did. Or, they simply relied on poor business analysis that focused on a negative trade-off and ignored the positives.
When people have ideas, encourage them to put their money where there mouths are to try to prove it out. Reward them handsomely if it works. Encourage them to try again if it doesn’t. Understand, failure is likely and not a sign of incompetence. Good baseball players strike out much more often than they hit home runs.
Alos, read Nassim Taleb’s trilogy: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragility. Then read F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit. And, finally, read Russ Roberts’, The Price of Everything.
After reading these, you may see the world differently. Innovation is not a planning process, it’s a discovery process.