Editor's Note:
We are still building on the strand of thought that nature of innovation and
ideas generation is collaborative.
In the article, Where Original Ideas Come From, Greg
Satell made the point on the nature of and result of communal effort in the
emergence of scientific revolution. Additionally, he links scientific
revolution with the unstated fact of access to learnings and mastery of fellow
workers of knowledge. Newton stood on the shoulder of giants because he
learned what his predecessors and peers had discovered. If you have not yet read that post, please
pause and read it.
Now Rowan Gibson while
writing to a corporate audience alludes to the same fact: Einstein stood on the
on the shoulder of giants.
To answer these questions, we first
have to understand how big ideas are actually built. For a start, most people
don’t even associate the notion of a building process with idea generation.
Indeed, many senior executives still believe that ideas simply come to us out
of nowhere in a sudden flash of inspiration. So the essential first step is to
clarify how the creative process works. What is missing in most large companies
is a theory of innovation that translates into a practical methodology
for producing big ideas.
For well over a hundred years,
academics from fields such as psychology, anthropology and neuroscience, as
well as creative practitioners from the world of advertising, along with
notable management scholars, have been studying how the human mind produces
breakthroughs. Indeed, there is a substantial body of work on creativity that
is readily available to business people. But the reality is that few corporate
leaders and managers have given it much attention, preferring instead to focus
on improving operational efficiency inside their organizations while hoping
that – by some lucky accident – one of their people will have a Eureka moment
while walking the dog.
What we now know quite conclusively
is that creative ideas don’t just occur to us spontaneously from one moment to
the next, although that might often appear to be the case. Our minds actually
build them from a unique chain of associations and connections, sometimes over
a considerable period of time. When we examine the creative process in more
detail, we discover that breakthrough thinking is usually built on an
illuminating insight (or a series of insights) into a situation or a problem
that inspires an unexpected leap (or leaps) of association in the mind,
resulting in a completely novel configuration of previously existing ideas.
This fresh combination of thoughts, in which various, perhaps unrelated
concepts and domains click together in a whole new relationship, is what
suddenly manifests itself as a big idea or creative solution. That’s the famous
Eureka moment when a light bulb seems to switch on in our heads.
How Einstein reinvented physics
When Albert Einstein came up with
his revolutionary theory of special relativity, and shortly afterward with E =
mc2, it didn’t just come to him out of the blue while he was sitting at his
desk staring idly out of the window. By his own account, he had been thinking
about it for at least seven years, starting during his diploma course at the
Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich, where he studied mathematics and physics.
At the turn of the twentieth century, when Einstein graduated, the great
conundrum of physics was the apparent incompatibility between Newtonian laws of
mechanics on the one hand and the new science of electromagnetism on the other,
because it turned out that light did not behave as those classical laws
predicted. This was the seemingly unsolvable puzzle that the young graduate
Albert Einstein ambitiously determined he would try to solve.
Over the following seven years or
so, he studied the work of his predecessors and peers—from Isaac Newton to
James Clerk Maxwell, David Hume, Ernst Mach, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré,
and Max Planck—either building on or refuting their ideas. He explored radical
new concepts through his famous thought experiments, like riding across the
universe on a light beam, or being in an elevator in free fall. The answer
finally revealed itself when Einstein came to an illuminating insight that
fundamentally shifted his perspective. He did this by challenging conventional
assumptions about time and space, and asking some radical new questions about
physics that few had ever dared ask before: What if Newton’s laws of mechanics
are not as fixed as everyone has believed for centuries? What if time and space
are not absolute? What if they are variable and the only universal constant is
in fact the speed of light? (In my new book “The Four Lenses of Innovation,”
this innovation perspective – or lens – is called “Challenging
Orthodoxies.”).
Once this key insight opened
Einstein’s eyes to see the solution to the problem, he was able to get to work
immediately on the mathematical details, and in just five weeks he produced
what is arguably the greatest scientific paper of the twentieth century: “On
the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” What this story illustrates is that big
ideas need more than a moment. There is a definite thinking process involved in
constructing a breakthrough, and the stepping stone to a radical new idea is
invariably a powerful new insight.
It’s all about the insights
Does this mean that coming up with a
breakthrough is always going to require many years of hard work? Not at all.
Sometimes a big idea can occur to us in a few minutes. But the constant factor
in building a big idea is an insight (or a series of insights) that
fundamentally shifts our perspective.
What gave Steve Jobs the idea back
in 2005 that Apple should develop and launch its own smartphone? It came
from an insight into tech trends that had the potential to render the iPod
obsolete. Jobs reasoned that if mobile phone companies could turn their devices
into easy-to-use music players (which was not hard to do), then the iPod would
no longer have a reason to exist. Having watched the cell phone replace digital
cameras, alarm clocks, personal digital assistants, and other dedicated
devices, it seemed only a matter of time before the iPod would go the same way.
Why would anyone want to carry around two devices when they could combine both
functions in one? (This is an example of using the second lens of innovation – “Harnessing Trends”).
The idea for a bagless vacuum
cleaner didn’t just pop unexpectedly into James Dyson’s head while he was
taking a shower. He was already thinking about how this product category might
be improved when he happened to visit a local sawmill and noticed large
centripetal separators (or industrial cyclones) removing sawdust from the air.
Dyson’s insight was that this was a much more efficient way to collect dirt and
dust than a vacuum bag (because the appliance loses suction power as the bag
fills up). His big idea was to try to scale down an industrial cyclone and
install it on a domestic vacuum cleaner. (This illustrates another of the four
lenses of innovation – “Leveraging resources in
new ways”).
Gary and Diane Heavin, founders of
the global Curves franchise, didn’t simply wake up one day and say, “Hey, why
don’t we open a women-only fitness club?” The idea came to them after
recognizing a glaring problem with traditional gyms. They noticed that many
women were feeling intimidated or embarrassed in these male-dominated
environments and this insight – based on empathy – led them to ask if there was
a way to better cater to women’s requirements. (This is the fourth lens of
innovation – “Understanding Needs”).
What we conclude from this is that
insights are the triggers for innovative thinking – they are the stepping
stones that lead to radical new solutions. Just as a large, flat stone (or a
series of stones) allows us to cross easily from one side of a stream to
another, insights allow us to make the necessary leaps of association that
build big ideas.
Improving your capacity for radical innovation
Now that we understand insights as
the raw material out of which big ideas are built, we can begin to discuss a
practical methodology for improving our capacity to innovate.
What companies need to understand is
that you can’t produce big, breakthrough ideas unless you first generate the
right kinds of insights. It’s like a farmer hoping to reap a bountiful harvest
without first sowing the right seeds. We need to understand that the output is
dependent on the input. Investing time, money, and effort in innovation without
first building a rich portfolio of insights is mostly a fruitless exercise.
People are being asked to make giant
leaps in creative thinking but without the intellectual stepping stones they
need to get them from here to there. Their companies expect to get out-of-the-box
ideas without developing the fresh and inspiring perspectives that can help
people see out of the box in the first place.
What most large organizations are
missing is a systematic methodology and an organized process for generating,
capturing, sharing, and using powerful insights at the very front end of their
innovation efforts. They may well invest time and money in acquiring insights
of some sort, but are they the right kinds of insights for disrupting the rules
of the game?
Do
these insights challenge convention and stretch people’s thinking along new
lines, or do they merely restate the obvious? Do they uncover the deeper
implications and unexploited opportunities inherent in emergent
discontinuities? Do they cast light on trends that competitors have either
overlooked or ignored? Do they point to completely new ways of leveraging the
company’s skills and assets, or other resources that exist outside the
organization? Do they offer profoundly new perspectives on customer needs,
provoking breakthrough solutions for transforming the customer experience?
These are the kinds of insights companies should
be actively accumulating and then using to fuel the front end of their
innovation process. The only way to produce ideas radical enough to drive
dramatic growth, open up unexploited market spaces, and disrupt existing
industry business models is by first generating the high-quality raw
material—the powerful insights—that can serve to trigger those ideas. And the
great news is that your company can now deliberately and systematically
discover such insights using The Four Lenses methodology described in my
new book.
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