The long jump to radical innovation

In a previous episode I talked about how innovation can mean literally 7 different things. Today I’m focusing on radical innovation, what the authors of today’s study call the “long jump” to finding new value in uncharted technological terrain.

So this paper looked at what they called “outlier patents” filed around the world, and they’re using outlier here to mean patents that broke new ground in a technical space that didn’t previously contain patents. Basically an “outlier patent” is a proxy for leaps in innovation that provided them a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to dig into.

What they found is, there were three ways of working that produced these leaps of innovation. These three are not mutually exclusive, they can overlap, but they are distinct practices we can learn from.

First is what they called “long search paths.” This is where someone has an atypical path through a bunch of disparate knowledge, seemingly produces very little, and then suddenly produces what looks like a big leap forward. In actuality, behind the scenes, they were following a twisty path all the way there, but it wasn’t visible to anyone else… at least partly because a lot of it was failures.

The second is what they called “scientific reasoning.” This one is pretty straightforward, it’s pulling solutions from an analogous problem space into a new space.

The last one is “distant recombination,” also straightforward, where you bring expertise from two or more different areas together to produce something new.

Fairly interesting, but what does this mean for those of us working in industry trying to make change in the world around us? Well, there are some specific takeaways outlined in this paper that I think we can apply more broadly.

First: If you get a result that looks like a mistake, or seems different than what you expected, look deeper. An example from my world: If your product usage numbers are lower than expected, maybe it’s not a problem with the marketing or the discoverability of a feature. Look closer and you might find an unexpected and highly valuable answer to a question you didn’t think to ask. And if you or your team don’t have time to dig deeper, give the problem to a new-in-field employee because they won’t have biases that might prevent them from seeing the unexpected.

Second, use insights and inspiration that the rest of your industry is not. If you look at the same places you’ll find the same things, so broaden your horizons. Look at analogous industries, look at previous experiences people on your teams have had in unrelated fields, and look at academic research. The number of times I’ve watched teams painstakingly reinvent something that academia or another industry had already figured out 10+ years ago is mind-boggling.

Finally, as a leader, embrace diverse team composition. I can tell you from experience that it’s much harder to effectively run a team of people who are different from each other, but if you can create the conditions that give a diverse team the space to spark and challenge ideas together, and then not dictate the results you’re expecting, you’re increasing the probability of breakthrough innovation.

On a personal note, I found this paper gratifying to read. I went from hard science to arts journalism to entrepreneurship to enterprise tech and AI, so I know that it’s not easy to have different experience from the people around you. But people who are different might be the best bet any field has for leaps in innovation, and as the paper clearly shows: radical innovation can take a long time behind the scenes before it comes to fruition. Thanks for listening.

Source: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/orsc.2019.1328