Essentially, they become square-peg companies in a round-hole world and lose relevance. They find themselves locked into a set of solutions that don’t fit the problems they need to solve. They lock themselves into one type of strategy and say, “This is how we innovate.” It works for a while, but eventually it catches up with them. Yet all too often, organizations act as if there is. There is no one “true” path to innovation. In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that every innovation strategy fails eventually, because innovation is, at its core, about solving problems - and there are as many ways to innovate as there are types of problems to solve. Or, what if the company needed to identify a new business model? Or what if - as is the case today - current chip technology is nearing its theoretical limits, and a completely new architecture needs to be dreamed up? In fact, a study analyzing 17.9 million scientific papers found that the most highly cited work tended to be mostly rooted within a traditional field, with just a smidgen of insight taken from some unconventional place.īut what if the task had been simply to make a chip that was 30% more efficient? In that case, a marine biologist dropping clams on the table would have been nothing more than a distraction. Many believe it is just these kinds of unlikely combinations that are key to coming up with breakthroughs. When you have a really tough problem, it often helps to expand skill domains beyond specialists in a single field. That, in essence, is the value of open innovation. “They saved $999,000 and ate the clams for dinner,” the executive told me.
Seeing the confused looks of the chip designers, he explained that clams can detect pollutants at just a few parts per million, and when that happens, they open their shells.Īs it turned out, they didn’t really need a fancy chip to detect pollutants - just a simple one that could alert the system to clams opening their shells.
Another word for running into the same problem crack#
It was an unusually complex problem, so the firm set up a team of crack microchip designers, and they started putting their heads together.Ībout 45 minutes into their first working session, the marine biologist assigned to their team walked in with a bag of clams and set them on the table.
Apparently, his company had won a million-dollar contract to design a sensor that could detect pollutants at very small concentrations underwater. One of the best innovation stories I’ve ever heard came to me from a senior executive at a leading tech firm. And when nothing is well-defined, well, then we’re in the exploratory, pioneering realm of basic research. There are always new problems to solve learn to apply the solution that best fits your current problem. When the reverse is true - skills are well-defined, but the problem is not - we can tap into “disruptive innovation” strategies. In cases like these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains. “Breakthrough innovation” is needed when we run into a well-defined problem that’s just devilishly hard to solve. Well-defined problems that benefit from well-defined skills fall into the category of “sustaining innovation.” Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we’re trying to get better at something we’re already doing.
Leaders identify the right type of strategy to solve the right type of problem, just by asking two questions: How well we can define the problem and how well we can define the skill domain(s) needed to solve it. Just like we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic for the life of an organization, or a single source of financing, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks. Innovation is, at its core, about solving problems - and there are as many ways to innovate as there are different types of problems to solve.