Innovation Engine Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Inside

  IMAGINATION

  KNOWLEDGE

  ATTITUDE

  Outside

  HABITAT

  RESOURCES

  CULTURE

  Inside Out and Outside In

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY TINA SEELIG

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  As children, we naturally engage our curiosity and imagination in an attempt to make sense of the complicated world around us. We experiment with everything in our midst, grabbing objects to see how they feel, dropping them to see how far they fall, and banging them to see how they sound. We mix together random cooking ingredients to see how they taste, make up games with ever-changing rules, and fantasize about what it would be like to live in outer space.

  As we approach adulthood, however, we too often forget how to be creative. We give up playing and focus on producing, swapping imagination for implementation.

  The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way.

  The human brain evolved over millions of years into a fabulously complex organ that is optimized for innovation. With input from all our senses, it is always assessing our ever-changing environment and generating fresh responses to fit each situation. Each stimulus, no matter how small, can jump-start creativity.

  Let me demonstrate this with a single word.

  Until recently, prospective students at All Souls College, at the University of Oxford, took a one-word exam. The Essay—as it was called—was eagerly anticipated by applicants. They would each flip over a piece of paper at the same time to reveal one word. It might have been “innocence” or “miracles” or “water.” Their challenge was to craft an essay in three hours inspired by that single word.

  There were no right answers to this exam. However, each response provided insights into the applicant’s wealth of knowledge and ability to generate creative connections. The New York Times quotes one Oxford professor as saying, “The unveiling of the word was once an event of such excitement that even non-applicants reportedly gathered outside the college each year, waiting for news to waft out.”1

  For so many of us, this type of creativity hasn’t been fostered. We don’t see our entire environment as a source of opportunities for ingenuity. Yet, creativity should be an imperative, and we should look at everything around us for inspiration. Creativity allows us to thrive in a changing world and unlocks a universe of possibilities. As the renowned American inventor Alan Kay famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” We are all inventors of our own future. And creativity is at the heart of invention.

  For centuries people have questioned these natural talents and looked outside themselves for a source of creative inspiration. The ancient Greeks believed there were goddesses, called Muses, who inspired literature and art, and they worshipped them for their powers.2 Later, in Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare invoked his muse when writing sonnets, often beseeching her for help.3 Ideas often feel inspired and, therefore, it made sense to beg a muse for inspiration.

  Your creativity is, in fact, an endless renewable resource, and you can tap it at any time.

  After a dozen years teaching courses on creativity and entrepreneurship in the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, I can confidently assert that creativity can be enhanced. A concrete set of methods and environmental factors can be used to intensify your imagination, and by optimizing these variables, your creativity naturally increases. I call this collection of factors the Innovation Engine.

  The Innovation Engine, shown in the following figure, illustrates how creativity results from the interplay between your internal world and the external environment. It reveals a set of techniques you can use right away to evaluate and expand your creativity and that of your team, organization, or community. Using these techniques, you can improve your ability to see opportunities around you and creatively tackle challenges of all sizes.

  The Innovation Engine has two parts—the inside and the outside—braided together. On the inside are imagination, knowledge, and attitude:

  • Your imagination is the catalyst for the transformation of knowledge into new ideas.

  • Your attitude is the spark that sets the Innovation Engine in motion.

  • Your knowledge is the toolbox for your imagination.

  The three parts on the outside are habitat, resources, and culture:

  • Resources are all the assets in your community.

  • Habitat includes the rules, rewards, physical spaces, and people in your environment.

  • Culture is the collective beliefs, values, and behaviors in your community.

  All these factors fit together and profoundly influence one another. Like creativity, at first glance this model might look complex. Over the course of this book, I will take apart the Innovation Engine and examine its six components more closely. Then, I’ll put it back together and show how all the parts work in concert and influence one another to enhance creativity.

  There is a common theme: creativity is not just something you think about; it is something you do. In the following chapters, you will learn how to jump-start your Innovation Engine and see how every word, every object, every idea, and every moment provides an opportunity for creativity.

  Inside

  CHAPTER ONE

  IMAGINATION

  What is the sum of five plus five?

  What two numbers add up to ten?

  The first question has only one right answer, but the second question has an infinite number of solutions, including negative numbers, decimals, and fractions. To me, this is remarkable! It led to the profound insight that each question we ask is the frame into which the answers will fall. As you can see, by changing the question you ask, you dramatically change the range of possible solutions.

  Mastering the ability to reframe problems is an important tool for increasing your imagination, because it unlocks a vast array of solutions. Taking photos provides a good example. When taking a picture on the shore of a lake, you might use a wide-angle lens to capture the entire scene, photograph the trees close to the shore, or focus extremely close on a single wildflower or a ladybug on that flower. By just shifting your field of view up or down, or panning left or right, you completely change the image. Of course, if you walk to the other side of the lake, climb to the top of a nearby peak, or take a boat out onto the water, you shift the frame further.

  In most cases, we don’t even consider the frames we use—we assume we are looking at the world with the proper set of lenses. However, being able to question and shift our frames of reference are important to enhancing our imagination, because doing so reveals completely different insights.

  Consider the fact that before 1543 people believed the sun and all the planets revolved around the earth. To all those who looked to the sky it seemed obvious that the earth was the center of the universe. But in 1543, Copernicus proposed that the sun was actually at the center of the solar system. This was a radical change in perspective—or frame—and resulted in what we now call the Copernican Revolution. This shift in point of view, in which the earth is seen as but one of many planets circling the sun, dramatically altered the way individuals thought about the universe and their individual roles within it. It opened up the world of astronomy and provided a new platform for inquiry.

  This type of thinking can be applied to any industry anywhere in the world. For example, the directors of Tesco, a food-marketing business in South Korea, set a goal to increase the company’s market share substantially, and they needed to find a creative way to do so. They realized that
the lives of their customers were so busy it was actually quite stressful for them to find the time to go shopping. So, instead of bringing more customers to Tesco’s stores, the directors decided to bring their store to more customers! They completely reframed the shopping experience by taking photos of the food aisles and putting up full-size images in city subway stations. People could shop while they waited for a train, using their smartphones to take and send photos of an item’s QR code and paying by credit card. The items were then delivered to them at home. This new approach to shopping boosted Tesco’s sales significantly.4

  One of my favorite ways to practice reframing is to examine jokes. Most are funny because the frame of the story changes when we least expect it. In this example you will see that the frame shifts in the last line:

  Two men are playing golf on a lovely day. As the first man is about to tee off, a funeral procession goes by in the cemetery next door. He stops, takes off his hat, and bows his head. The second man says, “Wow, you are incredibly thoughtful.” The first man says, “It’s the least I could do. She and I were married for twenty-five years.”

  Another way to increase your imagination is to practice connecting and combining dissimilar ideas and objects. Alan Murray, head of the School of Design at the Edinburgh College of Art, gave his former graduate students at the Eindhoven University of Technology a surprising assignment to help them hone these skills. He challenged them to invent a “sextron.” He told them they needed to combine two different household devices, such as a coffee machine and a blow-dryer or a telephone and an electric toothbrush, to create something new, and it had to function as a sex toy. They then had to design a formal user’s manual for the new device.

  This was certainly an edgy project! His goal was to inspire these students in ways they had never imagined. Not only did they have a wild time taking on this provocative assignment, but they also learned that by connecting devices that had never been connected before, they could come up with surprisingly innovative products that stimulated both the mind and the body, from ears to toes, in unusual ways.

  On a recent trip to Japan, I asked those who were going to attend my lecture to do a similar advance assignment. They were required to pick two unrelated household objects, such as a flower vase and a shoe, and figure out a way to combine them to create something novel and valuable. The results came in several different flavors. Some were alternative, unintended uses for the objects. Others were an enhancement of the functionality of the original objects.

  The unintended-use solutions from the audience included attaching an inverted baseball cap to the wall with thumbtacks to form a small basketball hoop, making an earring stand out of an eggcup and a sponge, and using lipstick and nail polish to paint pictures.

  Many of the creations that enhanced the functionality of existing objects involved clocks. For example, one person combined an alarm clock with vocabulary flash cards. In the morning, when the alarm went off, you needed to get a certain number of words correct in a flash quiz in order to turn off the alarm. Another person combined a clock with a room fragrance spray such that the clock released different scents at different times of the day—morning scents were energizing, and evening scents were relaxing.

  On a different scale, this type of cross-pollination takes place in our communities as ideas are randomly rearranged from many cultural sources. This concept was explored in depth by AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. She has done extensive work in communities that are primed for innovation and has studied the critical factors at play in determining whether a city will be a hub of creativity. Her book Regional Advantage looks at the factors that contribute to the high levels of innovation and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Essentially, Silicon Valley innovation is robust because of the extensive cross-pollination of ideas between individuals and companies.5

  A great way to experiment with connections on a day-to-day basis is to use metaphors and analogies. By comparing one thing with another, you uncover fascinating parallels that open up a world of new ideas. In a 2011 study at Stanford, Lera Boroditsky and Paul Thibodeau demonstrated that people get quite different sets of solutions depending on which metaphors they use to describe urban crime. If crime is described as a “virus,” then the solutions are predominantly shaped around social reforms, such as changing laws. However, if crime is described as a “monster” in the community, then the solutions focus on dealing with the individuals involved. You can use a range of different metaphors to unlock a wider array of solutions for a problem.6

  Another important skill for increasing your imagination involves pushing beyond the first right answer to the problems you are trying to solve. The first answers to any problem are probably not the most innovative. Unfortunately, most people are satisfied with the first solution they find, missing the opportunity to come up with innovative approaches, which require more effort to discover.

  There are many tools for generating unconventional ideas that will push the limits of your imagination. My favorite is brainstorming. Done well, brainstorming enables you to get past the first set of ideas pretty quickly and on to those that are much less obvious. Brainstorming was first popularized by Alex Faickney Osborn in his book Applied Imagination, published in 1953 after he had been using this approach for more than a dozen years. In his book he outlines a series of rules for brainstorming sessions. The four core tenets of his approach are to defer judgment, generate lots of ideas, encourage unusual ideas, and combine ideas.7

  Unfortunately, people often don’t extract the most from brainstorming. They think it is as easy as getting a bunch of people in a room together and throwing out ideas. In fact, brainstorming is quite hard, and many of the guidelines that enable it to work are not intuitive or natural. For example, it is challenging to defer judgment, to push beyond the first right answer, come up with crazy ideas, and build on the ideas of others. Brainstorming is similar to other skills, such as chess or baseball, in that knowing the rules is not enough to make you a competent player.

  Your imagination is a muscle that gets stronger with use. This chapter described several exercises that are effective in building that muscle, including reframing problems, connecting and combining ideas, and brainstorming to push beyond the obvious solutions. Together, these are powerful tools for enhancing imagination.

  CHAPTER TWO

  KNOWLEDGE

  Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, handed subjects in his laboratory a newspaper and asked each of them to count all the photos inside. Wiseman picked subjects for this experiment by recruiting individuals who identified themselves as being either extremely lucky or terribly unlucky. He wanted to see whether those people whose lives are filled with good fortune actually see the world differently from those who consider themselves star-crossed.

  In this experiment, the unlucky people took several minutes to count all the photos in the newspaper, and most came back with an incorrect answer. The lucky people, on the other hand, took only a few seconds to find an answer, and they were all correct. Why was this?

  Wiseman designed special newspapers for this experiment. Inside the front cover of each newspaper was a message with two-inch-high letters that read, “STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.” Both groups were looking for photos, as requested, but the lucky people also read this message and responded accordingly. In contrast, the unlucky people were focused only on counting the photos—since that was their specific assignment—and they didn’t see the message with the answer they needed.

  To test this result further, Wiseman gave the unlucky participants another shot at success. Halfway through the newspaper he placed a second large notice, which said, “STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU HAVE SEEN THIS AND WIN £250.” Not a single person claimed the money.8

  This elegant experiment shows that people see the world very differently. In addition, it demonstrates beautifully ho
w, by ignoring information in our environment, we miss important keys to solving problems. In fact, the world is filled with endless messages, and it is up to each of us to discover them.

  My colleagues Michael Barry and Anne Fletcher teach a class on need-finding, which deals specifically with focused observation in order to identify opportunities for innovation. The entire class is crafted to prepare students to be keen observers. Michael and Anne start their class with a wonderful story by the late American novelist David Foster Wallace:9

  Two young fish swim past an older fish. As they pass the older fish, he says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish continue on for a while until one eventually asks the other, “What the heck is water?”

  The message in this fable is that we often don’t notice the things that are most important in our lives. We are blind to the “water.” Michael and Anne spend ten weeks teaching their students how to see the “water” in their lives as they identify surprising and valuable opportunities.

  Acute observation is a key skill for gaining valuable knowledge about the world around you. This knowledge is the fuel for your imagination. Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur, provides a great example. He has been on the founding teams of eight different companies, and many people have praised him for his creativity and fearlessness. He chuckles and says, “I’m not brave. I’m just incredibly observant.” Steve has discovered that the more you observe, the more data you collect, and the more patterns you see, the more boldly you can act. As Steve would say, “This is a big idea!”10

  In 1988, for example, Steve was brought in to run marketing at a company called SuperMac Technology, which made graphics boards for computers. At the time, the business had just emerged from bankruptcy and had only a 10 percent market share, which was way below the other two leading players in the field. As Steve put it, “They were twentieth in a field of three.” Soon after he arrived, Steve noticed an enormous pile of fifteen thousand product registration cards that had been sent in by customers. They were stacked up recklessly in a corner of an employee break room. He asked his colleagues about this massive stack of cards and learned that they had just piled up, year after year. Everyone had been much too busy executing their plans to take a look at these seemingly meaningless pieces of paper. Steve started digging through the pile himself and quickly realized they contained a gold mine of information.