Search and Vision for Systematic Innovation

How to be productive in innovation?

The simple answer is "work hard", "be systematic", "believe in a larger vision".

Best to illustrate this:

I am writing a python program to do something new. I know that to be innovative I need to be "one level above" what was previously done. So I include a construction which I know enables this "newness". The problem is that this construction does not fit with "the normal code".  I notice this only after my first attempt to put things together, when on the way to a design, I cannot find a way to bring back in the requirements I have dropped. Let's call this first attempt design A. 

When you fail, you try again. I pivot my design, now to focus on B. Same result, design fails to bring in all requirements. I try again, now focusing on C. Same result, the design does not fit. A this point I start worrying. I step back. I explain to my daughter: "tricky, but I have got it! What we need is to go a level above and dynamically bring in A, B, and C concepts in a pre-sorted meta-design that depends on the input data". This new design, let's call it sorted ABC is not easy... and it also fails! Now I am seriously worried.  

I try again. Yet this time, knowing that A, B, C have failed, as did sorted ABC, I step back further. I go all the way to the "one level above" concept, which I take out, and put back in, in a complementary way. In two days, I have the design, and in a week I have all the requirements in it.

Innovation is just a "search algorithm". Edison knew this. The pharmaceutical industry has scaled this to the extreme. What is a little bit tricky in computer science, and similar technology domains, is that innovation is a mental game. The result is that failure within a search effort impacts moral and motivation.  The fact is, if you have not prepared yourself, it is not possible to invest yourself, and not feel the pain of failure.

The effort I described above took me more than a month. I might mention that I was getting seriously upset with my repeated failures. Yet the trick is that failures that are progress within a bigger vision are acceptable. They are painful, they make you lose time, but they are still ok if they bring you closer to your vision. Therefore the simple rule in innovation is that your need that larger vision before you start! And in fact no work should be done without that larger vision, and that larger vision needs to be a real concept of delivery of a real product with real innovative advantages.

A key ingredient to this process is that failure must reduce the search space towards your innovative vision. As a leader or in advisory roles, I find myself repeating and emphasising this more than anything else. Because this is the "crux" of productivity in innovation. Again: FAILURES MUST BRING YOU CLOSER TO YOUR VISION!

Finally, if your failures are not bringing you closer to your vision, then you have placed the bar "too high" and you need to diminish your expectations, and reduce the scope of your vision.


All original content copyright James Litsios, 2020.