Innovation Is a Problem-Solving Process. Part II: Strategy

Abstract

For the writer of fiction, Ecco (1994) continues, “the surrounding world [the one created by the writer] provides the constraint.” His characters are obliged to live according to its laws, making the narrator himself “the prisoner of his own premises.”

It is necessary to create constraints in order to invent freely.

Umberto Ecco

It is necessary that the constraints be paired in order to innovate freely.

Pat

It is necessary to see boundaries as paired constraints, both precluding and promoting.

Michael

Digression II: Thinking Inside the (Tool) Box

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting inside his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique…

Robert Motherwell (1992)

The tool box I’m thinking about is the one inside your head, the one you can’t think outside of.

Pat

Paradoxically, scarcity can make your tool box bigger than abundance can.

Michael

When Motherwell (an Abstract Expressionist) says homage, I think retain and when he writes critique, I think preclude. What he’s saying is that your domain, your area of expertise, provides both what you work with (the homage) and what you work against (the critique). Both are what I call the basics in your tool box, the one inside your head, the one you can’t think outside of. There are also borrowings, things from other domains, things noticed when needed.

As previously, Pat’s thoughts are in this typeface; Michael’s are in this.

The Contents of the Tool Box

The Basics.

The basics are the first things that go in. They define your expertise, which means they are domain-specific. They come in two kinds: tools in your head and tools in your hands. The tools in your head involve semantic memory (what you know); the tools in your hands represent procedural memory or skill (what you can do with what you know). What could we expect to find in Motherwell’s tool box? Things that painters know (about styles and materials) and techniques painters use (to produce variations of those styles, with those materials). Michael, help me here, what would we find in a manager’s tool box?

Let’s use one definition of management: resource allocation. That is, moving money (that’s easy to move) or raw material and equipment (that’s more difficult to move) from where it is stored to where it is needed. What would we expect to find in a manager’s toolbox, then? Probably simple heuristics for deciding just how many resources to move so that teams (that’s mostly who does the work) can do the job they are supposed to be doing. The common denominator among these tools is “more is more,” or at least “adequate is good.” In other words, when it comes to resource distribution, the idea is that where resources are needed, they need to be made available.

How can an innovator make a basic tool box bigger? There are two ways. One is deliberate, expanding your expertise in domain-related ways.

You are a painter, a colorist, not a draftsman. You want to look at the world as black and white and in lines. You decide to study under a master printmaker. You are YoYo Ma. You want to learn new ways of hearing and making music. You set off on the Silk Road. You are Johannes Gensfleisch Gutenberg, and you grow up in the goldsmith trade in a town on the River Rhein surrounded by vineyards (and, of course, wine presses).

You are a manager. You want to make sure that the work gets done by allocating resources. Where the world for painters is black and white and in lines, the world for managers is red and black. You are trained at university and perhaps later at business school to think that lack of resources (the red figures) is counterproductive and to be avoided precisely by making resources available where they are needed. The deliberate way to increasing the size of the toolbox is firmly tied to a specific discipline. They are happening from inside that domain, and are a means to an end, with the end being an improvement (often in other disciplines) using principles of that, original, discipline.

This somehow sounds deprecating. It isn’t meant to be that way; for domain-specific innovations (in particular those which “define” the modus operandi of a particular domain) can hold the clue to radically innovating other domains. The screw press for extracting juice from grapes and olives has been invented in the first century AD, and remained virtually unchanged until modern times (as an aside, I have “inherited” such a press, probably dating from the nineteenth century from the previous owner of my house in Piemonte, and it still works). By the time Johannes Gutenberg used the screw-press principle to innovate the domain of printing, this particular innovation was already some five-hundred years old. Using the same principle for printing, rather than pressing, and in combination with movable type led to what is widely considered the single most important innovation in the second millennium, laying the foundation for separating knowledge from its physical carrier, a process that led to the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the knowledge based economy we are still busy with today. Thus, if you function in the deliberate mode of innovation, you, well, liberate domain-specific (and often domain-defining) principles from the source domain to innovate the new domain.

The other way is automatic, it happens whenever a problem is solved. Every successful substitution, every newly constructed solution path adds new skills—a new way of making and a new way of noticing connections—to a solver’s tool box. Monet’s first substitution series (which gave us Impressionism) gave him new ways to paint (using contrasting hues rather than values, separate mosaic-like, instead of continuous, strokes) and new connections (the envelope or atmosphere that surrounds, immerses, and connects everything in its colors) that over time (over 20 years) led to his second substitution series (changed conditions rather than motifs, shared instead of local colors, etc.). Michael, you have much more to tell us about “over time,” don’t you?

Yes. The additions and the realizations that “go together” add up and previously separate functions have an almost magical tendency to merge over time making innovation often (very often, most often) incremental. Consider the telephone. We moved from a wall-mounted technology with a speaker (attached to the wall) and a headphone (attached to a wall-mounted equivalent with a wire) to a table-top device which now united the headphone and the speaker into one hand-held unit, which however was still connected to a kind of receiver which remained on the table and which we used to dial telephone numbers (first via a circular device and later via a keypad). The next step up were wireless home phones, which united, in the speaker/headphone also the keypad, and not too long ago, we still had mobile phones which folded up. Camera -phones where the first step in combining the phone with a completely new (and yet, in hindsight, intimately related) function, namely communicating with pictures, in addition to communicating via the spoken word. The smartphone then used the phone-function as an excuse to combine it with a virtually unlimited number of additional functions. All of a sudden, a phone is not (just) a phone. What will “phones” look like in the post-touchpad era? Will they become ever smarter? Is the incremental approach to innovation and problem solving inevitable or is there a shortcut?

Borrowings can be a kind of shortcut.

The Borrowings.

Knowledge and skills specific to a domain are inside sources. Borrowings come from outside sources, i.e., other domains. They are things that are noticed when needed.⁹ From whence then, come the borrowings? Strategies, contingencies, collaborations, bricolage, and the initial state of an innovation problem.

• Strategies

Strategies can be defined in two ways. In the first, they are specific, alternate paths to the same goal. For example, there are six different strategies for solving single-digit addition problems. Strategies of this kind are domain-specific. They are basic, not borrowed.

In the second, a strategy is a general procedure for solving problems across domains. They are basic to problem solving, but are borrowed by other domains. The paired constraint model is this kind of strategy: noticed when needed, borrowed not basic.

Couldn’t you say that, in a very general sense, all borrowings are strategic?

Yes, and in the most general sense, borrowing itself is a strategy.

• Contingencies

Pat, it is here where the work I have done on thematic thinking comes in handy (Froehlich, Gibbert, & Hoegel, 2014). That is, we see the “need” when there is a spatio-temporal contingency in some way. For instance, the phone was combined with the camera, since the phone keeps the camera “handy” (in fact, the German term for mobile phone is “handy”!). Consider the sofa-bed, a truly magnificent innovation (dating back to 1899) which can be found in most house-holds. As with the camera-phone, the innovation here comes from borrowing close resources and combining them in synergistic ways. By “synergistic” I mean in ways that go beyond the functions each individual product could do on its own. By keeping the camera “handy” in the phone, we are transformed into real-time reporter/journalists in a way even George Orwell would have thought implausible. In terms of the sofa-bed, what makes this innovation so magnificent is its power to transform your living room into a kind of on-demand bedroom (or the other way round). Which other piece of furniture has the power to transform the very essence of the room it is surrounded with?

Incidentally, the sofa-bed, invented by Leonard C. Bailey, an African-American born into poverty, is a neat illustration of domain-specific deliberate innovation. If you are born into poverty, you probably will have spent many nights sleeping on a sofa (or using somebody’s bed as your sofa), so merging the two makes sense. If you are the son of a goldsmith/engraver (to come back to Gutenberg), probably the last material you think of for making moveable type is wood (the technology for printing before the movable type consisted in carving an entire printing page into wood). Engraving every single moveable metal-type would have been even more expensive than carving typeface into wood, though… How does your father produce cheaper engravings? By engraving only the mold and then casting molten metal into that mold. But then, precious metals are too, well, precious to turn them into moveable type. So which other metals can be used and easily molten? A train of thought about contingencies like these presumably led young Johannes to the idea of using a lead (easily molten over the household fire, something most kids will have observed their fathers doing when casting bullets for hunting), reinforced with a bit of tin and antimony for extra durability.

The printing press on its own would not have freed (liberated…) the individual letter head from its wooden printing board where it was firmly fixed in sentences and paragraphs. Economically-produced die-cast letterheads, in combination with the printing technology did, however. Such contingencies lead to synergistic combinations, which outsoar the domain-specific provinciality from which they emerge.

Michael, let me expand a bit on contingency. In my understanding, a contingency is a relationship in which one thing is dependent on another. In your examples, noticing is dependent on three contingencies—one is need (there is no noticing without need), the second is chance (the occasion on which the thing needed is noticed), the third is knowledge (recognizing that the thing noticed is the thing needed). So, for noticing to happen we have (1) need, (2) chance, and (3) knowledge.

I want to add two things on which both noticing and knowledge are dependent: plasticity and variability. Plasticity refers to the ease with which the brain adapts to input from the world (Nelson, 1999). Adapting here means rewiring, physical/tangible rewiring that creates new and expands existing neural networks. Plasticity induces noticing, noticing further expands the networks. What we call talents and gifts are based on increased plasticity in particular parts of the brain. For example, mathematicians notice patterns,¹⁰ composers and musicians notice sounds, painters notice colors.

While plasticity is pre-wired, variability is acquired.

My earlier research showed that learning involves both how to do something (the skill) and how differently to continue doing it (the variability level). The level is determined by task difficulty early in learning. If success/mastery depends on trying many things, high variability will be rewarded. If rewarded, it will be repeated, becoming habitual in (and only in) the training domain. This is what makes all of us more or less habitually/predictably variable in different areas, say writing or proto-typing or cooking. There are other contingencies. High variability levels facilitate skill acquisition and transfer. They also increase sensitivity to (i.e., noticing) changes in condition, and subsequent alteration and adaptation. I could go on—the contingencies (including those between variability and plasticity) are continuous—but I should switch to collaborations (Stokes, Lai, Holtz, Rigsbee, & Cherrick, 2008).

• Collaborations

Some innovators, experts in multiple domains, collaborate with themselves. I’m thinking as usual, about artistic innovations, about Alexander Calder’s mobile. The mobile was the product of his initial training as an engineer (outside source) and his later development as a sculptor (inside source). Paul Klee had to choose between careers in music or art. Art won, but music left its mark on both the vocabulary (the Canon of Tonality parallels the cycle of fifths in classical music) and the rhythms (the directional patterns in his grids represent tempi like staccato and legato) of his paintings. For my math program, I had two things at hand: the Japanese count that I learned working in Tokyo and the design skills I acquired at Pratt.

Many more innovators collaborate with outside sources, borrowing from other experts’ tool boxes. These collaborations can be direct, person to person interactions, like those between theorists and engineers at (legendary) Bell Labs, between design teams at (becoming legendary) IDEO, or between engineers and data analysts at Vestas Wind Systems, a Danish wind power company, where turbines are designed and built to match wind conditions mathematically modeled for the exact place where each turbine is placed.¹¹

Collaborations can also be indirect. Gutenberg noticed the screw press used in wine making, thought in terms of metal (not wood), and saw the link between engraving and die-casting. Being the son of a goldsmith, he probably thought in terms of small artifacts made of metal, so the idea of die-casting entire printing pages must have seemed outright grotesque. Impressionism happened (light breaking up on things vs. light reflected from things) when Monet noticed Chevreul’s color wheel. Netflix happened when Reed Hastings noticed memberships (vs fees) from his gym, mail order (vs. in-store) from Amazon, and—then recently introduced from Japan—DVDs (vs. videocassettes). Some indirect collaborations are intergenerational. I quote Isaacson on this: “The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them. Steve Jobs built on the work of Doug Engelbart, who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bish” (Isaacson, 2014, p. 280).

• Bricolage

Pat, the way I see it is that resource constraints make us notice stuff that is right in front of our eyes, and which can hold the key to an innovation solution, but which is kind of eclipsed by having enough money to invent around the problem. There is a nice case on the military jet engine here. As I wrote in a paper with my colleague Phil Scranton for “Management and Organizational History” (Gibbert & Scranton, 2009), the challenge with jet propulsion is quite simple: the hotter the engine runs the higher its fuel efficiency and the greater its thrust. If the whole machine gets too hot, it unfortunately blows up. At the end of the Second World War, the Allies competed against the Germans in the development of what was seen (even more so than the atomic bomb) as THE “winning weapon” to end the war. On the Allied side, the US government prioritized the jet engine over the atomic bomb to the extent that the funding the military jet engine was double that of the Manhattan Project. Now, how would you go about solving the fundamental challenge in jet propulsion if you had all the money you needed? The American engineers focused on creating more heat resistant alloys (which needed a lot of hard-to-come-by precious metals) in an effort to turn the entire engine less susceptible to crack down when it ran at full speed. So, the project looked something like this: cook up a new alloy, produce the engine, run it at full speed, and watch it blow up. There was a much better solution to the problem…. (to be continued).

• The Initial State

I originally had this under collaboration, but I think it’s important enough to warrant its own sub-head. What’s so important? Realizing that your most critical collaborator is the initial state of your innovation problem—the specific style, product, or process you aim to re-specify, refine, or replace. In many cases, obviously those of necessity and less obviously those of style,¹² you do not choose your initial state. If you can, choose it carefully, strategically.

Remember (like the Pressman), it supplies the items in your preclude column, without which you have no place to start (inventing the Walkman).

Other Things to Remember

• Innovation is a problem-solving process.

• You can only problem solve inside the tool box of your expertise.

• You can make your tool box bigger.

• Paired constraints can make it bigger.

• You should make it bigger because….

• The innovative-ness of your solution depends entirely on its contents.