Interfacing with People

You need other people to tell you that your idea is wrong, so you can learn. Help people do that by asking them what they’re up to (as a conversation starter); figuring out how to articulate your own uncertainties and unknowns, because your conversational counterparts might have the knowledge you need; and demonstrating a genuine interest in listening. Draw from the personal experiences of others and from the specific information they may provide to improve your hunch, refine your problem, and help you reconceive what you prototype for impact. You innovation prototype will accrue people through these conversations; eventually, they may become users, team members, or participate with you on your path forward in some other way.

Prototyping a Real-World Problem

You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a real-world problem—that is, prototyping a problem. Get ready to be wrong, because a good solution can emerge from being wrong a lot and you need only be approximately right once. This process of prototyping a problem as an approach to innovation has several advantages: progress is about how much you learn about the problem; there are multiple strategies for making your problem tangible and getting to specific questions; and there is a demonstration possible of any problem at a scale that matches your current resources.

Scaling Up an Organization

Organizations don’t just grown on their own. You build them, and you may end up building multiple organizations, each one atop the previous one. The scale-up logic is straightforward: You present what you did (the past) to motivate where you will go (the future), but what you work on is the middle (the present). Most emerging organizations fail because they build for the future having ignored the entire present. But you don’t have to worry about whether a decision is optimal for that rosy future—it just needs to work today. As you build the next organization, you’ll reuse parts from the old one and you’ll get to implement everything you’ve learned. Growth and scale-up work like problem solving: no one cares how you first came up with the solution. The organization that systematizes your current innovation prototype is your first big milestone.

Risk, Doing, Learning, and Uncertainty

Your innovating requires you to be more alert regarding what you can do about what you think you know and don’t know. So, the notion of risk as hit or miss is limiting. But what really matters is how well you’re prepared to handle uncertainty. That depends largely on whether you have banked your future on a single thing being true or whether your ideas is robust and ready to survive changes. Show a learning path through a space of opportunity that reduces everyone’s tolerance for uncertainty and that explains how you intend to trade off certainty and risk as you scale up so you do not fail because of something you could have predicted and/or been prepared to ready. Remember, there is no risk at the outset; when risk enters the picture is largely a matter of scale. And if you absolutely must fail, make it come as a surprise to you and everyone, so everyone cherishes what is learned.

Interacting with Parts

You can get started innovating right away: just assemble some parts you already have or can get easily; learn as you go; and use those parts to make your problem tangible. Anything can be a part: in a corporate setting, that includes anything you currently do, assemble, or procure; and for everything else—from physical parts to services to resources for acquiring knowledge—there’s the Web. You bring parts together you’ve chosen so you can make any aspect of your problem tangible—even a solution—and you ask questions, reasoning about your problem with your minds and your hands. Parts will tell you what you need to assume at your current scale, what you aren’t seeing, what you are missing, and whether the next scale is even possible.

A Kit to Drive Innovation, Anywhere

You have a choice to set up a way for yourself or anyone else to start innovating right away. You just need something to empower exploration, and it ought to consist of things that already exist. If you accept that the trial and error reveals the innovations needed, and that you can at least simulate their impact using other parts, there is no point in trying to plan a “great innovation” or culling innovation ideas from the get-go. You can choose to focus on the problem and simply get started. So, create some tools of the trade and be a professional innovator. You can easily build an innovation prototyping kit, starting from anything—a product idea, a hunch about a problem, a development kit, a research paper, or a patent. Such a kit packages a hunch about a problem and helps you or others get started.

At a Small Scale, Nonlinearity Is Your Ally

Innovating is a highly nonlinear process. You can turn that nonlinearity to your advantage and explore a space of opportunity systematically, rather than constraining yourself to a pre-specified future, by combining a few parts, substituting those parts, talking with some people, looking for patterns in the combination of parts and insights from others, and then outline a few distinct opportunities for impact. You don’t need any intuition; just ask what is possible after the parts are combined, and learn what happens then. Are there new problems those parts might solve together? Is there something to learn from how people are “misinterpreting” your idea? As your idea grows, you’ll have parts, people, comments, and near misses to fuel your exploration; as you demonstrate each opportunity with a different set of parts, you are creating a space of opportunity. Time is your ally.

Managing Innovating Continuously

You can create the conditions for innovating anywhere and make it a continuous process. You can build an engine for innovating that yields impact, strategic insight into new problems, and increased efficiency, and “configure” it to produce new products, companies, causes, policies, inventions, innovation kits, identify talent and resources, or develop professional innovations. This can be in a corporation, a research/academic organization, or generally. Your innovating advantage is that your organization itself can be an innovation prototype.

Epilogue: Academic Commentary

Innovating is a discipline and practice in its own right that benefits from many healthy connections to several other disciplines, much as physics and engineering relate to each other and much as behavioral science relates to economics and management. This book brings together ideas from several disciplines to explain innovating by its actions. In this commentary, you will find academic references and relevant literature across several disciplines. Some support key ideas discussed in the book or portray the opposing ideas; others help to situate the book’s content in a broader discussion....

The World Is Your Lab: You Need a Notebook to Converse with Yourself

To derive benefit from documentation when you have only a hunch, you must dispense with the notion that documentation is just record keeping. Capture your thoughts without regard for being wrong; our brains have no problem drawing the seemingly preposterous connections that fuel innovating. The benefits of documentation will be most easily understood by future-you—the real expert at what you are doing and fully equipped with hindsight. So, get ideas out of your brain and documented before the memory of an idea you once had becomes more important than the idea ever was. Later, when your brain finds it again, it will become a near miss. That and everything it helps your brain remember can be a part.