Synthesizing Innovation

I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, as I’ve been working on some tough brainstorming and writing assignments.

I’ve spent most of my career analyzing and writing about things I could touch—whether it was hardware or software. But how do I write convincingly of things that don’t exist yet? How do I strengthen my existing innovation talents to become as strong as Kay, Jobs, and Heinlein? How do I think outside the box even more?

I’m blessed (or cursed?) to have one of the key high-level traits—that I don’t think like most other people. But this also brought up the corollary question—once I’ve further developed my innovation skills and accomplished some of my more important goals, how do I teach other people to innovate? To answer that, one must first understand some of the key enablers to thinking outside of the box.

For a long time, I have known intrinsically that these were some of the requirements:

• read widely
• be curious about everything
• have a good long-term memory for inane details—this is far more important than having a good short-term memory
• take copious notes—this will compensate for the lower-than-average short-term memory (which itself I’m convinced is part of what creates brilliance)
• ask lots of questions—in fact, ask questions whenever you don’t understand something
• read the life stories of brilliant innovators—biographies, autobiographies, whatever you can get your hands on
• look for connections between disparate things
• relax—living your life like a Type-A is not only a sure-fire path to burnout, but to stifled creativity as well

A few of these were confirmed for me when I was researching the fundamentals of enterprise social networking (including reading Where Good Ideas Come From), and a couple others were described brilliantly in an article on Wired.com, How to Spot the Future.

This common thread about looking for connections between disparate things is one of the most important behaviors, and my original inspiration came from watching James Burke’s marvelous Connections series.

Of all the rules in the Wired article, Rule #6, Demand Deep Design, is closest to my heart. It is possible—and for some of us far too easy—to carry this to the extreme, and lose sight of the original goal. But back off a little bit, and up pops the insight and persistence required to make things elegant—to make them just work. “Good design is hard” the author writes—but I will tell you that it is so worth it.

But Rule #7, Spend Time With Time Wasters, is most prophetic for me, especially this week. It’s related to my “relax” above, which I’ve long known intrinsically, and which Where Good Ideas Come From  and Drive confirmed for me.

I frequently do my best work early in the morning (though sometimes in late-night/all-night sessions), but I hit on a pattern this week that has excelled for forming ideas and completing them on the keyboard.

To an outsider this week, it might have looked like I was goofing off, but in reality, I’ve simply been carefully exercising all of those concepts above, including #7. I think I’d be a little embarrassed if I had to show you my browser history from the past few days, because on the surface, it would look like I was researching unimportant miscellanea. I don’t remember everything I was reading about, but some of it ranged from reset buttons to toys to electric cars to smoke detectors. And every bit of it helped me form and refine the ideas I needed to write about.

Another piece of the puzzle was to wait a little bit, but not too long. For one of my white papers, a long lunch break was just right. For the other, more integration time was needed, so it was a long lunch break, some initial writing, a good night’s sleep, and another whole morning being a “Time Waster”. But this still wasn’t quite enough, and I knew it. The secret you won’t find in the Wired article.

Call it Rule #8, Go Out And Explore. Get off your butt and go do something. Get outside and go for a walk, go window shopping, or go to a museum or art gallery. You should sometimes do this without any purpose, other than to have fun. But at least half of the time, do so with a purpose—to find inspiration about something specific.

It all adds up to idea synthesis.

In my case, I needed to find some inspiration about factory floors, and some other inspiration about homes. Not having access to a factory floor at the moment, the closest proxies I could think of were Costco, Home Depot, and the mall. I didn’t know exactly what inspiration I would find there, just that I would find it.

OK, I was thinking that something related to seeing the forklifts in action at the big box stores would be it, but they were nowhere to be found. Instead, I found one key concept while staring up at the massive ceiling lights in Costco (and it had nothing to do with light bulbs!), and another on an endcap at Home Depot.

In the end, these couple of white papers just about wrote themselves over the course of a couple hours late in the afternoon each, and the results were met with a bit more acclaim than I was expecting.

With one white paper in particular, I hit the nail on the head so cleanly that when I found perhaps the best scientific paper on the subject, it listed the same four components I had concluded were ideal, and in the same order, and almost completely validated the concept I had arrived at independently. Explaining why nobody had yet brought the concept to market was the essential missing ingredient, and made the story complete.

That’s a long, long way of saying I can validate the methods espoused by these three writers, but I don’t think you’d believe me as much if I just told you to read these things, now would you?

(And yes, I know this isn’t the complete answer of how to teach others to be innovative, but ask me down the road a while, and I’ll have a much better story for you, I’m sure.)