Working as designers at an agency, we get the luxury of working on a variety of projects with different clients. Although it’s exciting to be working with entrepreneurs and innovators, there are times when I doubt whether true innovation exists anymore. Every other product I encounter these days is a web version of an existing software, or a social networking tool for different markets. The last true world-changing inventions I can think of are the iPhone and the iPad, and they were built on previous products such as the Blackberry.
But borrowing from older products or concepts doesn’t necessarily mean an idea isn’t innovative. In fact, in most cases, innovative ideas are built on previous foundations. Add a keyboard, internet and email access to a cell phone and you get the Blackberry. Add additional standardized mobile applications to the Blackberry, and you get the iPhone. Increase the screen size of an iPhone, add more RAM and a faster processor, and you get the iPad. As we can see, innovation doesn’t just come from solitary innovators, but occurs through an evolution of prior ideas. It’s the constant iteration of inventions that makes them more useful and powerful, often with the seemingly simple addition of features or capabilities that already exist.
Various social science thinkers such as
Steve Johnson and
Andrew Hargadon have taken a closer look into the process of innovation and claim that it comes from an amalgam of minds, as opposed to the popular notion that brilliant ideas come from lone geniuses. More specifically, Johnson claims that there are environments he describes as “conjugal beds”, in which ideas “can have sex” and procreate new innovative ideas. At his TED talk, he explained that the intellectual flowering during the past 500 years started in London and was largely due to the British switching from beer to tea and coffee. This greatly sped up the evolution of intellectual discourse because 1) the majority of the population was no longer drunk most of the time, and 2) people were imbibing coffee and tea, which are stimulants causing more intellectual activity, plus 3) coffee shops were created, thereby creating spaces in which minds can commingle. Anyone living in the Bay Area can drop by countless coffee shops, and witness this commingling in action. It’s not uncommon to see startup folks in coffee shops discussing “the next big thing” or even “the next small thing,” which really could become the next big thing (e.g. Twitter).
Hargadon further supports this idea that innovation springs from creative communities in his analysis of IDEO’s creative process. He claims that IDEO’s big success in innovation is largely owed to the fact that they have the space to collect technological solutions from a wide range of industries. Due to the agency’s position in the market, they are in a prime position to collect intellectual knowledge and capital from their clients, which span many industries. This storehouse of intellectual and technology solutions allows designers to create innovative solutions that are not necessarily created from scratch but adapted from other industries and applied to the current problem. Hargadon calls this “technology brokering” and claims that IDEO isn’t actually any more creative than any other firm, but it is in a position to accumulate a large reserve of technology capital, giving the company a competitive advantage when coming up with innovative solutions.
How do these insights apply to innovating for your company or even for yourself? Well, first off, if you’re a designer, the pressure is off to feel like you have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to designing. As we have seen, the ‘lone wolf inventing on their own’ is a myth; moreover, it’s an unrealistic expectation to live up to. Instead, one should focus on creating fertile environments in which ideas can commingle with other ideas, possibly creating new fresh adaptations or hybrids. In short, adopt IDEO’s process of innovation by creating spaces in which knowledge and idea sharing is easy.
In a company, build your own repository of technology capital that designers can draw upon. In a company that has more than one designer, design reviews among designers are crucial for cross-pollination of ideas and solutions. This raises the overall “innovativeness” of the design team. Many brains focused on a design problem is much better than a single brain mulling over the problem, and just collecting design solutions from various industries is no good if those ideas are not shared. Learning from others’ work also exposes designers to new design patterns and ways of working through design challenges.
If you’re on your own or don’t have access to other designers, then you’ll have to build and expand your own warehouse of design solutions. Look at how other people have solved similar problems and see you can apply it to your own problem. Competitors’ solutions and products outside of the industry can also allow you to look at your problem from a new perspective, possibly sparking new ideas. Attend lectures and talks so that you can interact with other technologists, and expose yourself to new ideas. Taking this further, attending creative events such as Maker’s Faire or art shows can inspire and give you a different perspective. This is good practice in general for designers, but it is especially vital to designers who don’t have other designers to bounce ideas off of.
So when you’re stuck on a problem, or just feeling un-innovative, then remember that you can create environments for ‘a-ha’ moments that can make you feel like a ‘lone genius’, even if it’s just for that moment.
