Don't Build Your Experimentation Practices on Eureka

He may have retired as President and CEO of Innocentive, but BIF Research Advisor Alph Bingham is far from retired. He recently launched is own blog - Innoblogger - writing about the wide-open rationale for open innovation. His recent entry, Edison, Archimedes and Solution Space goes indepth on a subject near and dear to us here at the Business Innovation Factory - what's the right way to organize around problem-solving and experimentation?

From Alph's blog:

In a nutshell, the distinction is one between the thoughtful application of trial and error (admittedly informed to varying degrees) and that of serendipity or the “aha” in which novel breakthroughs present themselves not in analytic response to prior experimental results but as sudden flashes of insight.

The complexity of innovation has given me a new found appreciation for the use of metaphor. I’ve used Alph's contrasting Archimedes/Edison example quite a bit over the past few years. So how should you organize for innovation - like Edison or Archimedes? It certainly makes you think about where you are on the spectrum and what opportunities might present themselves if you're willing to change your perspective and, more importantly, bring other problem-solvers into your equation. Again from Alph's blog:

Some may argue that “Eureka” has ALWAYS been a part of our scientific endeavors and hence our scientific institutions, whether the NIH, Bell Labs, university research, DARPA or the garage work preceding Kitty Hawk. True. I don’t disagree.

But our organizational practices COULDN’T be built on the Eurekas – we loved it when they happened but we ORGANIZED around a solid cycle of experimentation. Design can’t be trivialized by saying simply that we’ll assign problems to our own “Archimedi” or implement a series of random lateral exercises (i.e., bathing) to stimulate the experience. But thinking of the Archimedean model as “stepping on a star,” what can we do? My simple-minded answer is to take a LOT of steps “into space” and see if one of them doesn’t qualify. Don’t start with one or even a few hypotheses and “tack to the light,” but start with dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of initial hypotheses and judge them based on the brightness of the original point of entry rather than the subsequent efficiency of navigation. (Of course, maybe the future will hold more clever approaches (I actually hope so)).

No one can corner the market on smarts and diversity of exposure does create novel solutions. Innocentive is certainly testament to that. Thomas Edison once said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Alph thinks it’s time to update that equation. At our summit a couple of years ago he said, "There will always be a lot of perspiration involved, but should the inspiration be 1 percent, or should we make it 10 percent by opening it up to a diverse net of human beings before you put the perspiration in?"

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Watch Alph at the BIF-2 Summit

Posted February 13, 2008 08:05 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink