Killer Innovations

Why do most firms fail to find the next killer innovation? It’s not for lack of effort. I would argue that in many cases it’s tied to our human instinct of finding the fast answer. It is our natural inclination to resolve a problem or challenge by searching for the right answer. Subliminal, our mind stops looking once we come to the first answer that best approximate the answer to the problem. We fail to look for the next best answer that may in fact be the breakthrough we really need.

In our day-to-day lives we experience this when we’ve misplaced something and begin the frantic search. We begin to retrace our steps in search of the missing item. However, once we find it, our anxiety level depletes and we stop searching. It’s interesting to note that we have adopted the euphemism of saying “I always find the car keys in the last place I look”. Who keeps searching once you’ve found them?

We tend to act the same way when we are searching for a solution to a problem. Whether the problem is finding our car keys or the next killer innovation that will radically change the company we work for.

What prevents us from looking further?

Our self-aware scope of thinking is broken into two groups, things we know and things we know we don’t know. Whenever we experience a challenge, we will habitually search for answer in these two groups. The first leads us to an immediate answer such as, “the last time we saw this happen, we did X and it was successful”. If we immediately scan the challenge and it doesn’t generate a response from the first group, we immediately push it into the second group and begin searching for the first right answer. This can lead us to search for outside expertise, compare the challenge for similar by not identical answer than could be adopted (e.g. best practices) or attempt to breakdown the challenge in sub-challenges that we can map into our past experiences.

The short sidedness in this approach is that we are only looking into two of the four groups for possible answers.

We tend to rationalize ourselves into believing that we are self-aware to the point of knowing what we know and what we don’t know. When in reality, both assumptions may be wrong. The first step to finding better answers to our challenges is to recognize that we have two other groupings that hinder us. The first is the realization that we may think we know something when in reality we don’t. This is manifested by the habit of making broad assumptions or pre-determining what the challenge is (assumptions) and fitting it into out “tool box” of answers. In businesses, this is manifested by the “we have always done it this way and it’s the best way” or “that won’t work, we tried it before”

The remaining group is probably the biggest barrier to high impact breakthroughs, those killer innovations that change companies, markets and industries. This group is hidden from most of us unless we challenge ourselves to truly look and have an approach to search the area. This group is the “things we don’t know we don’t know”. This is the space that forces us to change the rules, look at the challenge from a completely different perspective and/or force us to re-think how we think.

This is were the next killer innovations are found.