Adaptive Innovation
Here is an interesting new article by Michael Slocum on the Real Innovation site. He argues for adaptive innovation and says,’There is an argument that all that can be invented has been invented or, at least, that the number of high-level inventions has diminished over time with the overwhelming majority of patents issued being on a significantly lower innovative level. German writer Johann von Goethe stated that innovation changed such that the solution to a problem may already exist and that the problem solver’s task is to find those pre-existing solutions and adapt them to suit a particular purpose. This is a different approach to the search for an innovative solution – pursuing analogy rather than novelty.
Non-linear problem solving begins with the specific and heads to the generic – this generalization is the key to adaptive innovation. Adaptive innovation is the key to the ability of an organization’s ability to respond quickly to the needs of society and the customer – it leverages any ability to adapt and existing solution to suit for its purposes. This “adaptivation” should be pursued as part of any problem solving activity.’
I would agree with his argument that we should put less energy into trying to find brand new ideas and more into sytematically searching for and adapting existing ideas from other fields. He is a believer in using processes for this purpose and is an advocate of the TRIZ methodology.
He concludes, ‘Adaptivation provides insight into solutions to analogous problems from differing industries, technologies and scientific fields. This is an open approach to solution generation and it provides additional benefits to the problem solver. Not only are pre-existing approaches considered but the search space for these solutions is considerably larger than the organization’s typical search space. An organization typically looks inward at existing patents, competitive intelligence or for team members to create a solution based on previous experience. Collectively this describes the closed approach to innovation whose narrow-minded focus is no longer an acceptable ideation approach given the evolving natures of competition and innovation.’
Should we switch all our innovation energies into systematic adaptive processes? It has a lot to offer in terms of creative problem solving but I am sure there is still scope for individual imaginative insights.
Paul Sloane