Strategic Intuition as the key to (open) innovation
When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer “At night,” or “In the shower,” or “Stuck in traffic.” You get a flash of insight: Aha! William Duggan explains in his new book, Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, how the mind forms great leaps and how strategic intuition offers a 4-step method for identifying and capturing new opportunities. I had the opportunity to ask him some questions on the implications of his research for new product ideation, brainstorming, and open innovation.
1) What is the key message or take-away for practitioners in your book?
Successful innovation comes from new combinations of previous elements — the elements themselves are not new — and the method to make that combination contradicts the current practices of most companies who try to stimulate creativity and innovation among their employees.
2) How should for example a new product ideation project be organized if you take strategic intuition into account?
IDEO is famous for A) zany practices like an airplane wing sticking out of the office wall, basketball hoops, rollerskating down the corridor — and none of that matters. They also do B) rapid prototyping and intense customer observation — which is neutral, because you can do that and still get the actual creative part wrong. What they do right is C) bring people who worked on many unrelated projects together to design something new, to consciously bring previous elements together in a new combination. So I would say “do what IDEO does,” but C, not A or B.
3) Eliminate all regular brainstorming sessions?
Yes, eliminate all regular brainstorming sessions. Ask anyone when they have their best ideas, and they will usually answer “in the shower,” or “at night”, or “jogging,” or at some other random time when their mind is at rest. They have a flash of insight, where previous elements come together in their minds in a new combination, often to solve a different problem from the one they’ve just been working on. The idea that you can schedule a flash of insight on a particular topic at a particular time on a particular day, for not just one but many people, is completely insane. But “irregular brainstorming” — where you pop into my office and say “can I talk to you about something — I had an idea…” — now that’s great.
4) What could be the implications for (open) innovation?
Strategic intuition provides evidence, a theory, and tools to support open innovation. The previous elements that combine in your mind as a flash of insight come from what other people have done in the past. If you rely on only your own experience, you’re severely limiting the inventory of elements you can draw from. Innovation is a treasure hunt for a combination that works — chemists call it “exploratory synthesis”, where they try out all kinds of combinations to see what they get. Page and Brin, for example, made Google by combining four previous elements from others — data mining algorithms, academic citation ranking, AltaVista’s full-text crawler, and Overture’s ad listings. Great artists steal — legally, of course. And open innovation is the best form of organization to do that.
5) What would you say has been the biggest surprise or learning for you in this field?
The biggest surprise for me is that strategy as taught in business schools and as practiced in companies completely skips the question of how you actually get an idea. Strategy tools today are all strategic analysis, where you understand your industry, competitors, customers, competencies, future trends, and so on. When it comes to the next step — so what should we do? — the leading methods of strategy are silent. There’s a huge gap for what to do next. That’s why everyone resorts to brainstorming. Strategic intuition offers a better way to fill that gap.
For more information on Strategic Intuition:
William Duggan is the author of three recent books on strategic intuition as the key to innovation: Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strategy (2002); The Art of What Works: How Success Really Happens (2003); and Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (2007). He has 20 years of experience as a strategy adviser and consultant, and teaches strategic intuition in three venues at Columbia Business School: MBA and Executive MBA courses, and Executive Education sessions.
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