Innovation in Practice Blog
The Myth of Serendipitous Innovation
With so many successful products created through serendipity, it makes you wonder whether companies can rely on it to create breakthrough products. The answer is no. Serendipity, as a method of innovation, has a very poor track record. The number of serendipitous products is a tiny percentage of the total of all products. It just doesn’t yield nearly the amount of blockbuster products as you would think.
So why does it seem there are so many of them? That’s because serendipitous products are more memorable than others. We hear about them in the news media more often. Because of that, we recall more examples of serendipitous products than other inventions. So we’re fooled into thinking they must be occurring at a much higher rate. It just isn’t true.
The Subtraction Technique: Reframing Your Business Model
I had just finished a talk on Systematic Inventive Thinking in which I had stressed the usefulness of the Subtraction technique. Just then, a group of seven men approached the stage. They introduced themselves as the management board of Standard Bank of South Africa. They liked the idea that innovation is something that can be learned and applied. They were especially interested in Subtraction. “Do you think it would help us with our problem?” asked one of the delegates.
The Division Technique: Cutting Innovation Down to Size
You can frequently make groundbreaking innovations simply by dividing a product into “chunks” to create many smaller versions of it. These smaller versions still function like the original product, but their reduced size delivers benefits that users wouldn’t get with the larger, “parent” product. This is one of three approaches of the Division Technique called “Preserving Division.”
The Six Best Books on Creativity and Innovation
Creativity is what you do in your head to generate an idea, while innovation is the process of putting it into practice. You need both to succeed, which may be why the number of new books on these topics seems to grow every year. Yet despite the popularity of this category and the steady stream of new books, I continue to go back to the classics, those books that actually taught me how to do it versus those books that just talked about it. Caution – these are not “light reads,” but they’re the ones I’ve learned the most from.
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