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3 Ways Leaders Can Enable Disruptive Innovation

The story of how the sticky note became a huge market success is a story of ingenuity and persistence. It’s also a story that exemplifies why disruptive ideas are so hard to manage inside a company.

In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was working on making a super-strong adhesive but accidentally ended up creating a weak adhesive that could be peeled off easily and was reusable. Intrigued by the new material, Silver tried to get support within the company to find ways to commercialize it. Over the next five years, he gave seminars to different groups and talked to many leaders in the hope that it would spark new ideas. The most promising idea a product group came up with was a reusable bulletin board that people could stick paper to but that idea was abandoned because bulletin board sales are not large enough to make this a profitable business. Without any good commercially viable use case, Silver couldn’t garner any support for his new adhesive. That changed in 1974 when Art Fry, another colleague at 3M who had attended one of Silver’s seminars, came up with an idea to use the adhesive on pieces of paper to act as bookmarks for his hymn book. Fry then tested the idea within the company some more. He sent a report to his manager with a sticky note on top, who then responded back on the same note. Soon other employees started using it and 3M decided to take the idea more seriously. They did a limited launch of the sticky note in four cities but it failed to generate much sales. Fortunately, they realized that the launch failed because the concept was new and customers were not able to gauge how useful the sticky notes would be. So, they did one final test in Boise, Idaho, where they handed out free sticky notes to businesses and waited to see the response. Over 90% of businesses ordered the sticky notes when they ran out giving 3M a very clear signal of success!

Despite the skepticism they received, Silver and Fry’s persistence paid off eventually and led to a category defining product for 3M. But their story illustrates why it’s so hard for companies to identify and grow disruptive ideas. 

Companies are optimized for incremental innovation

Most companies have a dominant thinking style that favors short-term incremental innovation. Consider how new features get incorporated into a product. In most places, there is a well established protocol starting with user studies to identify how the product might be made more efficient or intuitive. However, this approach can only result in incremental innovation. Imagine you were a leader at 3M faced with evaluating Silver’s discovery. You would most likely ask the same (logical) questions like what pain point or unmet need of the customer gets addressed by the new idea. And you would end up rejecting the idea in the first meeting. Unfortunately, they are the wrong kind of questions to ask for disruptive innovation when you are creating a new product category. 

In the case of 3M, even the marketing team fell victim to established thinking and only after recognizing that people can only evaluate a product once they are familiar with it, did they hit success. 

The issue here isn’t that managers are not capable of identifying good ideas or that they let their egos get the better of them, but instead, as researchers found, “…managers face two distinct hurdles: They are not empowered to act on input from below, and they feel compelled to adopt a short-term outlook to work.”

Handling Disruptive Ideas

To manage disruptive ideas, companies need to create a different channel where radical ideas can survive, and the most recommended approach is to create a different team to incubate such ideas. However, this approach still requires managers and employees to understand radical ideas so they can be fed into the new channel. Without this step, the incubating team starves for good ideas coming from product teams that can potentially be successful. 

Boost ideas before evaluating them

Transformational ideas don’t always sound convincing or practical in the beginning. One mistake leaders tend to make is to focus on evaluating the idea when they first hear it. This works well in the case of incremental innovation where the value proposition is easy to understand – whether it is improving performance or making the design more intuitive. As a result they end up blocking ideas too early. For transformational ideas, it helps instead to first understand the full potential of an idea before starting to evaluate it. This requires looking at an idea from multiple angles, finding new use cases or connecting with other products that the person proposing the idea may not have thought through. 

Leaders need to create an exploratory phase where ideas can be built up in different ways to see their full long-term potential. Most radical ideas tend to get blocked early on but by adding a boosting phase, companies can significantly increase the number of potentially disruptive ideas they see.  

Idea evaluation shouldn’t be the manager’s job

Managers are often the first hurdle that an innovative idea has to cross. If a manager gets convinced that an idea has merit, then they can champion the idea further up the chain. This works quite well for incremental innovation, where a manager’s experience can play a meaningful role in evaluating and shaping the idea more. However, for radical ideas, the same strength becomes a weakness. Like in the case of the sticky note, where a colleague from another part of the company was able to identify the potential of the adhesive, evaluating ideas should be a broader effort. When it comes to creativity, no one person is going to consistently pick winners but by including more people in the mix, companies can start tapping group intelligence towards innovation. 

Leaders should recognize when an employee is bringing a radical idea, and push it through a boosting stage. In the simplest form, managers can bring the team together to brainstorm on the idea with the intent of finding the most promising incarnation. 

Remove individualistic biases 

Most companies disproportionately reward the person who “first came up with the idea”. The reality is that most ideas in the initial formulation are weak and it often requires significant contributions from many others before an idea can fly. When incentives are misaligned, employees might choose to propose their own idea instead of helping other ideas become successful.  As a result, instead of one or two killer ideas, companies are left with multiple mediocre ones. 

To combat individualistic tendencies, leaders should set expectations with the team that ideas become groundbreaking through many people’s contributions and routinely reward people who help others’ ideas become more successful. 

As AI becomes more prevalent in society, businesses will need to innovate at a faster rate than ever before to stay competitive. Companies that figure out the formula to churn out disruptive ideas will have a big edge over others. This requires companies to understand ways in which disruptive innovation differs from incremental innovation and reengineer incentives and processes to support transformative ideas from employees.

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Creativity Hack: One-Hop Associations

Finding ways to connect two unrelated concepts liest at the root of many innovations. Combining unrelated objects or concepts is one hack to finding novel ideas. However, combining completely random ideas has one drawback – it often leads to incongruous ideas that don’t always resonate with people. The One-hop association method is a way to connect unrelated (but not completely random) concepts and leads to ideas that are perceived as surprising in a good way.  

About The Hack

For this hack, you start by building an association map of an object. Suppose your task is to make a new and interesting ruler. You first start with the ruler in the center and choose a few ways that a ruler might be connected to other objects. Attributes like “used with”, “material” and “similar to” tend to be easier to work with for younger children. Then, you list different values for each of those attributes like a ruler is used with paper and pen. This gives the first order of concepts that are directly associated with the ruler. Next you extend the association map by one more level and list second order concepts that are associated with the first order ones. Finally, you try to connect back the second order concepts with the original object and see if that leads you to any interesting ideas. 

As an example, a ruler is used with paper which is used with scissors. Trying to connect a ruler with scissors might give you an idea to make a ruler with a sharpened edge that can also help cut paper. The reason this hack works well is due to the incongruity theory. When people notice an incongruity, they can either find it amusing or be disappointed. When people can tie the incongruity back to the product, the product feels more fun, interesting or amusing, but when people can’t find an underlying connection, the idea appears confusing. 

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it in product design or with students.

DescriptionTo find a creative idea for product improvement, try to build an association map and combine concepts that are one hop away. 
ExampleIn designing a new kind of ruler, start by listing concepts that are connected with a ruler using attributes like “material”, “used with” or “similar to”. Then repeat this exercise one more time to find the next level of concepts. Finally try to combine second order concepts with a ruler to   
Tips Instead of combining objects directly, use attributes of the second order object to combine which can lead to novel ideas  
ExtensionsTo extend the association map, use more types of attributes like “similar to”, “environment”, “sounds” and more. The more extensive the map, the more opportunities to find new ideas. 
Creativity Hack: One-Hop Associations

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Creativity Hack: Combining Unrelated Ideas

One of the most potent ways to find creative ideas is to take two completely unrelated concepts and try to combine them. This ability to associate unrelated ideas is a natural process for our brains but we often underuse this capability in finding novel ideas.  

About The Hack

Associative thinking, the ability to combine unrelated ideas, underlies a lot of innovation we see in the real world. Google search, one of the most well known inventions, is the product of associative thinking. When Sergei Brin and Larry Page were students working on improving search, they hit upon an interesting insight. The problem that they were trying to solve is to point users to high quality web pages that contain information users would find useful But how do you determine which websites are good and which ones are not? Their “aha” moment came when they realized that academic journals have a mechanism to identify high quality papers — the number of times a paper is cited by others. Applying the same concept to web pages, they realized that the more a web page is linked to by others the more authoritative it must be. They used that idea to create their first algorithm to rank web pages and Google was born! 

To use associative thinking in product design, find random objects or concepts and try to connect it to your central problem. For example, suppose you are tasked with making a new kind of mug. You then think of different objects or attributes, not typically associated with a mug, and see if there are ways to combine it. Suppose you picked a ball to combine with a mug. The simplest way to combine would be a ball-shaped mug. But, you could go further and use an attribute of the ball in a more meaningful way. Let’s say you pick “inflatable” as an aspect to incorporate. That leads you to creating an inflatable mug that is easy to pack on trips and provides good thermal insulation thanks to the layer of air in between. 

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it in product design or with students.

DescriptionTo find a creative idea for product improvement, try to combine a random object or attribute with the product. 
ExampleIn designing a new kind of mug, you combine it with a ball. One attribute of the ball is “inflatable” which leads to the idea of an inflatable mug. The mug is useful because it packs more easily for hiking trips and also provides better thermal insulation due to the layer of air in between.  
Tips Instead of combining objects directly, use an attribute of the random object to combine. That often leads to more interesting and novel ideas  
ExtensionsTo build associative thinking in students, ask them to incorporate other famous characters (fictional or otherwise) into their stories, or do a project that combines their hobbies with a subject they are learning (e.g. music and math)
Creativity Hack: Combining Unrelated Ideas
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Creativity Hack: Designing Through Metaphors

Metaphors by themselves are creative acts — they bring together two unrelated concepts and provide a fresh way of looking at something familiar. Consider the overused and cliched metaphor about creativity, “thinking outside the box”, which implies stepping back and approaching the problem from a different direction. The origin of the metaphor is believed to come from the nine-dots puzzle, where you have to connect a 3×3 grid of dots using four lines or less without lifting the pen. The only way to solve the puzzle, that most people miss, is to connect the lines outside of the imaginary “box” created by the dots. Once you understand the principle behind the puzzle, the meaning of “thinking outside the box” becomes much more clear. 

About The Hack 

Metaphorical thinking can be extended to help trigger creative ideas in product design. The type of ideas that this process generates might come across as more surprising and fun, compared to the typical incremental innovation ideas, and therefore this hack makes for a useful addition to the initial ideation phase. 

As a real world example, suppose you are trying to come up with new feature ideas for your document collaboration tool (e.g. Google Docs). To trigger creative ideas your goal is to try and combine “collaboration” with different natural or artificially created phenomena. Let’s say you pick your phenomenon to be “shadows.” You then explore characteristics of the phenomena that might apply to collaboration. One aspect of shadows is that they hide or make something less visible than the parts that are well lit. Applying this to your product, an idea could be to use AI to selectively add shadows to parts of the document that are more solidly fleshed out. This simple mechanism can nudge collaborators or reviewers to focus on parts of the document that need more work or clarity, thereby improving overall group productivity. 

You can iterate through the process to generate more ideas. For example, another phenomenon could be “name carved on a tree”. What does this phenomenon imply? Why do people carve their names (e.g. “Josh was here”) on trees? It could be that people want to memorialize their presence or perhaps a way to mark their achievement after a long hike. Applying that to our example of collaboration, one idea could be to use AI to determine the order of authorship on a document based on how much different collaborators have contributed to the document. Many times the order of authors is predetermined before the work is actually done and doesn’t get updated based on actual outcome. This feature could make the process more fair for everyone.  

The idea behind this hack is to explore different metaphors because not all of them will yield immediate insights. However, once you get an opening it might help trigger more ideas in that direction.  

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it.

DescriptionApply metaphorical thinking to come up with new product design ideas. Come up with a few natural or artificial phenomena (like shadows, fresh tracks on snow etc.), identify characteristics of the phenomena and apply that to the product under consideration.
ExampleApplying “shadows” to a document collaboration tool could suggest an idea where parts of the document are shadowed to indicate that those sections are complete and nudge collaborators to focus on other sections. 
Tips Not all phenomena will lead to fresh insights, so if no ideas get triggered in a few minutes then pick a different one.  
ExtensionsOnce you get a new direction through metaphors, you can reframe the problem and come up with more ideas. Using the previous example, you could reframe the problem as “how can we guide collaborators to the section that will improve efficiency?” Reframing then leads to a different set of ideas, for example guiding someone to a particular section because someone else is already working on another. 
Creativity Hack: Designing Through Metaphors
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What Neuroscience Tells Us About Learning

Students today spend more time on academic learning than generations before. They cover more ground – learning things like programming or environmental science that their parents didn’t have to fret about – and spend more hours doing homework after school. One study found that in the sixteen-year period from 1981 to 1997, there was a 25% decrease in time spent playing outside and a 145% increase in time spent doing homework. 

As our society advances even more, students will have to cover more and more content, not just during their K1-2 school years but throughout their careers. By some estimates, students growing up today will have to learn entirely new domains and reinvent their careers every few years. Learning is no longer limited to younger ages but is becoming a lifelong journey. 

What does this really imply?

Students have to learn to learn –  acquire knowledge and master concepts faster – without which they will find it harder to stay abreast of new developments coming their way. But it’s not just about superficially memorizing things. Students will have to understand how to apply their newfound knowledge to problem-solving. In other words, learning has to become a more efficient process in terms of speed, depth, and understanding.

Thankfully, advances in neuroscience are giving us clues on how to make learning more efficient. Understanding how the brain processes information can help students take charge of their own learning, not just in their student years but throughout their life.

Neuroscience Of How Our Brain Learns

At a high level, we can view learning as a three-step process. When we encounter any new information, our brain first encodes this information and places it in short-term memory. For example, if you come across a new fact, say learning about a new breed of dog, the information first goes into your short-term memory. The next day, you might recall that your childhood friend had a similar-looking dog, and now you start to remember other details about the dog – how friendly it was, how it played, and so on.

At this stage, your memory is in long-term storage; it continuously consolidates other pieces of information that you already had. Over time you might add more connections to this piece of information, maybe a joke you heard about it, and it starts to get more and more enmeshed with other pieces of memory. 

After a few days, you might forget the name of the breed and try to recall it. You struggle a bit and then remember your friend’s dog, the joke, and other bits of memory that were tied to it. And then the name suddenly comes back to you, and you get a sudden burst of relief! 

A few days later, as you share a story about your childhood friend, her dog and the name of the breed come to your mind effortlessly, and you marvel at how well you remember this now. 

The picture above encapsulates how our memory works. Once we consolidate information into our long-term memory, subsequent retrieval and reconsolidation help to strengthen the memory traces and make it easier to recall information in the future. 

Forgetting Is The Path To Learning

Over the last couple of decades, neuroscientists have discovered interesting things about how our memory works, and counterintuitive as it sounds, forgetting information is an important aspect of remembering! Our brain is constantly pruning information that it thinks it doesn’t need so that it can serve the really important bits of information faster. 

Imagine if your brain stored every little nugget of information that it receives – the color of the shirt a passenger wore in the subway, or the name of the street your friend in another state lives on – it would make it much harder to find the useful information that you really need. So if you don’t need any piece of information, its retrieval strength starts to get weaker. However, when you try to recall something that you have forgotten, i.e., when you have to struggle a bit to remember it, that’s when the brain gets a cue that this particular memory is important and might be needed again.

So, with the process of retrieval, it starts to reconsolidate the information – find newer connections to other traces of memory so the memory is stored more strongly. As a result, this process of forgetting and remembering actually helps you learn better. 

Neuroscience-based memory models give us clues on how to structure our learning for maximum effectiveness. Here are three ways to boost your learning.

Repurpose Failure

When students don’t remember or don’t apply concepts correctly, it’s a sign that the information has been stored weakly in the brain. However, instead of feeling that they are ‘not cut out’ for this kind of work, students need to understand that their failure is simply a sign for their brain to reconfigure and become more efficient. Human brains are designed to learn through mistakes, so it makes sense to reframe forgetting as what it really is – a trigger that tells us that we need to take additional steps to ensure learning is complete. Students should use the opportunity to review concepts again and try to reconcile the mistakes so their understanding of the subject increases.  

Adopt Active Learning Strategies & Neuroscience

Adding some challenge to the learning process that taps our brain’s natural mechanisms to process, store and understand information can significantly boost learning. Such challenges are ‘desirable difficulties’ because they make learning more efficient. Here are a few strategies that students and teachers can adopt: 

  • Retrieval Practice: When learning new information, periodically quiz yourself about the central ideas and new terms encountered without looking at the text. This forces your brain to fetch the answers from long-term memory, and repeated retrieval is going to strengthen your memory.
  • Spaced Learning: To add more desirable difficulty to learning, practice retrievals after a period of time. When you start forgetting, you exert more effort in trying to remember, which then cues the brain to store the information more deeply. The gap between learning and retrieving can be anything from a day to a week – the key is that the gap should allow for some forgetting to happen.
  • Interleaving: Instead of waiting to thoroughly master one concept before moving on to the next, try mixing up different kinds of problems or concepts once you feel you have gained sufficient understanding in one. Not only does this make good use of spacing, but it also allows you to spot connections or differences between different kinds of problems. 

Research studies show that such strategies can be very effective in the classroom. In one study, students who practiced math problems in three sessions spaced apart by a week performed twice as well on the final test compared to students who did all the practice problems in one session.  In another study, students performed significantly better on their science exam when a practice quiz one month before the exam interleaved concepts on the quiz. 

Associative Learning & Neuroscience

Another useful strategy in learning is to connect the information you are learning to other pieces of knowledge you already possess. If retrieval practice creates deep roots, then associative learning creates more branches that help anchor the information better. To build associative learning

  • Find an analogy: Ask yourself if the new concept is similar to any other piece of information that you already possess. As an example, you might make a connection between gravity and magnetism as both involve a force that they can’t see and attract objects. 
  • Find a personal connection: In some cases, your personal experience can be helpful in finding connections about what you are learning. For example, while learning about the ice age, you might remember an earlier trip to Grand Coulee, where they saw how the Missoula Floods carved out a massive canyon in a very short time. The scale and impact of the event will give you an enhanced perspective of the topic and deepen your understanding. 

Conclusion

By understanding the neuroscience behind learning, students can take charge of their own learning. The key to efficient learning is to add and embrace the right kind of challenges that push our brains to reconfigure themselves. Unless students lack relevant background or specific skills to make sense of the concept in front of them, such challenges should be welcomed instead of dread. 

With a deeper understanding of the learning process, students can try different approaches and customize them to their needs. As an example, for some students, one day of spacing might be enough, whereas, for others, it might be a week. For the latter set, practicing a skill every day might not be as effective because they haven’t forgotten enough for reconsolidation to take place. With some trial and error, students can identify strategies that work best for them and become smart learners. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit