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One of the best innovation stories I've ever heard came to me from a senior executive at a leading tech business firm. Evidently, his company had won a million-dollar contract to design a sensor that could detect pollutants at very pocket-sized concentrations underwater. It was an unusually complex trouble, so the firm ready a squad of cleft microchip designers, and they started putting their heads together.

About 45 minutes into their first working session, the marine biologist assigned to their team walked in with a handbag of clams and set them on the table. Seeing the confused looks of the chip designers, he explained that clams can find pollutants at simply a few parts per 1000000, and when that happens, they open their shells.

As it turned out, they didn't really need a fancy chip to detect pollutants — but a simple one that could alert the system to clams opening their shells. "They saved $999,000 and ate the clams for dinner," the executive told me.

That, in essence, is the value of open up innovation. When you accept a really tough problem, it often helps to expand skill domains beyond specialists in a single field. Many believe information technology is just these kinds of unlikely combinations that are key to coming up with breakthroughs. In fact, a report analyzing 17.9 million scientific papers found that the nearly highly cited work tended to be mostly rooted inside a traditional field, with just a smidgen of insight taken from some anarchistic place.

But what if the chore had been simply to make a chip that was 30% more efficient? In that case, a marine biologist dropping clams on the table would accept been nothing more than a distraction. Or, what if the company needed to place a new business model? Or what if — as is the case today — current bit engineering is nearing its theoretical limits, and a completely new architecture needs to exist dreamed up?

In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that every innovation strategy fails somewhen, because innovation is, at its core, nigh solving problems — and there are as many ways to innovate equally there are types of problems to solve. In that location is no one "true" path to innovation.

Notwithstanding all too oftentimes, organizations act as if there is. They lock themselves into one type of strategy and say, "This is how we innovate." Information technology works for a while, merely eventually it catches up with them. They discover themselves locked into a set of solutions that don't fit the issues they need to solve. Essentially, they get square-peg companies in a circular-hole world and lose relevance.

Nosotros need to start treating innovation like other business organization disciplines — as a prepare of tools that are designed to attain specific objectives. Just equally we wouldn't rely on a single marketing tactic or a unmarried source of financing for the entire life of an organization, nosotros demand to build upwards a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks.

It was with this in mind that I created the Innovation Matrix to help leaders place the right type of strategy to solve a problem, by asking two questions: How well can we define the problem? and How well tin we ascertain the skill domain(s) needed to solve it?

W170608_SATELL_FOURTYPES

Sustaining innovation. Nearly innovation happens hither, considering most of the time nosotros are seeking to get better at what we're already doing. We want to amend existing capabilities in existing markets, and nosotros have a pretty clear idea of what problems demand to be solved and what skill domains are required to solve them.

For these types of problems, conventional strategies like strategic roadmapping, traditional R&D labs, and using acquisitions to bring new resource and skill sets into the arrangement are unremarkably constructive. Design thinking methods, such as those championed past David Kelley, founder of the design house IDEO and Stanford's d.school, can as well be enormously helpful if both the trouble and the skills needed to solve it are well understood.

Breakthrough innovation. Sometimes, as was the case with the example of detecting pollutants underwater, nosotros run into a well-defined problem that'due south just devilishly difficult to solve. In cases similar these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains, such as adding a marine biologist to a team of chip designers. Open up innovation strategies can be highly effective in this regard, because they help to expose the problem to various skill domains.

As Thomas Kuhn explained in the The Construction of Scientific Revolutions, nosotros accelerate in specific fields by creating paradigms, which sometimes tin can make it very difficult to solve a problem within the domain in which it arose — but the problem may be resolved fairly easily within the paradigm of an adjacent domain.

Disruptive innovation.When HBS professor Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in his bookThe Innovator'southward Dilemma, it was a revelation. In his study of why good firms fail, he establish that what is normally considered best practice — listening to customers, investing in continuous improvement, and focusing on the lesser line — can be lethal in some situations.

In a nutshell, what he discovered is that when the basis of competition changes, because of technological shifts or other changes in the marketplace, companies tin discover themselves getting better and improve at things people want less and less. When that happens, innovating your products won't assist — you lot have to innovate your concern model.

More recently, Steve Blank has developed lean startup methods and Alex Osterwalder has created tools like the business concern model canvas and value proposition sail. These are all essential assets for anyone who finds themselves in the situation Christensen described, and they are proving to be effective in a wide variety of contexts.

Basic enquiry. Pathbreaking innovations never arrive fully formed. They e'er begin with the discovery of some new phenomenon. No 1 could judge how Einstein'due south discoveries would shape the earth, or that Alan Turing's universal computer would someday get a real thing. Equally Neil deGrasse Tyson said when asked about the bear upon of a major discovery, "I don't know, but we'll probably taxation information technology." To his point, Einstein's discoveries now play essential roles in technologies ranging from nuclear energy to computer technologies and GPS satellites.

Some big enterprises, like IBM and Procter & Gamble, have the resources to invest in labs to pursue basic research. Others, like Experian's DataLabs, encourage researchers and engineers to get to conferences and hold internal seminars on what they learn. Google invites almost 30 top researchers to spend a breather year at the company and funds 250 academic projects annually.

Yet one of the best-kept secrets is how fifty-fifty small and medium-size enterprises can access globe-class research. The federal government funds a multifariousness of programs, such as the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a serial of manufacturing hubs to assist develop advanced technologies, and Argonne Pattern Works. Local universities, which have a wealth of scientific talent, can besides be a valuable resource.

Taking steps to participate in these types of programs tin can help pocket-sized business compete in competitive markets. For case, Mike Wixom of Navitas, a four-year-onetime battery visitor that joined the Joint Middle for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) as an chapter, told me, "Equally a pocket-sized company, we're fighting for our survival on a daily footing. Becoming a JCESR affiliate gives united states of america an early on peek at technology, and you get to give feedback well-nigh what kinds manufacturing issues are likely to come up up with whatsoever detail chemistry."

So, clearly, being able to attain out to scientists on the cut border can help a concern plan for the future, simply as the other approaches, such as design thinking, open up innovation, business concern model innovation, and others, can help propel a business frontwards if applied in the right context. Simply no one solution fits all issues.

If your innovation strategy is struggling or declining, consider whether information technology's because y'all've locked yourself into a single arroyo. There are always new problems to solve; acquire to apply the solution that all-time fits your electric current problem.