That's Just the Half of It!

What you know is only half of innovating. The other half is the new knowledge you can and must create.

After years of helping others generate ideas, I am now humbly aware that idea generation is less likely innovation’s critical path, despite what many assume. Ideas—particularly ones that deserve serious attention—are more likely outcomes, not the input, driving successful innovations. Peter Drucker alluded to this over 25 years ago when he declared in Innovation and Entrepreneurship that the bright idea is the least reliable source of innovation.

Innovation’s more likely critical path is knowledge-creation—what most of us call learning. Strong ideas come from knowledge-creation. Weak ones eventually reveal some form of knowledge omission or commission, especially about what is valuable to the customer. When R&D-based innovations break through an otherwise “me-too” crowd of look-alike products, it is not because someone made a lucky guess. It is because some new learning occurred, some new observation was made, some knowledge was created, and correspondingly, something new and valuable was conceived.

What most see in successful innovation are outcomes. However, the paths leading up to these outcomes are filled with:

•     experience and experiments (physical, virtual, mathematical) that create data,

•    interpretations of data that create information, and

•     applications of the information, successful or not, that create understanding of what works and what doesn't, and why...and that, in turn, develops knowledge.

These knowledge-creation paths twist and turn and cycle back, far from the mythical straight line hindsight suggests—more like a “Slinky” than a taught string.

R&D organizations are filled with knowledgeable experts—those who understand not only what works, but why. However, it is not simply what experts know that creates value.  It’s what experts do with what they know that leads to value creation—the critical path for innovating. 

The irony of the expert’s knowledge is that it can be the very thing that blocks learning, especially about the customers’ value ecosystem. It has often been said, “all value is derived from context.” If true, then to create new knowledge the expert must interpret the context (the ecosystem) in which the customer lives. That is where new value emerges and where innovation is nourished.  

Identifying where gaps are in our knowledge, especially of what’s meaningful and valuable to customers, may be where the critical path begins for the knowledge creators in R&D. Selecting and describing gaps in our knowledge may be one of the more reliable ways of targeting where we should focus our efforts. Successful innovations always seem to emerge from that kind of knowledge-creation. 

What you know is only half of it.  


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 2011. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.