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Sunday, August 30, 2015

Bias and Innovation Solutions in Context

Colleague and master innovator from the enterprise Pete Foley, is now writing in Innovation Excellence.  See his most recent contribution: Why I Moved to Las Vegas and What it can tell us about innovation.   Also relates to bias in research.

" ... Once we have found an innovative solution to a problem, there is a danger that we are satisfied, the confirmation bias kicks in, and consequently we ‘turn off’ and move into execution mode. This good enough solution may be OK in an uncompetitive environment, but what happens if someone else keeps looking, and finds a much better idea? You don’t want to be the guy fine-tuning the latest refinement to a horse drawn carriage when somebody else is developing the motorcar.

Fighting natural human biases is always challenging, but in this case, there are many things we can do. For example, we can simply park ideas, and push teams to come up with multiple concepts. Or we can create internal competitions, and have different groups battle to come up with increasingly more breakthrough ideas. Or we can simply ask innovators to for their analogy to the aforementioned motor car, assuming they are in the horse drawn carriage business. Digging back into my background of consumer goods, that might be a detergentless washing machine. Or back to our automobile example, maybe the commercial driverless car. I’m by no means sure how far away that is, but it does question how much innovation effort you might want to put against innovating the driving experience in the mid to long term? ..... "

Read the whole thing, and follow Pete's writing,  See also his relevant blog.

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