Innovation is Harder than We Think

I believe that "growing inventions into innovation" is an inherently worthwhile activity, and it can be lucrative.  I love working with people who are passionate about practicing "the art of the new."  In the realm of innovation, optimism is healthy and necessary.  However, the landscape is littered with those organizations that were blindly optimistic, and most of us are too optimistic.

Consider this assertion by Art De Vany:

Pervasive optimistic bias is based on (1) unrealistically positive self-evaluations; (2) unrealistic optimism about future events and plans; (3) an illusion of control.  People exaggerate their control over events and the importance of their own actions in ensuring desirable outcomes.

Certainly, there is craft in doing innovation, and some people are more expert than others.  Even so, such expertise almost always takes longer to develop than we acknowledge.  The good news is that expertise is within our reach, if we do the work.  As neuroscientist Daniel Levetin observes:

The emerging picture...is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything...Learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of information in neural tissue.  The more experiences we have with something, the stronger the memory/learning trace for that experience becomes...Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience...It is impossible to overestimate the importance of these factors; caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes.

Unfortunately, most of aren't really that good at learning.  As experimental psychologist Cordelia Fine notes:

Our first problem is that we are, at root, very poor scientists.  All sorts of biases slip in unnoticed as we form and test our beliefs, and these tendencies lead us astray to a surprising degree...[E]ven when we genuinely seek the truth, our careless data collection and appraisal can leave us in woeful error about ourselves, other people, and the world.

Even if we successfully apply diligence, passion, and healthy skepticism to the cultivation of our craft, the accumulation of skill is insufficient.  As I use the term, innovation means the adoption of a new way of doing something by users, and the interdependent social dynamics of users are impossible to predict or control.  That matters, because users play a major role in determining the success of a prospective innovation.  As De Vany concludes:

The craft of filmmaking can be learned, but there is no learnable craft when it comes to predicting how a movie will play with audiences.

I can't help but agree with Andy Hargadon, when he writes:

The pursuit of innovation requires patiently and humbly building a new network of people, ideas, and objects around the original [idea].

Patience and humility: repeat that 10,000 times, Dave.

For more reading: How Breakthroughs Happen, Hollywood Economics, A Mind of its Own, and This is Your Brain on Music