Does your business culture nurture innovation, or stifle it? Are you looking for ways to build your business creatively but finding daunting constraints at every turn? This course is designed to help you understand the forces that limit innovation, identify those barriers in your own business culture, and break free of them to realize the full value of your imagination. You’ll learn new skills and strategies that you can immediately apply to drive innovation in your group or organization, and you’ll build an understanding of the six most common constraints on innovation in both individual and group settings—that is, the six ways that creative thinking is often sabotaged before it can produce results. You’ll also learn to recognize stakeholders who are actively invested in stopping your ideas in their tracks. Finally, you’ll examine societal and technical constraints that you’ll need to overcome to foster a forward-thinking culture. Through case studies and interactive exercises, you’ll learn how to: - Generate, assess, and implement great ideas in your organization - Build your organization’s capacity for innovation, including creating an innovative culture - Lead innovation projects, processes, and teams - Recognize big issues lurking on the horizon before they become constraints - Drive adoption of great ideas - Develop and manage an innovation portfolio - Innovate to stay relevant and competitive in a fast-changing landscape
The Physics of Innovation
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From the course by Vanderbilt University
Strategic Innovation Toolkit for Managers
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From the lesson
Technological Constraints: How to Take a Really Hard Problem and Make It Completely Impossible
Meet the Instructors
David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
[MUSIC]
Physical constraints are these laws of nature that we're going to talk about.
This is the first set of constraints.
And so this is, I mean, think of this like why are some things hard?
Well, some things are just hard and it's because of the physics of it,
maybe the biology of it.
So here we're going to talk about the laws of physics, biology.
And really not them in themselves, that is, talking about how matter behaves.
We're talking about your understanding of how matter behaves.
And so in this class, we're really interested, from a managerial perspective,
we have to understand what we know about the things.
because if it's a matter of knowing it, we could find that out.
But the problem we have, really, is one of knowing whether we know or not.
Let me put it into this sort of two by two here.
Talk about sort of these four perspectives on knowledge and
our ability to know something.
But we're going to talk first about unconscious incompetence.
I'll go into these in a little more detail.
But just from the beginning,
unconscious incompetence is when we don't know we don't know something.
Then generally we move to a state of conscious incompetence,
where we know what we don't know but we still don't know it.
We move then to conscious competence, where we know what we don't know,
we know what we know, and we know how to do the things we need to know.
And then also unconscious competence.
That is, where we're able to do things.
We're competent but we don't know why or how we do it.
We do it in an unconscious state.
So each one of these represents sort of a constraint of sorts.
And we're going to look at these in detail individually.
So let me start with unconscious incompetence.
Unconscious incompetence is when you don't know, what you don't know.
Why is that a problem?
Well sometimes not knowing what you don't know can lead to really adverse outcomes.
So for example, there was a big medical innovation in the 1950s in Europe.
There's this wonder drug that was developed.
This drug was like aspirin, like a wonder drug.
It was prescribed for headache, for
pain killing, it was a tranquilizer, a remedy for coughs and colds.
And at one point they figured out that this would be a great thing for
morning sickness.
In fact, it stopped morning sickness when a woman's pregnant.
It stopped them from this urge to throw up.
At the time, medical science believed that there was no way this
drug could go across the placental barrier from the mother to the child.
But guess what.
We were wrong.
And so this drug, thalidomide, resulted, the wide use of this drug,
thalidomide, resulted, over two years,
in the birth of tens of thousands of severely deformed babies.
Because, in fact, the drug did go across the placental barrier, and
it was a problem.
Ironically, well, it's not ironic, but in fact, in the United States,
did not experience the problems with the thalidomide that other countries did.
Because in the US, the FDA had disapproved the use of it.
The FDA said, this thing requires further study.
And in fact, at the time, that was a very controversial decision.
Because the drug industry lobby said, why do we have to do this?
You guys don't know what you're talking about.
This drug is safe.
We know everything about this drug.
We know that it's safe.
Because they had done animal studies and
assumed that people were going to behave the same way.
And so these are kind the of decisions we talked about last time.
Remember, the FDA was talking about how it is that we do these studies and certain
organizations had ideas about how the FDA needed speed up their approval process.
Well this is one case where that societal barrier was actually a good thing,
at least in the United States.
And so again we have this problem where we don't know what we don't know.
Next we're going to talk about conscious incompetence.
That's when we know something, but we don't know what to do about it.
We're still incompetent.
We know that we don't know it, but we're not really sure how to do it.
And so in the A12 development, for example,
they had to develop a new kind of fuel.
The problem with the fuel was that there's 11,000 gallons of this stuff on board.
And in some places,
normal fuels would actually explode at these high temperatures.
So they said they'd, fuel, they'd keep it in the wings.
The wings got anywhere between 350 degrees up to 700 degrees.
And conventional fuels would explode at that high temperature.
And so they develop a new fuel that would not explode at those low temperatures.
And the chemist got to work, and they innovated and
they really got thinking about it.
They were trying to figure out, how do we do this?
How do we make this happen?
In the end,
they came up with a formulation that only burned at a temperature,
I think it burned at a temperature of 3,400 degrees, something like that.
And what happened was, it was such a high burning temperature that you
couldn't even light it with a match, that the stuff would not light.
And so then the problem was how do we start the engine,
if we can't light this stuff?
And in fact, they had to use explosives to start the engine to get this thing
to start burning this fuel.
And so that's a case where we know we need this fuel and
we're trying to get to it so we have to do all these steps in order to get to
the place where we're actually competent.
The kinds of problems that are caused by not knowing, or knowing what we don't know
are often solved by this kind of incremental development.
That we make this incremental advancement.
It's sort of where our understanding is close and we just have to keep trying,
and keep trying, and keep trying, in small ways,
to get to the place where we need to be.
Unfortunately, the knowledge may still not be accessible.
We may not be able to get to that place because we may think we're at the edge of
our knowing, and we may not actually be there.
And so, conscious incompetence is a better state than unconscious incompetence,
but not fully ideal.
Next, we'll make it to this conscious competence state.
Conscious competence is when you understand
the kind of problem that you face.
And you actually have the tools to be able to solve it.
And so, lots of problems in engineering and science take this form.
Especially in engineering, for that matter.
We have analysis, we have models, we have these tools that we can use to analyze
the world and try to understand what it is we need to do in some situation.
If you were an architect, you were going to build a house,
you could look up the tables for how thick the floor has to be,
how thick the pillars have to be to hold this thing up.
Bridge design, for example,
is another place where we understand a great deal about bridge design.
And so we can build an amazing structure like this, and do it fairly
efficiently using the knowledge that we have, and so the conscious competence.
One thing, though, that happens here with conscious competence is
we don't know the edge of our competence.
And sometimes we may sort of fall off the edge.
There's a great book called To Err Is Human.
And what they talk about there is how the development sometimes outpaces our
knowledge.
And so what'll happen is we'll make a bridge longer and thinner,
make a bridge slightly longer and thinner, and
they'll make another bridge longer and thinner.
And they'll keep doing this until a bridge falls down.
And they'll say, okay, well that didn't work and then they'll back up a little bit
and try to push out again, and push out again, and push out again.
And so with that kind of failing being a process of moving forward is how we sort
of find the edge of what our competence, our conscious competence is.
Another problem with conscious competence that is you may not end up with solutions
that are not along the path, the normal path of development.
And so there's been a long-standing problem in the airline industry.
So in the airline industry, it's well known that if a plane is in the air flying
people somewhere, it's making money.
If a airplane is sitting on the ground, it is not making money, right,
because it's just sort of sitting there.
And so one of the problems is how do I get the passengers into the seats as quickly
as possible.
For a long time, people tried to solve the problem using queuing theories and
queuing models.
Do we put them in the front and board from the back and
have the high numbers come back?
Or do we board from the front and have the low numbers, or do we go from both ends?
All these different ways.
Well the solution, one of tne of the better solutions that was come up with,
was not come up with in this way.
And that solution is by Southwest Airlines.
And what they do is they don't assign seat numbers at all.
And so think about it this way.
If you don't assign seat numbers, people think, wow, if I don't show up early,
I'm going to get a really bad seat.
So people show up early.
And as soon as the doors open, people run on board and
find the seats as quickly as they can and sit down, to find the best seats.
And that solves a problem in a way that would never have been arrived at using our
conscious competent model of analysis and modeling that we would normally get there.
And so that's the one problem.
That's a constraint there, is that we may not get to a different kind of solution.
Then we have the problem of unconscious competence,
where we don't know what we know.
We know what to do.
We seem to know what we do, we're able to get stuff done, but
we're maybe not really sure why.
There's a great book called Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matt Crawford,
where he talks about, basically Matt Crawford worked in a think tank.
He was sort of your normal white collar intellectual.
He threw it all away and became a motorcycle mechanic.
Began to work on antique and vintage motorcycles.
And what he talks about in one part of the book is really interesting.
He says when someone brings him a bike for repair,
he doesn't know what's wrong with it.
He doesn't even know if he can repair it or not.
But still he takes the bike in.
And so again, he's unconscious of what he knows, because he's pretty sure that
he can get there because he's worked on similar bikes before.
Because he uses a diagnostic process.
Because he's got rules of thumbs, and traditional understanding.
And even a bunch of assumptions that he's going to make.
And he does, he finds his way through there.
So by working through the bike, and
he makes lots of sort of decisions as he goes through.
He's often and usually able to get the bike where he needs to.
And if he can't, then he goes and finds another person who's also unconsciously
competent, who's able to work on the bike for him.
Unconscious competence can be a good thing in a case like this,
around motorcycle repair.
However, it can be a bad thing when we don't understand that we don't know
something.
In which case we've gone around the full circle and
we're once again at the state of unconscious incompetence.
And so these form kinds of constraints for
us that we really have to understand our understanding of what it is we know.
Again, unconscious incompetence.
We don't know what we don't know.
Conscious incompetence, we know what we don't know.
Conscious competence, we know what we know.
And then unconscious competence, where we don't know what we know.
And so this is the cycle that we want to understand and
be sure to address when we're stepping into a new kind of problem.
So how do we overcome these physical constraints?
Well one thing to do is to start out and
figure out how hard the problem are we facing.
Is this a really, really hard problem that's going to require lots of money, and
lots of time, and lots of people?
Or is this going to be an easy to solve problem,
one that's not going to require all those things?
And this is something that we can actually stop and try to estimate.
We can find experts, people who've worked from the field before,
people who've solved these kinds of problems.
We can develop schedules.
We can do a patent search, look at expert opinions.
Those are all the kinds of things that can help us understand,
what's the nature of this problem that we face?
And often people just sort of jump off and do it out of excitement, or out of ego.
Jump into a problem trying to solve it without really sort of stopping and
saying, okay, what kind of problem is this?
How hard is this likely to be to solve?
Another thing we can do is hire an alien.
And what I mean here is, well, let me just tell you a little story.
I was once touring an insurance company, a health insurance company.
And there were two gentlemen in a cubicle as we walked by.
And the person who was guiding me around said, yeah,
those two guys, we got them when they were working on the SETI.
I said, the SETI, like what, the couch that you sit on?
He said, no no, SETI, like S-E-T-I.
The SETI project, which was a search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
And so what these guys would do is, they would sit,
develop ways of looking with these radio telescopes looking into space.
They were just looking for intelligence, looking for
some kind of signal that there might be intelligent life out there.
And so there are electrical engineers, statisticians,
people like that with those kind of skills.
What kind of role do those people have in an insurance company?
From the insurance company perspective they certainly are aliens.
And so as aliens in the insurance company, what they bring, the positive thing they
bring is they brought this ability to look at large amounts of data and
to begin to make sense out of it.
And so one thing was health insurance, you have a person who gets a prescription,
then go to the doctor.
They go to the doctor to get a prescription.
Then something else happens and they get a prescription again, they go to the doctor.
How do we understand that?
Are there patterns there, are there things that we can see?
Really, really small patterns happening out of this big amount of data.
And these particular aliens are the ones who could understand that kind of thing.
And so you want to bring those people inside your organizations who have those
kind of skills.
And we talked earlier, from the organizational constraint perspective, for
example, where these kind of people, it's really difficult to bring them in,
because we're not sure what they know.
We're not sure how to work with them.
We're not sure, even whether we like them or not.
But it's important that we do that.
Next we might let other people do the hard part.
Eric Von Hippel calls these people lead users.
And so lead users are people who are really, they're often not,
they're not professionals.
They're not people who are paid to do this thing.
But they're people who are so rabidly into a hobby or
into a type of product that they just can't be stopped.
And so you may have a friend who is a bicycle nut, he's got a bicycle
that only weighs like three ounces he can hold it up with his finger and
goes a hundred miles an hour, it's made of carbon fiber, whatever.
But this person is not a bicycle manufacturer.
The person is a consumer of these things but who's always constantly tweaking and
making it better, making it better, making it better.
That person knows a great deal about bicycles.
I also recall an example from a long time ago, it seems like long in Internet years.
Where people were sort of fooling around with this thing called WiFi,
the wireless Internet, WiFi.
And this one person reported he had made a connection, a two mile connection on WiFi.
And that's pretty far, given the standard of WiFi is not that much.
I believe it's like 300 feet, and not two miles.
And the astounding thing was that on each end of that two miles was a antenna made
of a Pringles can.
So we know Pringles potato chips come in that little silver can, and
they were able to make the connection using those.
And so those are the kind of lead users who have a great deal of understanding and
who are pushing the limits of what we know.
They don't have the kind of conscious competence.
That is, that they don't know from a modeling and analytics, and
they're not designing it that way.
They're just trying things out.
And they're learning from that.
And so this might be a really good source of ideas that kind of solutions that you
might not come at in a sort of head on conventional way.
The next thing to know, is to understand how far do I invest?
The first problem is understanding how broad is this chasm?
Because if you don't put enough resources and time and money and
emotion into getting across this chasm, and only put half of that in there,
that's going to be a problem, right?
You fall into the chasm.
And so understand what it is you're going to take to invest.
If it's the biggest project you've ever signed off on,
you need to understand that and go ahead and commit.
And if you're not willing to commit, you're not going to make it halfway.
You're not going to make it all the way across the chasm by
resourcing it only halfway.
The other thing to understand though, is to understand that some things are,
if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well.
And so there we also need to understand how hard is the problem, right?
We just talked about it.
How hard is the problem we're addressing, and
understand that there's sort of we've reached a certain point,
we may have to say to ourselves, you know what?
It's not worth getting there.
If you think about this in terms of your chances of success,
if you don't see success, if you don't see that you can be successful and
generally improve things, you may hit this point of diminishing returns, right?
Where we invest more, and we invest more, and we invest more, and
we only get a little bit out of it.
And so look at a curve like this where 80% more investment only gets you
20%more performance.
And you need to understand that and be able to say, okay, we've invested enough.
We're at the point of diminishing returns.
Let's ship it the way it is,
even though it hasn't met specifications that's like the A12.
Or, let's stop the project, because we're just putting good money after bad.
And so again, we need to invest to a point.
Understanding that if you avoid failure, that is if you stop a project,
even though you've spent money and you stop a project,
that that failure is a success because you've avoided greater failure.
And so if we stop something that's not going to work in the long run,
we've stopped people from putting their time into it.
We've stopped people from putting resources into it, money into it,
all these things.
And we can use those on other projects.
And so we avoid a great deal of opportunity costs by actually stopping
something, by avoiding,
allowing our failure to allow us to avoid larger failure.
And then just put a stop on it.
So, why some things are hard?
Because the laws of physics,
because we don't understand how to make matter behave.
And if we pretend that we do, that's just a setup for trouble.
And so we want to make sure we always stop and say,
okay, do I understand what's going on here?
And even if I don't, do I understand what I don't understand?
Next up, time constraints.
[MUSIC]
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