What's the recipe for invention?

If you give a plant water, sunlight, and nutrients, it will grow fruit. And, if you mix sugar, flour, and butter and then add heat, you get cookies. So, what's the recipe for a team of technologists to continuously develop new product ideas?

First of all, thanks to the commenters for their interesting points of view. I particularly liked "challenging the status quo" and striving for "clarity on constraints and goals".

Here's my formula for driving invention in a tech company.

1. Know your full range of capabilities.

It's great to know the constraints to a problem, and constraints create necessity which is (sometimes) the impetus for innovation. Just ask NASA or the military. But I argue it's even more important to learn what are not constraints. What data do you have that you didn't even know about? What white label applications are available? What academic research is already compiled? Know what's out there.

2. Understand the fundamental business problems.

You can tinker with technology 'til the cows come home. You can also get distracted by working on surface-level business problems that don't really matter. Why did your customers buy your product? Why made the customers of your competitors choose something else? What constraints do they have that you could make go away?

3. Share information!!!

This is the most important ingredient. If some people are away of the capabilities (#1 above) and other are aware of the opportunities (#2 above), but no single person knows both, then you're screwed. There's only one way to fix it, which is to share information the other party doesn't know they should be asking about. The best example: Product Managers should talk to Developers about what they're trying to do. Engineers should talk to Product Managers about what has their hands dirty. This is best done informally, in small groups, with conversation and without PowerPoint.

4. Be methodically imaginative.

Over time, it's easy to take constraints for granted. Remove one single constraint. Then try to solve it again. If that solution looks a whole lot better, then figure out how to eliminate the constraint. Keep doing this one at a time until you've cycled through all your key constraints. You may realize some are holding you back enormously and others very little. If one of your hypothetical solutions looks substantially different - and radically better (or easier) - then you know where to focus. So, think. What if your privacy policy changed? What if your cost to serve was $0? Challenge the conventional wisdom specifically because it's just that... conventional.

5. Develop a culture of "yes".

"No" is not a complete answer; a complete answer is, "yes, if only we had <fill in the blank>". You'd be amazed how often simply stating what would make things easier can do... for relationships, for earning trust, for identifying root issues, and most importantly for driving innovation. Also make a point that good ideas can originate from anywhere. Then take those ideas seriously when they're presented. And recognize that ideas you hear (as a Product Manager) are typically shorthand for problems and solutions. Usually, with a little abstraction, you'll discover some real nuggets.

6. Finaly, provide "the spark".

Invention is like a chemical reaction that requires activation energy. You can mix all these ingredients and they can become volatile, but they still need that extra "kick". So provide it. Give people time to break away from their "normal" routine. Give them room to run with an idea. Let them down-prioritize something else. Pay for lunch. Get offsite. Visit a client. Listen in on fiery customer service calls for an hour. Establish your own version of Innovation Day.

To all you "people managers" out there: if all you push on is efficiency, that's all you'll ever get!

Comments

[Janet Dulsky]

My recipe is as follows; equal parts getting out of the office and spending quality time with customers, being a real user of your own products and those of your competitors, unswerving passion for the customer, and courage to challenge the status quo.
• Getting out of the office and spending quality time with customers…not because customers can tell you about new products they want, but because by observing how customers really interact with your product (or your competitors' products) in their own environment can give you insights about the problems that still need to be solved
• Being a real user of your own products and those of your competitors…gives you a real connection to your customers’ experience with your product. What causes you fits when you use it? What do you wish it would do? What works well and could it be better?
• Unswerving passion for the customer…means that every idea is filtered by what is good, right, important, helpful to and makes a better experience for the customer
• Courage to challenge the status quo…means the ability to try a new approach, a new process, a new paradigm, in spite of the “but we’ve always done it this way” mentality, to solve problems for the customer

[Sagar Doshi]

1) A quality team

This goes without saying, but the people you surround yourself with are the most important factor in the success or failure of any project. And when I say "quality", I'm referring to the caliber of performance and to the attitude. You have to have brilliant problem-solvers with the right technical skill-sets, but they also have to be humble (able to admit mistakes), work well together, and be absolutely passionate about the field in which they are working. This, too, with a weak attachment to the "way things are done". In other words, the team needs to feel free to pivot or shift without delay as soon as a process or idea no longer works.

2) Emphasis -- above all -- on the end user and/or customer

At the end of the day, every successful product or service needs to meet a need of some sort. That need will always be changing and evolving, and the best companies, the ones that we remember, track that need like hawks. They know our needs and wants better than we do and before we do. Every time they interact with you, your team, or your product, the experience needs to be one of delight (they have to be awed by how well your product works) and empathy (even with decisions they don't like, they need to feel you're being reasonable; that if they were in your shoes, they may have made the same choice).

2) Clarity on constraints and goals

People will always be more creative when they truly understand the constraints under which they operate. When they can see the boundaries and rules of what they're "supposed" to do, they'll know exactly how to push up against and break down those boundaries and rules at just the right moment. It's much harder to be creative in a vacuum.

At the same time, they should have a mission statement or, perhaps, a general idea of the problem they want to solve. That doesn't mean they need to know they're going to develop a product with X features for Y customers with a Z timeline. It's more a higher level understanding (e.g. they want to make information widely available to humanity; they want to reduce childhood hunger; or they want to reduce global energy consumption). Once everyone's mind is generally magnetized in the right direction, each person's wildly unique perspective will help ensure greater creativity. This will also help the team clearly define success. If you don't know what you're trying to do, you'll never know if you're getting there.

3) Speedy, flexible decision-making

Slowing down decision-making will cripple an organization and make you lose against competitors every time. Everyone needs to agree on a way to make the right decisions, and then they need to stick with it. This doesn't mean that you emphasize weak judgment or no research. You have to try to maintain the quality of your decision-making given inherent uncertainty, while reducing all extraneous inefficiencies. For instance, you have to have faith that the quality team you've put together is capable of making the right decisions, rather than having a five-tier approval process every time adjustments or course corrections are required. And then, the moment that the decision-making process you've chosen stops producing the right type of decision, you need to be able to be dynamic and adapt accordingly.