Really big, unique disruptive innovations don’t always come from established experts in the field. Whether we are trying to innovate products, services, retail, or marketing strategy, it is very difficult to disrupt yourself. This is not news, but it remains an uncomfortable problem if you are the expert, or established market leader.
Max Planck, the famous physicist famously quipped that “science advances one funeral at a time”. So, to somewhat loosely extend the metaphor, if we are an established market leader, how do we avoid becoming the funeral that enables the disruption of our category?
In this blog, I'll summarize a few of the reasons why it is psychologically so hard for established market leaders to generate big, unique, disruptive innovation, and discuss why T-Shaped Innovators may provide at least part of the solution to this conundrum.
The Problem With Experts! One problem is that experts tend to come up with similar ideas to each other on similar timelines. Experts can be individuals or companies, but being one almost by definition makes it hard to pull away from the pack and be truly disruptive.
This doesn't mean that expertise or mastery is bad, far from it. Amongst other things, it is essential to turn ideas into reality, keep us honest, stop us following unproductive pathways or reinventing the wheel. It also key to constantly evolving our products or processes. But true disruption typically requires us to go beyond the usual suspects, and make new, unexpected, but useful connections. In many cases, this can be harder for a domain expert than most, because their knowledge primes them to naturally follow certain pathways. There are a few things that contribute to this.
- Multiple Discovery, or Simultaneous Invention. More often than not, innovation races between experts tend to be photo finishes. For example, the invention of the telephone (the old fashioned precursor to the cell phone), which we normally attribute to Alexander Graham Bell, was also the subject of a patent application on the same day by Elisha Gray. Even the signature inventions of geniuses like Newton and Darwin were close run 'races'. Leibniz independently came up with calculus before Newton formally published his theory, and Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin actually presented the theory of natural selection jointly to the Royal Society. This is at least in part because innovation stands on the shoulders of giants. In almost all cases it involves integrating strands of existing knowledge in new ways, and experts in the same field tend to have access to the same strands of knowledge as each other. They go to the same conferences, talk to the same consumers, and read the same journals or blogs! Even the greatest discoveries are often either the result of serendipity (a topic for another blog), or are primed by the 'stars aligning', and the right strands of information becoming available at the same time.
- Hammers looking for nails. There are numerous cognitive biases that drive us to look for solutions that preferentially use our skill set. These include the confirmation bias, functional fixedness, self affirmation bias, availability cascades, and self reference effects. These naturally blinker us to alternate approaches, can drive us to (unconsciously) force fit our skills to fit a problem, or even preferentially select problems to solve that fit our expertise. For example, a military expert will tend to look for military solutions to a conflict, while a diplomat will tend to favor a diplomatic approach to the same issue. A surgeon will be biased towards a surgical solution, a physiotherapist may suggest rehab, or a nutritionalist a diet change. If we are losing market share because of a mixture of poor product performance and poor communication, the natural bias of a product designer is to see product improvement as the big opportunity, because she will see more options in that area. The marketer will likely see communication as the big opportunity for similar reasons.
This applies to individuals, but also to companies and cultures. A traditional automobile manufacturer will almost inevitably find it harder to create a breakthrough car than a Tesla, because the combined, interdependent expertise of the company will automatically be drawn to more traditional solution matrices.
One answer to this is to simply bring in new expertise, or new perspectives, via either individuals or acquisitions. This can be very effective when it is easy to predict what skills are likely to fit with the evolution, or ideally revolution of a category. For example, car companies recruiting programmers, or pharmaceutical companies recruiting geneticists.
However, there are still challenges even with this. Integrating new expertise into an existing expert hierarchy can be difficult, especially in big, established organizations. And almost by definition, it can be hard to second guess where surprisingly productive new innovation interfaces will occur. And if the 'new' expertise is obvious, competitors are likely doing something similar - this is great for maintaining a position in an innovation arms race, but less likely to drive differentiated disruption. And to this point, often the magic of disruptive innovation is that it comes from left field. Taxi companies didn’t see Uber coming, any more than Blockbuster saw Netflix, or the record industry i-Tunes or Pandora, at least until it was too late.
There is no single, simple answer to these kinds of innovation challenges, but one option that I believe could be used more often is the recruitment and nurturing of expert generalists, or T-Shaped Innovators.
What is a T-Shaped Innovator? These are people with deep skill and experience in one or more disciplines (the vertical part of the 'T'), but who also have a broad knowledge in a wide variety of other areas (the horizontal part of the "T"). This helps them to connect experts from different disciplines, and to beg, borrow or steal ideas from non obvious sources. The broader the vertical reach of the "T", the more likely these people are to make surprising connections. I’ve talked often about actively searching for inspiration at interfaces, the power of integrating art and science, biomimicry, and analogy. People whose knowledge spreads across these superficially disconnected domains are more likely to make the surprising, potentially disruptive connections that activate these interfaces. And people who have multiple vertical pillars, sometimes called 'comb shaped innovators' can be even more adept at making unobvious, surprisingly effective connections.
These curious people won’t know as much about a field as an expert who has spent their life focused on a narrow area, and as a result, their value can be harder to quantify. But they will know about a lot of different, often emerging areas, and often know enough to see opportunities. Good ones are also sufficiently well connected to know where to go for that deep, narrow knowledge when it is needed to progress an idea. To that point, I'm not in any way suggesting that we replace experts. They remain essential, and play a particularly important role in the 'effective' part of the 'surprisingly effective' equation. But finding and nurturing T-Shaped innovators may be a way to add more neuro plasticity to big, established expert organizations, and so make them a little better at disrupting themselves.
Adapted from an article originally published in Innovation Excellence
Pete Foley is a consultant focused on catalyzing and supporting Innovation in Product, Retail, Branding and Marketing Design. Building upon 25 years experience at P&G, he leverages insights derived from Behavioral and Visual Science, applied to deliver practical, actionable results
