Connecting the three most important innovation theories

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"

Issac Newton. 

To integrate the fantastic ideas of creativity and innovation management body of knowledge into an organized discipline, we need to collect and understand these ideas first. However, where to start? The fact that the existing library of approaches and studies is so extensive, and the fact that our time and ability to dwell in them is limited, leads us to acquire information in parts and as we go, and subsequently become like the people trying to describe an elephant from their point of view. 

Image - Hans Moller

The metaphor of people surrounding a life-sized elephant is useful to describe how difficult it is to perceive big forms. Still, does it need to be so? Can't we think of a way to allow the people to obtain a shared vision? What if we could create a miniature representation of the elephant and give it to everyone so they could all explore it together instead of getting stuck on parts and perceive them as a whole? 

Extensive exploratory discussions are critical to achieving a holistic perception. Such debate, like describing an elephant, will need to produce an accepted miniature model of the elephant as a reference. If we can provide this miniature model to the people trying to perceive the elephant, we help them in two ways. The first is that they don't have to fall into conflict just by being in different places. The second is they don't need to wait till they all meet an elephant in order to talk about it. 

When Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of others, Newton meant he appreciated the knowledge that already existed, and that he built on it. However, this was not the regular use of the term standing on the shoulders of others before. The metaphor that evolved from a Greek myth of the blind giant Orion, who carried his servant on his shoulders so that the servant could guide the blind Orion has multiple meanings, we can read it as a statement on the importance symbiosis between giants (or gods) and people. We can learn from it also that there is a hierarchy of strengths or size. The giant is bigger than the human. This size issue was exploited before Newton as a way of reducing the size of humans in comparison to nobles and powerful people. At some points of history, standing on the shoulders of giants was not so much about the giant as it was about the dwarfs. 

I want to embrace all these approaches, primarily to appreciate the existing knowledge, secondly to admit that concerning so much knowledge, we should take a humble attitude and acknowledge the fact that we have room to grow. Third, I want to embrace the critical observation that while large bodies of knowledge are big and appreciated, they could also be blind to aspects that only us dwarfs can notice. 

So where do we start learning creativity and innovation management? 

I think a good start will be by integrating the ideas of 3 giants, that will provide us with sufficient references to many of the ideas that are at the core of creativity and innovation management. Later I will also add thoughts and references to other parts of the CAIM (creative and innovation management) canon. 

The giants I place at the core are, Clayton Christensen, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, and Peter Senge. Their works: The Innovator's Dilemma (which is also the primary influence to explore the innovators' drama) organized innovation as an idea that can appear in different forms.

Christensen contribution through the disruptive innovation model, which differentiated different innovation approaches, and the subsequent jobs to be done (which is also a significant reference to the Things To Be Done approach I will introduce here) are fundamental to understand the role and characteristics of innovation as a business or social tool.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow series introduced an educated observation on the experience of getting stuck, an experience widespread in innovation processes before or after understanding the innovation type or the job to be done. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi articulated the fundamental experience of evolution from psychological and operational angles and transformed it into a tangible outcome.

It's understandable that the achievement of Flow is not so easy in many occasions, and in this sense, Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline collection helps to understand the mechanics of achieving Flow in different innovation types through personal mastery, continuous learning, and systems thinking. 

These vital works are an essential primer to start understanding creativity and innovation management. However, the problem is that each one consists of several books, that add up to several thousands of pages of valuable knowledge.  Diving into each one of these ideas will be similar to approaching an elephant from one angle, which brings me to another question. Standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing, but how do we climb there? Because from what I've seen so far, the prerequisite request to spend a few weeks or months of reading the core textbooks is an insurmountable request in an age that has difficulties reading through the text of an email. 

The goal of the Things To Be Done approach, is to act as a mediating component. TTBD connects the fundamental ideas of Innovation types, disruption, discovery, and realization of primary (and critical) Jobs To Be Done (Christensen) , the desire to achieve Flow, understand the psychology of creative experience and identify different frictions that inhibit Flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and establish a system thinking observation, organize and direct personal mastery and ensure continuous learning (Senge) 

The Things To Be Done approach allow to gradually uncover the richness of the ideas developed by these three great minds because it reveals flow inhibitors in a way that exposes systemic friction points that can be easily recognized, explored and indicate which personal masteries are needed and require our attention. The ability to identify flow inhibitors, and correlate them with an effort, clarifies beyond doubt the type of innovation in front of us.  Using Things To Be Done approach we can gradually learn as we go, based on our real-world challenges, instead of investing in building a theoretical body of knowledge and then drag it into reality - which makes the whole engagement with creativity and innovation management cumbersome and uneconomical. 

After we've climbed and sat comfortably in the shoulders of these three scholars, we will be able to see, more broadly, the relationships with other knowledge domains such as Lean Productivity and Agile, Design Thinking, The Creative Class and Creative Demographics, Innovation Strategies, Innovation accounting, and even Extreme Programming. Thus,  Connecting all these ideas into disciplined expertise. 

However, to get there, we need to overcome the innovators' drama of learning. 

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This Text is part of Backgrounds - part four of the Innovators' Drama. You can read more similar content here