bplusd

In the design and innovation conversation, we’re obsessed with looking backwards (witness the endless dissections of the ipod’s genesis) and looking forwards (what’s the next big thing?). I think that innovation and design benefit even more from looking sideways.

Looking sideways means looking to other disciplines and industries to find mature solutions and frames that we can adjust and adopt in our own situation. This approach is understood and practiced at innovation leaders like P&G with their Connect and Develop innovation model. But based on media attention and practitioner discussions, we seem to undersell it as a major factor throughout the innovation disciplines. Maybe I’m wrong, and you can tell me in the comments, but for all the talk of working in intersections, edges, and overlap, hindsight and foresight seem to dominate the conversation, if not actual practice. Even articles like  BusinessWeek’s recent Pushing the Boundaries of Design pay lipservice to the concept of looking sideways, but then characterize it as the courageous act of ten design heroes, instead of business as usual.

I can see three reasons for not looking sideways more often. First, it’s not as personally rewarding to find a solution in another industry as it is to create one from the ground up. Secondly, our concept of expertise is tightly bound to the idea of the specialist. It’s the nature of specialization to drive deeper into a field, rather than look outside, and so we miss sideways opportunities. Finally, most organizations do not have a system in place to productively explore other industries, recognize opportunities, and bring them to market. Without a supporting system, looking sideways depends on individual insight and a large dose of serendipity.

So, what can we do to encourage more sideways innovation? I have a few thoughts…

1. Don’t abandon existing innovation investment – bringing in sideways innovation should complement existing efforts.
2. Find program leaders who are motivated by the D in R&D – people who get their kicks out of developing and launching products and services, instead of inventing them. This means that many traditional innovation leaders aren’t qualified to head a sideways innovation program. Instead, find people who are happy with discovery instead of invention, and who are motivated by getting products and services to market.
3. Overcome the perils of specialization by “collapsing the T”. In the world of T-shaped people, encourage exploration outside of specialization during some portion of research and discovery time. What happens when a specialist takes their perspective and looks horizontally through the other disciplines and areas that they have some familiarity with? What if they look at brand new areas? Encourage, reward, and recognize creative generalists, too.
4. Finally, you need to track these sideways explorations and suggest new areas of interest. This ensures that you’re getting broad coverage and don’t overlook important areas. It also connects people interested in similar areas so that you get more out of their exploration, encouraging complementary rather than duplicate thinking. This tracking needs to identify promising ideas and provide an on-ramp into your existing development stream – sideways innovations need a clear path for migrating from idea to proof of concept to offering and launch. Most of all, to make the program self sustaining, you need to track things so you can identify success from the program as ideas transform into offerings and generate revenue.  For implementing such a tracking system, a bottom-up approach like wikis and Shreveport-style search tagging (a hypothetical product that doesn’t yet exist) is going to work better than a top-down command and control approach.

What else needs to be in place to encourage looking sideways? Is this a staple of innovation that is so common it’s just taken for granted and I’m overstating the need? I’d love to hear your take on sideways innovation.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 8:57 am and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.