The Innovation Lens …
See every innovation example as a variation on a small set of themes.
The force of fundamentals
When education psychologist and cognitive learning theorist, Jerome Bruner, introduced the conceptualization called “structures of the discipline” he argued that “the curriculum of a subject should be determined by the most fundamental understanding of the underlying principles that give structure to the subject.”
Using Algebra as one example, Bruner proposed that students who learned about Algebra’s underlying principles, or structures, would be able to recognize all Algebra problems as “variations on a small set of themes.” This perspective would make Algebra much easier to learn and to use.
Others have described this type of framework as the basis for converting a skilled craft into a methodology or discipline, as occurred in the past with the subject of Engineering and the method of “differential diagnosis” used by physicians.
Innovation’s fundamentals
For the subject of Innovation, it seems possible that a framework of underlying principles, or structures, would allow students to recognize innovation’s widely-varied and omnipresent examples as variations on innovation’s own small set of fundamentals.
This perspective might make innovation and its forces much more visible to students, including in their own everyday worlds:
- What is innovation exactly?
- Why does innovation matter? And why might innovation matter to me personally?
- How and where does innovation happen?
- And by the way, how does innovation relate to science and invention? How does it relate to technology?
Imagine if learning answers to questions like these allowed young students to begin to see innovation and its forces so clearly that they would begin to see how they can participate in making innovation’s version of change happen, beginning in their own classrooms, schools, and communities.
Imagine if hands-on practice with innovation’s fundamentals over the course of K-12 schooling, including testing and acting on ideas in collaboration with others, allowed students to understand just how cross-functional innovation’s practice is — how every student’s strengths can support innovation, including their own strengths.
Imagine if this hands-on practice motivated students not only to develop and harness their own personal strengths, but also helped them understand the types of purpose in the world that are most personally compelling and the types of knowledge they want to develop in order to participate in making a difference.
It seems worth trying
This website explores the possibility of establishing a framework of innovation’s fundamentals as a way to support student learning, by providing a lens for seeing and understanding innovation’s small set of themes:
- First, the website draws on the work of innovation’s practitioners and other experts — work that has made these themes more visible today even as the themes have existed over hundreds of years. Their work provides the basis for a draft of innovation’s underlying principles, or structures.
- Second, a different page of this website provides an early prototype of the type of learning tool that would be made possible by a framework of innovation’s fundamentals: A searchable online gallery of many wide-ranging examples of innovation, where a profile for each example highlights innovation’s small set of themes. A gallery like this is intended to help bring innovation’s themes to life, including demonstrating how the themes are readily detectable even across widely varied expression. A gallery of examples is also to stimulate student imaginations, including helping students consider how they might want to try out innovation’s methods, now and in the future.
A Rough Draft
Consider the draft of innovation’s fundamental themes just below, followed by a table that presents the themes alongside the same for science and invention:
1. What is innovation exactly?
“Change by way of value.”
Innovation practitioners, sometimes called “change agents,” initiate the possibility of change by putting a new “offering” out into the world, which provides a new type of value. For example, a new type of electric vehicle might offer battery charging that’s faster and more convenient.
However, innovation’s change relies on customers adopting the offering. Practitioners may have had the idea of offering this new type of electric car as a way to achieve the change of greater use of electric cars, for the purpose of more environmental sustainability, but practitioners can’t achieve the change directly. Innovation’s change relies on enough customers finding sufficient new value in the offering to adopt it.
2. What type of change?
Innovation’s ultimate type of change — resource leverage — is what actually matters so much. When customers adopt an offering’s new value, their adoption permits the ultimate change of more fruitful use of resources (natural, human, financial, etc.).
Resource leverage “fruits” are measured in three primary ways:
(1) greater societal wealth, or “gross domestic product” (the total value of everything that a nation produces), which can be associated with a higher standard of living for everyone in a society;
(2) greater sustainability of finite natural resources; and/or
(3) greater human flourishing, such as the effect of society’s pool of human resources experiencing more engagement of their talents, or strengths.
Continuing with the example of the new type of electric vehicle, customers who buy the car may or may not care about the ultimate effect of resource leverage. Nonetheless, sufficient adoption of the new type of vehicle by customers could have the effect that natural resources are indeed used more fruitfully, or in this case sustainably.
As a different example, if a business were to use a new application of artificial intelligence to offer a whole new type of online game, which was enthusiactically adopted, this offering could have the effect of increasing a society’s total economic output (“gross domestic product”).
A single offering can have the effect of resource leverage in multiple ways:
For example, if every new high school graduate in the U.S. had been offered in school, and had adopted, deep learning about how they could engage their personal strengths toward a personally-compelling purpose in the workplace, this adoption during school years might produce the change of more human flourishing during adult years. In turn, the flourishing could have the additional effect of increasing a society’s total economic output. Plus. much of this economic output might be of the type that has the effect of greater natural resource sustainability.
Innovation’s change of resource leverage also can be found at any scale. At a smaller scale, young students might offer the new value of an easy way to compost food scraps in their school cafeteria, so that the food scraps don’t go into a landfill and instead are put to fruitful use. If the “customers” in the school cafeteria adopt the new offering because it’s easy, their adoption could have the effect of more sustainable use of resources in that community. The students’ idea might also offer the value of an example that other schools decide to adopt, with an effect of even broader change.
Thus: “Change by way of value.”
New value is innovation’s medium of expression.
And resource leverage is its type of change, which depends on customers adopting the new value that innovation practitioners offer.
- Fundamentally, “value” is in the eyes of customers. It’s not inherently positive.
- Arizona State University’s promotion of “responsible” innovation speaks to the importance of bearing in mind this fundamental amoral aspect of innovation’s change by way of value.
- For example, many point to the offering of variable-rate-mortgages in the U.S., associated with the ultimate outcome of many home foreclosures and the 2008 “great recession,” as an irresponsible offering.
- Innovation practitioners may or may not intend a responsible, or moral, benefit to society. And even if the intention is positive and a societal effect of resource leverage is sustained, there can be separate unexpected negative societal effects.
3. How do innovation practitioners create new value?
Innovation practitioners use the core creative structure of hypotheses.
On one hand, this is the same creative structure used within science:
- One dictionary definition of “hypothesis” says: “It’s a guess, but not just a random guess. It’s based on some existing knowledge or observations.”
- Bruner described a particular type of imagination for such new connections of existing knowledge: “the ability to see possible new connections before one is able prove them in any way.”
- Whether engaging in science or innovation, an idea may seem as if it comes from “nowhere,” but in fact it comes from your brain making a purposeful new connection from your existing knowledge.
On the other hand, innovation’s hypotheses are tailored to the purpose of “change by way of value,” which features two key types of hypotheses:
- “What could be?” That is, what could be as compelling new value to customers?
- “How could the new value become a new offering accessible to customers?”
When innovation practitioners test their hypotheses, they usually begin by exploring the response of “customers” to the offering of new value. This makes sense since the offering must be adopted if innovation’s “change by way of value” is to occur.
It can be helpful to think about innovation’s hypotheses fitting into the “Business Model Canvas,” shown below, which is a popular tool used by many innovation practitioners. The “what could be” hypothesis fits within the canvas element labeled the “customer value proposition.” Each of the other canvas elements includes one or more particular “how could it become” hypotheses.
The canvas helps to convey why innovation’s practice is typically collaborative and cross-functional, especially at large scale. For example, before Google offered a new type of search engine, it was its two main founders — doctoral students in computer science — who recognized its potential new value for search. However, it was the input of an early partner — not a computer scientist — who provided a crucial “how it could become” hypothesis (for “revenue stream”) by envisioning new value for online advertisers. The revenue-stream hypothesis, in turn, called for additional hypotheses for the whole right side of the business model canvas.
4. Where does innovation happen?
At large scale, innovation happens in the overall economy — typically in what is known as the “commercial production system” (for-profit businesses) or in the “social production system” (non-profit and/or government organizations, including schools, hospitals, and much more).
However, innovation’s fundamentals can happen at any scale, anywhere that an offering of value can catalyze the change of resource leverage.
A prominent business thinker described that innovation pertains to all “but that which is existential” — meaning all but inside one individual. It can happen almost anywhere, including in K-12 classrooms, neighborhoods, single organizations, etc.
5. Who are innovation practitioners?
Practitioners are located wherever innovation’s “change by way of value” is happening.
- Some practitioners focus on developing a brand new type of offering, which may be introduced within a brand new organization.
- Other practitioners operate within an existing organization (of any size).
- There is no minimum age or any other requirement for practicing innovation’s change by way of value. The methods are available to anyone interested in offering new value that can catalyze the change of more fruitful use of resources.
Compared to Science and Invention
Bruner also described that knowing a discipline’s structures “permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully.”
When it comes to student learning, there is perhaps nothing more meaningful than understanding how the practice of Innovation relates to the practice of Science and to the practice of Invention:
First, all three methodologies create change in the world.
However, each methodology creates a different type of change. And sometimes one type of change allows another type. For example, certain examples of Innovation are made possible by an advance first in Science or in Invention.
Second, to create change, all three methodologies — Innovation, Science, and Invention — engage the same essential creative structure of hypotheses:
But hypotheses are tailored to the type of change that each methodology produces. It’s the type of change, or purpose, that determines:
- what types of non-random guesses, or hypotheses, fit into the methodology
- what types of knowledge are pertinent to the methodology’s hypotheses
- who comes up with the hypotheses
- how hypotheses lead to the methodology’s type of change
- and so on.
Just below, the framework for Innovation, discussed above, is presented in relation to the same for Science and Invention, beginning with the type of change that each methodology produces.
Take a look …
Keep this framework in mind as you view different innovation examples at this website.