Innovation Lessons for Engineers

“So how do you come up with new ideas?” This is a common question we normally get when we explain customers and stakeholders what we do. Yes, as an innovation consulting firm it is our job to identify opportunities for innovation for our clients, and while there is certainly a methodology to it, it is hardly something reserved for "innovative people", if such a thing exist. These are some fundamental lessons we have assimilated over years that we think would help engineers embrace innovation as a discipline that can and should be learned.

LESSON 1 - DIVE IN

Long gone are the days when, in order to be innovative, companies had to make heavy investments in hiring specialized subject matter experts and/or R&D departments. While this corporate practice may still be the norm in some organizations, more and more agile enterprises are tapping onto the wisdom of the crowds for their innovation needs. This collective wisdom has now become available as a cross-disciplinary, multi-national, cross-generational, diverse and inclusive resource.

The reality is that in this day and age, innovation has been essentially democratized, where pretty much everyone has a shot at building and scaling a business anchored on a novel idea. Entry barriers for developing innovations has lowered to the point where present-day innovators are more likely to come up with a breakthrough learning from YouTube and Instructables rather than from graduate school.

If we trace back the origins of this new wave of innovators we are of the opinion that it can be pinpointed to the appearance of Apple's iTunes store. Think about it: that digital milestone meant that anybody that could code and with some knowledge of real world problems could build packaged solutions on one of the fastest growing platforms the world has seen...and build empires around them. What it was once the exclusive domain of large corporations with extensive dev/engineering/R&D payrolls could be accomplished by a university student in her spare time.

The lesson: we live now in an era of democratized innovation, where people learn from YouTube and SkillShare courses. The opportunities for exploration and creation of things, solutions, experiences, breakthrough paradigms and innovative business models has never been so reachable for the masses...for good or bad. 

LESSON 2 - KNOW YOUR HUMAN

As an engineer myself I learned the ways of controlling my environment, understanding the linear correlations of the world, their causes and effects and even asking five times "why" to find the "root cause" of a problem. So when I learned the nuances of "Scenario-Focused Engineering" at Microsoft, I was very surprised that it did not have to do much with the engineering I learned at school. Instead, this flavour of design thinking, or as it has been hailed for many years, "a systematic approach to innovation" had more to do with the psychology and behavioural analysis of the human at the centre of the design exercise. In other words, less equations, more human observations. Soon I realized that to understand the term "innovation" I had to shift my focus from the word "engineering" to "scenario", a scenario where a human was the main actor and thus it was imperative to understand him/her before proceeding to create anything.  

LESSON 3 - INTERSECT DOMAINS

The current education system that prevails pretty much around the world is anchored on the division of knowledge that best served the needs of the industrial revolution. Compartmentalized areas of expertise that are highly focused on a particular discipline and its connection to other -rather, similar areas. But it wasn't always like that. Examples abound, but one of the most notorious one was the largest university of ancient times, the House of Wisdom in present day Baghdad. In this ancient institution, wisdom was the most sought-after value, not only data or information or even insights. And the way it was done was simple: they welcomed any and every piece of expertise no matter the area of knowledge; they knew that the understanding and, more importantly, the amalgamation of disciplines was the secret to innovative thinking.

As engineers we seek solutions in true and tested support sources, but that will never help come up with real breakthroughs if we don’t exercise domain cross-pollination. By their very definition these accomplishments can only happen when new ground is broken and more often than not this happens when dots are connected at the intersection of domains.

LESSON 4 - SEEK ADOPTION

Just like any other hard science, innovation is actually a systematic discipline that can and should be learned. As more and more organizations are finding opportunities in the democratization of emerging technologies and lean methodologies for experimentation and fast prototyping to accelerate innovation, we observe that these same organizations tend to emphasize the resulting technological solutions. While by definition an innovation must provide more value to get a job done better than any previous solution, we are of the opinion that, just as important as the solution, the adoption of such solution is a crucial but often overlooked element in contributing to the advancement of the solution space.

One of the definitions of innovation that I particularly like goes like this:

Innovation is the act of generating more value for the customer and the business by fulfilling a job to the done better than anyone else.

What people tend to overlook is the last part: “better than anyone else”. In other words, as people who design solutions we need to be wary that our solution needs to compete with existing solutions and be considerably better for it to be widely adopted. It is this wide adoption that confers an innovation its longevity and status of provider of higher value that did not exist prior to its introduction.

Conclusion

We live in times where innovation has been essentially democratized and yet, it seems that organizations are still looking for the holy grail formula to manufacture innovation. The reality is that basic principles like the ones described above are industry agnostic and have endured the test of time. The secret for innovation is that there is no secret. If we embrace our curiosity and allow others to explore theirs, and as long as we direct these exploratory exercises towards identifying those delight factors that the user is seeking, one will inevitably step into the discovery of a breakthrough innovation.