Why Can't Ideation Produce Something Genuinely New?

Ideation cannot produce something genuinely new because ideas rely on concepts, language, and images we already know. The Western tradition had no place for creativity outside God's work: Greek thought held that anything new and true pre-existed as a perfect version, and theology cast God as ideating a vision and making it so. The word creativity only emerged in the 1800s and early 1900s, and it kept the same model of ideate, plan, and make. Design thinking adds "empathize" to the front of the same sequence. Jason's example: empathize with horse owners in the 1800s, and you will hear requests for a stronger, faster horse, never for a car. We place design thinking after the first half of innovation, once something qualitatively different has emerged.

What Is the Difference Between Change in Degree and Change in Kind?

Change in degree is the same thing becoming quantitatively more or less, like faster phones, and it expands an existing world. Change in kind is qualitatively different, so the criteria of one world stop mattering in the next, the way transport by machines differs from transport by horses and cows. The two are connected through thresholds. Make a table smaller and you get a stool, narrower and you get a bench, lower and bigger and you get a bed, all still furniture. Make it large enough and you have crossed into architecture, an outdoor shelter.

What Is Exaptation and Why Does It Matter for Innovation?

Exaptation is the co-opting of a feature for a use it did not evolve for. When Darwin was asked what use half a wing could be, the answer was that each stage served its own purpose. Feathers may have first sequestered toxins, then regulated temperature, then attracted mates or scared rivals, before falling, parachuting, gliding, and flight emerged. We show this in workshops with three images: a holiday nutcracker, a car at a traffic light, and a crow. Crows wait on the wires, drop nuts under stopped tires, and collect them when the light turns green, so both are nutcrackers. The crow is on our materials as a reminder to ask of everything: what else can this do?

How Does Blocking Work as an Enabling Constraint?

Blocking works by strictly refusing the intended purpose of something, which puts you in the terrain of what else it can do. A second rule keeps it from turning into everyday improvisation, like opening a bottle without a corkscrew: always bend toward what is least like what already exists, and add new blocks each time you drift back to the familiar. The Gibsons' concept of affordance explains why this works. An affordance belongs to the relation between a creature and its environment, the way nut-cracking belongs to the relation of crow, tire, and traffic light. Since thinking emerges from doing with an environment and tools, thinking differently means blocking habits, changing practices, environments, and tools. Asking an organization for a new mindset while its conditions stay the same changes nothing.

Why Should Innovators Invent Problems?

Innovators should invent problems because any stated problem already carries implicit assumptions, habits, and logics that shape its field of possible answers. We read Henri Bergson's line, "a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated," as a call to treat problems as assemblages. In The Great Train Robbery, the judge asks why Sean Connery's character robbed the train, and he answers, "because that's where the money was," exposing the moral and legal background the question assumed. When the car arrived, nobody solved how to feed horses or clear manure from the streets. Those problems became irrelevant, and new problems, values, and possibilities emerged. Novelty also carries no built-in value, so judging the new by the values of the old will make it look pointless.

What Are the Steps of the Innovation Design Approach?

The approach runs in two connected loops. You always start already engaged with something, and from there you decide between developing what exists or pursuing change in kind. Development leads to Emerge, co-developing something into reality. Change in kind leads to Disclose, surfacing the underlying logics, the general matter of concern, and unintended potentials, which leads to blocking and to Deviate, where a novel practice or world starts to emerge. That then returns to Emerge, where design thinking and jobs to be done find their place. Asked about backpacking tents, we suggested disclosing the logics of all existing tents and blocking them to find new approaches to dwelling outdoors, and noted that Thomas Edison thought he had invented a playback device while he was opening up the world of media. Our reading list starts with sources: Gilles Deleuze, Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba on exaptation, David McCullough's The Wright Brothers, Marc Levinson's The Box, and Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing.

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