Emerging Futures - Volume 134: It's Not About the “Innovator's DNA” or an “Innovation Culture”

Good Morning nodes in active construction,

What a week! We have been on the road, moving quite a bit—from Cambridge to DC, to up the Hudson Valley to Newark—where we attended a great event last night celebrating the critical works of Amari Baraka. 

Yesterday, right before we began working on this newsletter, we participated in the first of three talks we organized with and for a big international pharma company on ecosystemic innovation. It went really well and led to some insightful conversations. This lecture, as the first of three, was a general introduction to the different logics and needs of Disruptive Innovation and Developmental Innovation:

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The wonderful discussion after our talk got us thinking about last week's newsletter: Last week, we dug into the who and where of innovation. Our goal was to show that creativity is not “in” someone, nor does innovation emmenate from a source; rather, it is the outcome of an emergent process that is irreducible to any source.

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And what really got us thinking about last week's newsletter was a question about how our approach differs from the work of Clayton Christensen in regards to how we approach Disruptive Innovation – and innovation in general.

Cristensen (1952-2020) is famous for his theories around Disruptive Innovation in business settings and his parallel work on how to be more creative/innovative as an individual. 

Given our shared interest in Disruptive Innovation, this was a great question – and one that has come up a few times in similar settings. Given the limits of time and the context of the presentation, we had only time to give a very condensed answer. But the contrast between our approach and Cristensen’s is quite illuminating. 

Cristensen has researched Disruptive Innovation in certain business contexts, and popularized a certain concept of what this is. The work is interesting and worth seriously engaging with. We have many points of disagreement with how he defines and approaches Disruptive Innovation, but we want to put those aside for another time when we can focus on developing a broader discussion on the history of approaches to Disruptive Innovation.

Rather, let’s turn to where things get really interesting—and this is in how he translates his research into methods for helping actual businesses innovate. This work is found in two books: The Innovator’s Method and The Innovator’s DNA. Each of these books focuses on one prong of his two pronged approach: giving businesses a clear innovation model to follow and helping individuals become more innovative. 

Let’s start by looking at the model he suggests to businesses – The “Innovator's Method”:

“The Innovator's Method teaches an end-to-end process for innovation. This is a proven process that successful innovators use to conceive, test, and validate new business opportunities.”

And it consists of four sequential steps: Insight, Problem, Solution and Business Model:

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But here is the first problem – this method is nothing more than one more variation of the classical “God Model” of ideation driven innovation (and in some ways it is an even more ideation driven model!):

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And as such, it takes its place alongside almost all of the most common contemporary methods of innovation, having less to do with actual research and more to do with following an ancient anti-creative philosophical pattern:

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On top of all of the problems that all of these linear, non-emergent models face, what is uniquely troubling about this model is its focus on problems and existing customers: “The focus of this phase is to underscore the importance of the customer perspective to avoid a premature leap from problem identification to a final solution. Here, you will gain a deeper understanding of the customer's jobs-to-be-done and needs, and, ultimately, the conviction to provide the best solutions moving forward.” 

We have written extensively about how beginning with existing problems surreptitiously imports a field of already existing answers. Equally counter to disruptive innovation is the focus on existing customers and existing needs. If one is working in a genuinely disruptive manner, use, necessity, and users will co-emerge with the process of developing a novel world.

Now he is not wrong to say that his method works for innovation; it certainly does work for one form of innovation – developmental innovation (if only ok). But what it does not do is work for disruptive innovation (we wrote more about this recently in Volume 132). And this is deeply ironic, given his important research into disruptive innovation. And this reveals something about the problems with his research methods: In his research, he makes the very common mistake of using a retrospective lens. A disengaged retrospective lens will not give one a sense of the lived experience of engaging with and co-emerging as part of highly diverse, distributed, open-ended and uncertain processes. While from a retrospective lens, things will appear linear, sequential, and goal oriented.

Additionally, Cristensen makes the common mistake of assuming that the methods that work for Developmental Innovation will also work for Disruptive Innovation. But, given that Disruptive Innovation gives rise to something qualitatively new—something so new that it cannot be ideated in advance – ideation driven approaches will not work. In fact, they will derail every nascent disruptive innovation and bend it back into a merely incremental innovation.

We need quite different approaches for disruptive innovation:

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To push this further, to engage with disruptive innovation processes whatsoever first requires the dismantling of the physical infrastructures and organizational logics of developmental innovation. Developmental Innovation – in its being our de facto long-standing innovation logic, has led to a very entrenched set of practices, habits, and rituals. But more than that, it has led to a highly developed holistic physical and organizational infrastructure. This involves both how buildings, rooms, and tools are shaped, and how organizational infrastructures like job requirements are defined and carried out.

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You cannot develop disruptive innovation processes if you do not first refuse and replace the logic, practices, rituals, environments, concepts, tools and infrastructure of developmental innovation.

And if you fail to recognize that this is even an issue, as Cristensen and so many others fail to do, then all your attempts to engage with Disruptive Innovation will simply always be only Developmental Innovation by another name…

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Clayton’s Innovator’s DNA and the Zombies of Innovation

This brings us to the second pillar of his approach: individual innovation. Clayton Cristensen pairs his method for business innovation with a focus on individual innovation. 

This is equally problematic, as we argued last week: reducing innovation to individuals and their internal capacities is a radical failure to understand that innovation is not “in” anything; rather, it is the emergent outcome of a distributed, more-than-human assemblage. 

But Clayton does not stop there with this one error—in his research, he conflates leaders with businesses. Which is to say, he first identifies innovative businesses and then, without evidence, assumes that they are innovative primarily because of the individuals who lead them (are highly creative). And thus, he focuses his research on these leaders.

This approach is a classic form of essentialism—the search for a singular essence/source from which everything emanates and follows from:

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For Cristensen, the leader is the source. The conflation of leader and organization blinds us to the critical reality: complex systems, like organizations, “have a mind of their own.” What we really need to be doing is not figuring out how a leader thinks, but how organizations think! How organizations “think” is irreducible to any source; it is an emergent outcome of non-linear causal processes of “system causation,” where the whole shapes its parts.

This insight, that the emergent logic of an organization shapes its parts, cannot be left as a generality. This means quite simply that individuals – including leaders, are better understood to be the outcomes rather than the source of agency in an organization. 

Cristensen now asserts that innovative people consistently exhibit five key "behaviors.” These behaviors: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting contribute to “one’s ability to generate novel ideas that result in new products, processes, or business models.” 

If we ignore for a moment how he slips into an ideation driven model (e.g., “one's ability to generate novel ideas will give rise to new products,"  etc.) And if we also ignore his mistaken individualistic focus. And instead, focus for a moment on his argument for the development of an innovation culture where people make more connections, ask more questions, observe more, and experiment. Is there anything wrong with this?

On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with these practices. They are good practices in general for an organization to promote, and they are also relevant to innovation. But practices, and individual leadership practices at that, do not, on their own, lead to anything. 

Here again, the lessons of emergence and complex systems are ignored: what is actually giving rise to actual practices, dispositions, and activities is the emergent logic of the organization. And what we mean by “the organization” is far more than just the individuals and their actions (e.g., culture). We need to consider the specific logic, practices, rituals, physical environments, concepts, tools, technologies, and organizational infrastructure—this is what is leading or not leading to innovative outcomes.

Again, as we stressed last week, this is not to say individuals are bereft of agency. Far from it. It is just that this agency does not emanate from an essential internal core but rather from the middle of their embedded enactive entanglements. 

Culture and individual dispositions (what some might call “mindsets”) to the degree they are understood to be immaterial attributes lead us astray from coming to grips with how things happen. Consider simply for a moment the impact Marshall McLuhan says our basic technologies have upon us:

“they work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, & social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered… Any understanding of social change is impossible without a knowledge of the way technologies work as environments…”

McLuhan is arguing that technologies shape how we are embodied, acting both as extensions and, more importantly, as co-producers of human faculties, whether mental or physical. Technologies, by altering our habits & practices—our environment—provoke in us new logics of sense perception & habitual action that transformatively alter the way we act, sense, & think at an implicit level. 

And it is not just technologies; it is our physical environments, our concepts, tools, and organizational structures; these too are working us over completely. 

So rather than falling for Cristensen’s version of all too neat, and all too ubiquitous essentialist proscriptions, we need to get busy working across, with, and of the whole of the organizational assemblage to allow for things (including ourselves) to co-emerge with disruptive innovation processes

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And—it cannot be forgotten as we come to the end of this week's newsletter—this will necessarily involve the strong refusal of developmental innovation ecosystems.

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Well, that’s a much longer answer than we had time to give in our discussion! We hope that it helps spell out clearly some of the key issues that need to be addressed when we wish to focus on Disruptive Innovation. 

Till next week, enjoy the eclipse if you are near it, stay distributed and eco-systemic, make some tools and environments, enjoy the spring – and if you can spare a few dollars, your contributions to Doctors Without Borders will be matched this week.

Till next volume 135,

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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