Theory Chapter 4 Insights
Chapter. 4 InsightsAnalogies foster insight. Analogies highlight commonalities and relevant differences, they invite new inferences, and they promote new ways of construing situations.
Insights are somewhat overlooked stepping stones on the Innovation Continuum. Insights are the distillation of useful concepts from a product or service into principles of value added design or competitive advantage for that opportunity. They are the unique selling propositions that identify an innovative possibility.
The concepts behind Innovation itself can be analysed into Insights in order to identify how it can be improved.
INNOVATION INSIGHTS1 Innovation is a continuum
2 Innovation builds on previous knowledge
3 Innovation must be communicated
4 All innovations are logical in retrospect.
5 Innovation looks like magic because it is asymmetrical. It looks easier from the result than from a theory.
6 Innovation is designed for people.
7 There are few natural laws but countless applications
8 Innovation processes are considered mysterious.
9 Small innovation steps are easier than big ones
10 The more innovations you try the more products you get.Table 2 Innovation Insights
Theory Chapter 3 Order
OrderOver time, the "order" of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.
Ray Kurzweil
Analogy provides both the key elements for innovation – information and pattern recognition of order. Order, or “fitness for purpose”, is the core of any innovation. Innovations make and move by means of creating order. There are many forms of order and still more applications. Any existing product or service is a form of order. Not only that, it is therefore pre-qualified as fit for the purpose it is carrying out.
Analogy is the link between pre-existing order (like products and services) and future applications. Combination of forms of order into devices and processes generates pre qualified candidates the technological future.
Evolution draws upon the chaos in the larger system in which it takes place for its options for diversity; and evolution builds on its own increasing order. Therefore, in an evolutionary process, order increases exponentially.
Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil takes this concept one step further and identifies the feedback loop inherent in the ordering process. Each new form of order (e.g. a product or service) not only provides direct value (e.g. LED house lighting) but also functions as a stepping stone for further branches of development (e.g. LED house lighting directly driving light WiFi).
Theory Chapter 3 Analogy
Analogy (adapted from Gentner and Markman)Our structure-mapping abilities constitute a rather remarkable talent. In creative thinking, analogies serve to highlight important commonalities, to project inferences, and to suggest new ways to represent the domains. Yet, it would be wrong to think of analogy as esoteric, the property of geniuses.Dedre Gentner and Arthur B. MarkmanAnalogy and similarity are central in cognitive processing. We store experiences in categories largely on the basis of their similarity to a category representation or to stored exemplars. New problems are solved using procedures taken from prior similar problems.
First, analogy is a device for conveying that two situations or domains share relational structure despite arbitrary degrees of difference in the objects that make up the domains. Common relations are essential to analogy; common objects are not. This promoting of relations over objects makes analogy a useful cognitive device, for physical objects are normally highly salient in human processing - easy to focus on, recognize, encode, retrieve, and so on.
A new and creative solution usually results from the fusion of pieces of knowledge that have not been connected before. Geschka and ReibnitzThe process of comparison both in analogy and in similarity - operates so as to favour interconnected systems of relations and their arguments. As the above discussion shows, to capture the process of analogy, we must make assumptions not only about the processes of comparison, but about the nature of typical conceptual cognitive representations and how representations and processes interact. In particular, we must have a representational system that is sufficiently explicit about relational structure to express the causal dependencies that match across the domains. We need a representational scheme capable of expressing not only objects but also the relationships and bindings that hold between them, including higher Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity order relations such as causal relations.
There is, in general, an indefinite number of possible relations that an analogy could pick out, and most of these are ignored.
The defining characteristic of analogy is that it involves an alignment of relational structure. There are three psychological constraints on this alignment. First, the alignment must be structurally consistent In other words; it must observe parallel connectivity and one-to-one correspondence. Parallel connectivity requires that matching relations must have matching arguments, and one-to-one correspondence limits any element in one representation to at most one matching element in the other representation structure. This also shows a second characteristic of analogy, namely, relational focus: As discussed above, analogies must involve common relations but need not involve common object descriptions. The final characteristic of analogy is systematicity: Analogies tend to match connected systems of relations. A matching set of relations interconnected by higher order constraining relations makes a better analogical match than an equal number of matching relations that are unconnected to each other. The systematicity principle captures a tacit preference for coherence and causal predictive power in analogical processing. We are not much interested in analogies that capture a series of coincidences, even if there are a great many of them.
In a study, people who were given analogous stories judged that corresponding sentences were more important when the corresponding sentence pairs were matching than when they were not. Alignable differences can be contrasted with nonalignable differences, which are aspects of one situation that have no correspondence at all in the other situation. This means that people should find it easier to list differences for pairs of similar items than for pairs of dissimilar items, because high-similarity pairs have many commonalties and, hence, many alignable differences. Such a prediction runs against the common-sense view - and the most natural prediction of feature - intersection models - that it should be easier to list differences the more dissimilar the two items are. In a study by Gentner and Markman (1994), participants were given a page containing 40 word pairs, half similar and half dissimilar. The results provided strong evidence for the alignability predictions: Participants listed many more differences for similar pairs than for dissimilar pairs. It seems it is when a pair of items is similar that their differences are likely to be important.
Analogical Inference is another effect of use in delivering Innovation. Studies (Clement and Gentner 1991) show analogies lead to new inferences. In analogy, when there is a match between a base and target domain, matching facts about are accepted as candidate inferences. Mapping allows people to predict new information from old and will allow us to use analogy to suggest innovation options by using an existing product as a base domain.
Selecting existing product as a base domain has other benefits. According to structure-mapping theory, inferences are projected from the base to the target. Thus, having the more systematic and coherent item as the base maximises the amount of information that can be mapped from base to target. Consistent with this claim, Bowdle and Gentner found that when participants were given pairs of passages varying in their causal coherence, they (a) consistently preferred comparisons in which the more coherent passage was the base and the less coherent passage was the target, (b) generated more inferences from the more coherent passage to the less coherent one, and (c) rated comparisons with more coherent bases as more informative than the reverse comparisons. The inherent coherence of an existing product in its tangible and viable setting, makes it a superior option to a great leap forward from a law or technological advance.
It is possible that conventional analogies have their metaphoric meanings stored lexically, making it unnecessary to carry out a mental domain mapping. This could be the reason that it is easier to extend an existing domain mapping than to initiate a new one. For example, when electric current is described throughout a passage using the extended analogy of water flow.
Innovators are called on to map information from one situation to another and they must decide which aspects of their prior knowledge apply to the new situation. Schumacher and Gentner (1988) found the speed of learning was affected both by transparency (i.e. resemblances between structurally corresponding elements) and by systematicity (i.e. when they had learned a causal explanation for the procedures). Having a strong causal model can enable innovation even when the objects mismatch perceptually. Both transparency and systematicity are facilitated by drawing analogy between products.
Several findings suggest that similarity-based retrieval from long-term memory is based on overall similarity, with surface similarity heavily weighted. a parallel disassociation has been found in problem-solving transfer: Retrieval likelihood is sensitive to surface similarity, whereas likelihood of successful problem solving is sensitive to structural similarity. This suggests that different kinds of similarity have different psychological roles in transfer. For instance studies of relational comparisons suggest that when participants are required to respond quickly, they base their sense of similarity on local matches rather than on relational matches. At longer response deadlines, this pattern is reversed.
Structural alignment influences which features to pay attention to in choice options. Research suggests that alignable differences are given more weight in choice situations than are nonalignable differences.
In order to find concepts for transforming products the prime method available is to draw analogy with concepts used by other products. Analogy is particularly well suited because of the way the mind builds ideas from images and memory fragments.Analogy also has an important place in engineering and invention. Velcro, as no doubt everyone knows, was developed by analogy to the grasping properties of the common burr.Robert Root-Bernstein and Michele Root-BernsteinAnalogy is the quality or state of being alike or: affinity, alikeness, comparison, correspondence, likeness, parallelism, resemblance, similarity, similitude, uniformity, uniformness. Analogies can be used to group analogous relationships into five categories: descriptive, comparative, categorical, serial, and causal.
In our example, we might draw the analogy between the Dustpan and a rotary street sweeper and consider contra-rotating brushes on the brush handle that sweep together as the brush is pulled. The alternative conceptual forms of the product can be mapped using Innovation Ballistics and cued straight into our mental model for evaluation.
Analogy Cuing "What we have learned over the years is that what you get out of memory depends on how you cue memory. If you have the perfect cue, you can remember things that you had no idea were floating around in your head," Kenneth Norman, professor of Psychology at Princeton University"When you try to remember something that happened in the past, what you do is try to reinstate your mental context from that event," said Norman. "If you can get yourself into the mindset that you were in during the event you're trying to remember.
In an experiment, participants studied a total of 90 images in three categories -- celebrity faces, famous locations and common objects -- and then attempted to recall the images. Norman and his colleagues used Princeton's functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to capture the participants' brain activity patterns as they studied the images. They then trained a computer program to distinguish between the patterns of brain activity associated with studying faces, locations or objects.
The computer program was used to track participants' brain activity as they recalled the images to see how well it matched the patterns associated with the initial viewing of the images. The researchers found that patterns of brain activity for specific categories, such as faces, started to emerge approximately five seconds before subjects recalled items from that category -- suggesting that participants were bringing to mind the general properties of the images in order to cue for specific details.
Analogy is about finding similarities, categorizing, making comparisons and cuing memories.
Theory Chapter 2 Innovation Ballistics
Innovation BallisticsBy Incorporating the ideas of stepping stone 3d nesting and information inheritance a new view on the Innovation Continuum is possible – the ballistic view. In this visualisation, a product or other stepping stone is traced along its transformational path showing the impact holes through a series of ideaspace frames. This has the advantage of identifying the trajectory of the idea from its theoretical inception to the present product incarnation and off into the distant future. Furthermore it “freeze frames” the causations and relations at the level of abstraction required.
INNOVATION BALLISTICS
1 Shows the idea trajectory
2 Tracks into History
3 Projects into the Future
4 Freeze Frames causations
5 Identifies opportunities i.e. remaining ideaspace in each frame
6 Offers a measure of innovation opportunity
7 Relates the abstract to the tangible.
ValueThe target of innovation is to do more with less. This is a straightforward objective when you need to get the same result with less resources, or in less time (e.g. a better mousetrap). However even more value is returned by game changing innovation (e.g. stopping any mice getting in the house to start with). The key is value.
Value is simply your best objective. Most often, monetary cost or price is taken as a proxy for value. Although not ruinous, this is sub optimal. For example water and air are almost free but both certainly rather high in the value stakes. Value is not price. Price is a markets balance between supply and demand. It is driven by the averaging of wants and availability in a particular time and location with the information available and the expectations that prevail.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of NeedsMore useful as an indicator of value is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Physiological and security needs rank above all others, they are the first to be met. Beyond that, the overall measure of innovation is how high we can all move up the pyramid. In order to derive our standard for value we simply apply the hierarchy of needs to our personal circumstances.
In practical terms (see blog Section 2 - Practice) our Ideal Final Result target must help lead us to move as far up the hierarchy as possible, as fast as possible.
Starting from the bottom.
Theory Chapter 2 Product Information Inheritance
Product Information InheritanceProducts contain information, a lot of information. By their very existence products can tell you many useful things about concepts and customer needs. All products simultaneously monitor both these channels and as stepping stones in the continuum they also imply relations with the other steps.
This information inheritance from other stepping stones (see Nesting) enables us to use the product as both a microscope on its past inheritance and a projector on its future. We can look back at the principles and concepts from which it evolved and project these evolutions onto the canvas of extended customer expectations.
If you were to find a sword from Roman times there is little doubt that before long archaeologists would have identified its known provenance, production technology, normal usage and what told us about the society within which it was used.
With modern products with a fully available provenance it rarely occurs to use to study a product as if it was from ancient times. Familiarity breeds contempt. A dustpan is just there. No thought is given to why it was originally created and what ideas over the years have been rejected in continuing to make it. A dustpan and brush has been in use since before Roman times and has been one of the most enduring designs but unless we dig one up it seems unlikely to be looked at with the archaeologists critical eye.
In order to innovate we need to be product archaeologists.
Theory Chapter 2 Nesting
NestingStepping stones are nested. They relate to the other elements multi-dimensionally, having causational and dependency links as well as the time ordered relations we see in the continuum. Although these other links can lead to the appearance of a chaotic system, the use of constraints and treatment of the stepping stones as information sources can identify the deterministic nature of this situation.
Theory Chapter 2 Stepping Stones
Stepping Stones
Stepping stones are placed every time a pattern proves useful and is shared. These stones together are called progress and they are the determinants of the past and future success of the human race.
Stepping Stones are proven ideas that :-
- Can include any Law, Theory, Concept, Product or Service.
- Are recorded and communicated in a useful form.The fewer the stepping stones, the greater the innovative leap between the abstract and the practical, plus the greater the cost and risk involved. For instance, in times of war military innovation accelerates many fold because great leaps can be made without regard to cost. In war failure is not an option.
The more stepping stone paths followed the better the outcome. Having existing stepping stones in place means that following paths is quick and easy. And as Edison maintained, in the final analysis innovation is a numbers game, the more you try the more you get.
With stepping stones order and position is everything. You need to understand where each stone leads and in which order they are placed. If you want more concrete ideas you move towards the practical end and if you need conceptuality and wider applicability you move to the theoretical end. The law of conservation of momentum will explain many phenomena and in turn countless concepts so you need to get your ducks in a row.
Stepping stones have certain features that have kept progress painfully slow for millennia but show signs of exponential acceleration from here on in. Over the centuries there were few stepping stones but nothing to indicate an intellectual deficiency, so the dearth of technology would indicate communication has been the greater difficulty. Over the last few years the person to person communication explosion has driven this problem into the mists of time. Webs, mobiles, blogs, forums, books, and other media have multiplied the number of good ideas encountered and shared by an individuals on a daily basis.
Luckily, it seems, we are at the productive end of many years of an Innovation Continuum. For hundreds of years people have improved life with all manner of inventions and devices. Where we are now there is a (relative) abundance, produced by countless innovations. We are at the event horizon of a thought timeline that results in milk bottles on the doorstep, mobile phones ringing in your pocket, intelligent agents on your desktop and electronic books on the Ipod.
At the start of this continuum are the laws of the universe and these laws go on to set the rules for everything that follows. Our task is simple, to make stepping-stones from the universal laws, all the way to the product we are improving at the sharp end.
To produce these stepping stones we have an embarrassment of riches. With over two thousand years of recorded history we have technologies that make magic look mundane.
So, rather than start from abstract scientific laws it’s much better to focus on a concrete example from one of the millions of innovations we already use. This product focus gives a tangible beginning to what has until now, been a mysterious process. Allowing us to describe a straightforward set of steps leading from present reality to future products , compounds our advantage.
Theory Chapter 2 The Innovation Continuum
Chapter. 2 The Innovation Continuum
The Innovation Continuum is the basis for all efforts to rationalise material creativity into a scientific platform for future design. As you travel back along the continuum you drill down into the fundamental basis of all intelligent design – the laws of nature. This simplicity taken from natural events and interpreted into scientific laws, is however not the panacea it would first seem. The laws are so abstract when compared to day to day needs that it really would take the intellectual leap of a genius to bridge the gap.
The difficulty in innovation is twofold. The number of possibilities for combining laws that run a universe, with the demand vagaries of six billion people, is statistically overwhelming. Secondly, generating successful product designs from thin air with no design patterns, is the reason 250,000 years of pre history just resulted in a bow and arrow, a comb and some hopeless wall paintings.
PatternsPattern forming is also at work when engineers design complex machines. There are only a very small number of basic machines—levers, wheels, screws, cogs and so forth—from which every mechanical device is constructed. Technological invention is the process of forming new patterns with simpler components by combining elements and operations in novel patterns.Robert Root-Bernstein and Michele Root-Bernstein
All innovations are patterns.This is the underlying principle behind the innovation continuum. The innovation continuum is the realisation of centuries of pattern forming.
Theories, concepts, effects, principles and products, all form links between the patterns of physical laws and the patterns of human need. Physical and natural laws (e.g. gravity), give rise to phenomena (e.g. weight), that enable humans to make reproducible patterns for innovation (e.g. the principle of balance or design of a crane).
The continuum depicts the full reach of innovation from the abstract to the particular. This timeline can be viewed in many ways: -
The next section takes us on to investigate these links between patterns.
Theory Chapter 1 The Problem with Innovation today
Chapter.1 The Problem with Innovation today
The Innovation ParadigmInnovation is an art. Innovation cannot be learnt. Innovation has no system, or basic principles. Only gifted people can create. They create and we copy. They are the Gurus and we are the drones. Without people like Newton, Einstein, and Edison, the few that made it would still be living in caves. By the end of the blog it should be clear that the above innovation paradigm has no validity. Innovation is a science and it is reproducible at will.
Scientific disciplines not only have a theoretical base to explain the cause and effect of the phenomena encountered but also a structural taxonomy to relate elements of the discipline.
We therefore need to move our thinking from art, to science. To follow the simple steps from where we are, to where we want to be. We need to understand how innovation works and what steps we can take to take to reproduce it. We need to start generating practical theories of Innovation with associated taxonomies of structure and a language of use. All such theories will have common elements. They will be an integrated process because Innovation is an integrated process, they will be constructive because they build upon experience, they will be deterministic because every step is logical and reproducible, they will be fast and forward moving and most important of all they will be repeatable.
The underlying basis for all such theories is the continuum of history from past to present and from theory to practice.
The Innovation Continuum.
Introduction
IntroductionInnovation is still considered a black art, not a science. Progress a threat, not the hand that feeds us. Overlooked has been the simple fact that without innovation, the planet can perhaps feed only a few million hunter-gathers. With innovation, Earth can provide for a thousand times as many. The difference is merely a different set of ideas.
"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science."
- Bertrand Russell
In the 300,000 years since the dawn of modern man there have been no revolutionary improvements in either the Earth’s material resources or raw human mental capability. The ability to exponentially multiply the population has arisen solely from innovations.
“Human life expectancy was 37 years in 1800. Most humans at that time lived lives dominated by poverty, intense labour, disease, and misfortune. We are immeasurably better off as a result of technology, but there is still a lot of suffering in the world to overcome. We have a moral imperative, therefore, to continue the pursuit of knowledge and of advanced technologies that can continue to overcome human affliction.”- Ray Kurzweil If such technologies where dependent on Art why is it that they are so obviously accumulating? Any change must have a cause. The exponential change in technology must be driven by some mechanism that is capable of such growth. Knowledge is the prime, if not the only candidate. Artistic capability is an inherent skill and therefore not qualified to be a candidate process. Inherent skills may develop over evolutionary timescales but not in such a radical way. Innovation skills must be learnt.
This blog attempts to kill the idea that innovation is an art. It explains in both theoretical and practical terms, how the present paradigm of innovation can be replaced.
NavigationThis is a blog about analogy.
It draws connections between analogous products over time. Its purpose is to make product innovation reproducible. The blog connects analogy of the mind, to analogy in product designs. Products designs, by their very existance, contain information that can be traced from natural laws to users. It is this information that lets us form analogies between products. With these new analogies come new products.
The blog is split into three parts - the theory, the practice and supporting information (appendices).
The theory section maintains that all innovation results from a reproducible recombination of existing elements. Knowledge is the route to this reconfiguration. Knowledge is just the reduction of complexity. This blog attempts to reduce creative complexity and in reducing complexity makes things simpler to reproduce.
This process starts in chapter 1 with the acceptance that innovation can be designed rather than stumbled upon. Chapter 2 identifies the continuum through which the innovation will progress by recognising existing patterns and stepping from stone to stone on the ideas of others. These stepping stones of knowledge form the information inheritance of the product (or service!). Tracing the ballistic tracks of new products is the outcome of chapter 2, showing us the overall map for our product innovation.
Chapter 3 and the remaining theory chapters, elucidate the reproducible recombination of existing elements. Analogy is the central theme of this recombination. Chapter 3 explores in some depth how analogy can be used to compare existing patterns and how to harness mental cues in this process.
The remaining theory chapters (4, 5, 6 and 7) look along the continuum at Insights, Constraints, Options Ontology, Taxonomies & Language. Each of these subjects helps align the innovation trajectory more closely with the target. The constraint chapter 6 is particularly important in that it is counter intuitive. The chapter maintains that innovation can be enhanced by the systematic constraints of a well formed train of questioning. By the end of the theory section the reader should be familiar with the map and main concepts of the innovation continuum.
The practical section turns this theory into practice.
Chapters 8 to 11 introduce the "Three Steps to Innovation" technique. We conceptualise, idealise and realise our product using the continuum principles. Following each stage in turn we return the product innovation continuum to its conceptual roots, then its ideal form and finally realise the new product.
Chapter 12 is the appendix to the main source methods. The blog was constructed using the same methods of analogous thinking along the innovation continuum that it proposes, these are some of the analogies used.
Preface
Figure 1 Joseph Mallard William Turner (1838) Fighting Temeraire
Innovation Paradigm Replaced
Preface
When viewing Turner’s Fighting Temeraire or Michelangelo’s David, few would doubt the ability of art to inspire. The emotion engendered by the final departure of a proud warship tugged to its end or David’s tangible curves, smoothed from solid marble, are without parallel. However art’s exclusivity is also its fundamental weakness. Art has high barriers to entry; it requires inspiration, imagination, learned skills and innate abilities. Worse still at the highest level these skill combinations are extremely limited. Each generation is lucky to produce a handful of great artists.
Innovation too, is said to need inspiration, imagination, learned skills and innate abilities. Innovation is considered an art. This book maintains that Innovation cannot afford such exclusivity and this paradigm must be replaced. The alternative is to sit and wait for the next Great Master of Innovation like Darwin, Maxwell and Einstein or Technologists like Edison, Ford and Deming. Innovation need have no lofty goals and only one entry qualification, that it is useful.
This blog applies that qualification throughout, it is written to be useful - not true. A probability, not a fact. It draws your attention to the similarity and analogy between events not simply the facts themselves. On reflection it can be seen that all life is a “probability wave” not a predetermined equation. Even the great truths of Classical Physics bend before the Mechanics of the Quantum scale. No photon or electron is ever more precise than the occasion demands but you need not look to know where it will be, it will go where it is expected. Similarly the mind paints an impression of life with the gentle shades of memory conjured from the elements of experience. Precision is slow and unhelpful when you need to reuse recollections in fresh settings.
This blog is a probability wave that lowers the bar on innovation by showing how ideas can be conjured at will to go where they are expected.
