What if

#17 - Jul.2021

Ideas novelty is less common than you think. Most innovations are iterations of reframing the problem and building on top of existing solutions. And that's ok -  innovation should be more about value-driven solutions than just original ideas.

Back in the '40s,  Genrich Altshuller saw this trend in engineering: by reviewing thousands of patents across several fields he connected the dots between a few core principles shared by all solutions (a total of 40 principles!). In other words, most inventions were iterations of solutions from other fields.

And this is a powerful mental model. Removing the boundaries of the industry you work on while exploring solutions is a key aspect of diverging thinking for discovering new approaches. Abstraction and analogies can sometimes lead you towards the piece of the puzzle that you're looking for.

Here's a simple exercise that I learned some years ago when studying Service Design: when exploring solutions, choose a company that you admire from a totally different industry (say you work in food services - so you choose a company in tech or automotive). Then ask yourself this question: "What if [Company] were to enter my industry? how they might solve this problem?". This cross-field thinking can get you into very wild brainstorming sessions - connecting core principles used by other successful companies from very different industries can get you to insightful findings.