Science and Art and Innovation
Posted: November 3rd, 2011 in Innovation
By Rick Strezo
There’s Science. Yay Science!
There’s Art. Oooh Art!
For some reason, the world wrongly views each discipline as mutually exclusive, completely incompatible, with the other. Science versus art has become the title bout in the old Left Brain/Right Brain debate. Perhaps this has happened because it’s all too easy to plunk them each down at the extreme ends of the Methodical-Creative spectrum.
Sure they’re different, but not completely so. Science often benefits from happenstance (Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin) and unpredictable flashes of inspiration (Kekule’s famous snake dream revealing the ring structure of benzene). And art can lean heavily into facts and principles (both color and music theory come immediately to mind, as does Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style”).
Enter Innovation, which in the business world, somehow—simplistically and mistakenly—has become synonymous with unboundedness and creativity while simultaneously being divorced from process and problem solving.
As a consequence, many senior managers view Innovation as some unknowable juju—a dark art overseen by a fickle, mysterious god whom mere mortals could never hope to understand, much less tame. These same business leaders who have embraced the science of Six Sigma as a disciplined, measurable means of continuous improvement view its Innovation cousin solely as the art of freeing pent up creativity (while simultaneously applying prodigious amounts of luck).
In my 20 year innovation career I’ve met more of these hapless souls than I can remember. They may look like those of us who understand that successful, repeatable innovation is BOTH art and science, that it involves expansive thinking guard railed by process, and that it encourages creative problem solving, but their words quickly give them away as pure “artistes:”
“Everyone should innovate all the time.” (In the risky world of innovation, this is the only surefire approach—assuming the guaranteed outcomes you desire include complete chaos and abject failure.)
“We just need an Innovation Portal to capture all the creative ideas our people dream up.” (As if ideas were lottery tickets and probability of success was driven by sheer volume. The challenge for most businesses is not the shortage of ideas but the shortage of good ideas.)
“Just bring me one $100MM idea Just one.” (This manager needs a psychic, not an innovator.)
“Consumers didn’t know that they needed the iPod.” (Of course they didn’t: why would you expect your consumers to invent the solution you hope to sell to them? That said, in-depth consumer research would have uncovered both the need for a better digital music player as well as a better way to source the music itself.)
“I’ll know it when I see it.” (Run, do not walk, away from a leader foisting such inscrutable screening criteria on you.)
“I’ve had one market success in my career. I can’t possibly hope to have another.” (How very sad that luck and not skill has been this manager’s self-professed legacy.)
So, would-be Innovators, use your whole head (and by that I mean both the left and right halves of your brain): successful, bankable innovation isn’t a question of art or science, but rather one of art and science.