Dick Reilly writes: "First he locks himself in a room, preferably in a hotel in Puerto Rico, shuts off the phone, pulls down the blinds, has his meals delivered, and does not speak to a soul for a couple of weeks. In this meditative isolation, (he) engages in what he calls 'backtracking . . . I think about everything I done in the past five years, look in each nook and cranny, down to what I put on my toast in the morning.'"[1]
Clay Christensen coined the term, disruptive innovation[2] to refer to a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant status quo in the market. The quote above is from a disruptive innovator whose identity I will reveal later (no skipping!).
In our forthcoming book, “Uniting the Virtual Workforce[3]” Karen Sobel Lojeski and I discuss some of the issues surrounding innovation when people are working in geographically dispersed teams. The overarching question is, Can innovation be as successful when those doing the innovation are not collocated?
The answer depends on how innovation is defined. Our definition is the same as that used by IIIP – “imaginative activity that is fashioned to produce outcomes that are both original and have creative value”. We like this definition because it allows us to consider a very wide range of activities that span everything from the very front end of innovation to the launch of a new service or product.
The front end is where innovation starts. If you ask people whether it’s best to generate new ideas collaboratively in a group or allow people to work alone and independently, they will invariably choose the group. But it turns out that the very front end of innovation – generating ideas – is best done individually. Quite a bit of research has shown that if you want a lot of original, new ideas, it’s better to have individuals work at it alone than in a group. Two reasons have been cited by researchers for this contra-intuitive finding. The first is fairly simple. In a group, only one person can speak at a time, so in given amount of time fewer ideas can be expressed. The second is a bit less obvious and has to do with the apprehension that people might feel about expressing their ideas in a group. This fear of being criticized dampens the expression of ideas by more timid souls. But we believe that there is a third reason that has not been studied very much. It was suggested to me by Jonathan Sharples at the Oxford Institute for the Future of the Mind. He introduced me to the work of John Gruzelier, a neuropsychologist at the University of London. Gruzelier has been studying the effects of neural feedback designed to put people into a relaxed state characterized by “theta waves” in an EEG. What he found was a remarkable improvement in creativity for musicians who underwent neural training that allowed them to put themselves into a relaxed state.
Companies, desperate for innovative ideas, spend billions on research on better ways to develop new products, so it’s surprising that nobody has looked at the role of brain activity in innovation (we could not find any published research), and very little research on how working virtually affects innovation. Both of these areas need to be studied, especially when it comes to the fuzzy front-end, the pipeline for innovation. Even better we might study how these two ideas can be combined. Teach people how to put themselves in a relaxed state and allow them to work in a virtual environment that reduces the apprehension of criticism and let the ideas flow. This might help answer the question posed at the beginning. It may be that the virtual workspace is ideal for the front end.
As promised, the quote that I began with is from Frank Lucas, a disruptive innovator portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film American Gangster. Lucas disrupted the market for heroin in the US[1] by completely changing the supply chain. He offered a superior product for a much lower price and was making about a million dollars a day before he was “disrupted” himself. Setting aside the ethical, moral and legal issues Lucas was a true innovator. I did some research on his life after I saw the film and thought that the similarity between his approach to getting ideas and the work of John Gruzelier was striking.
[1] Jacobson, Mark. The return of Superfly. New York Magazine, August 7, 2000.
[2] Christiansen, C.M. The Innovator’s Dilemma. New York: Harper Business Essentials, 2000.
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