What to Learn From a Doer’s Manifesto On Innovating

Review of Luis Perez-Breva’s Book on Innovating

Innovation is the process of creating something new. But at its genesis, no thing about an innovation is new.

That is the starting point of Luis Perez-Breva’s book Innovating — A Doer’s Manifesto from 2016. The book evolved from workshops at MIT on innovating.

The title offers two clues to what Perez-Breva presents:

• Innovating — a verb, not innovation — a noun. This choice reflects the view that an innovation is what we call something when the work is done, once the novelty is understood. However, looking at the task ahead of an innovator, prior to knowing what the novelty consists of, the more useful object of consideration is the practices and process, that best lead to revelation of novelty and thus innovations.
• A Doer’s Manifesto. The audience are those individuals or small teams engaged in the process of innovating. Innovation can certainly be studied in a greater perspective, say the set up of institutions, such as education, research labs, and market regulations that spur on innovating. However, the perspective in the book is that of the ones actually doing the work.

I find a lot to appreciate in the book, which overlaps with my own experience of innovating. I summarize parts of the book next, after which I offer an appraisal.

Though my interest in reading and reviewing the book is with regard to product and service innovation, Perez-Breva makes the point that the innovating manifesto can be applied to other types of innovating, like academic and political. My choice of terminology will reflect my interest, but the reader can surely appreciate the wider applicability.

Retrospective Analysis — A Poor Guide

For an innovation to be successful there needs to be a market for it, a receptive audience, or demand speaking generally. It is tempting therefore to begin the innovating by performing a market analysis, identify a segment to target, decide price points and features, and then go to work.

This is not the way to do it, Perez-Breva argues, or at least not the optimal way. The retrospective analysis of successful innovations, flipped backwards, falsely frame innovating as steps on a path towards a known and defined market.

Innovating rather is better thought of “as something you start to do way before the idea of a product or an organization eventually reveal itself.” The novelty is discovered through the innovating process.

Make It Tangible

The starting point is instead a hunch. That initial mental construct about an issue close to one’s mind, maybe even a pet peeve, which hints at a problem that might be dealt with better. Nothing earth-shattering, final or certain needed at this stage of the process.

In the next step on the innovating journey, the innovator should seek to make an object of the hunch more tangible by some means. That real or abstract object will later be the key to discovery of what might be novel (if anything).

Before discussing the means to make things tangible, Perez-Breva distinguishes between what that object of the hunch to focus on might be:

• A rough idea of a solution the innovator has in mind to the problem of the hunch.
• The problem of the hunch itself, which through simulation or testing can be clarified, bounded or otherwise better understood by the innovator.
• A method to verify if a solution to the problem of the hunch indeed has been found, which indirectly can support the creation of novel solutions.

In other words, the objective is to learn about the problem through making something about the hunch more tangible. But, it is not exclusively the prospective solution that can be the object of these efforts.

Means to Make It Tangible — Parts

Regardless what object of the hunch is used as the point of entry to the learning and innovating process, Perez-Breva defines two means to make the hunch more tangible: parts and people.

Parts is defined very broadly, from physical material and components of hardware, to parts of software, or diagrams and flow-charts, patents and papers. Simply, a part is an item that enables some manner of experimentation or trial of the selected object of the hunch at a reduced scale.

Reduced scale is an important concept in Perez-Breva’s argument. In the forward-looking view, the innovative full-scale solution is not known, it must be discovered in stages. The discovery process requires errors to be made, and possible routes forward to be discarded. It is always cheaper to be wrong at smaller scales compared to whatever the full-scale will prove to be.

Therefore, the innovating process should include combinations of parts that in a simple or creative way approximate a reduced set of features of the object of the hunch. The less it takes to better approximate, the more creative the accomplishment. Also, the parts serve the purpose of facilitating learning and discovery at the given scale, and they are not necessarily going to the parts in whatever full-scale solution lies ahead.

Means to Make It Tangible — People

People are the other unit. They fit into the process by their contributions in the form of information, capabilities and skills, as far as the problem of the hunch is concerned. Again, the notion to consider people as a target market to be analyzed, segmented and serviced, is to use a retrospective point-of-view when a forward-looking view is needed.

That view of the innovating process by Perez-Breva has a further implication for interfacing with people. Since the solution towards which the innovating is moving is unknown, the challenge to the innovator is less about about finding the right person for the goal at hand, and more about finding out which person will open up a new fruitful path forward in the discovery when engaged with the innovator or team.

With that view serendipity and chance encounters have potentially more to offer, as does good principal qualities of people, rather than narrowly defined skill sets.

Structure A Process

With this view of innovating, a theory if you like, Perez-Breva outlines a process fit for the circumstances, a process that can be practiced by an individual or a team. He contrasts two distinct pathways, one he calls idea-harvesting, the other innovation prototyping, the latter being what he favours.

Idea-harvesting builds on brain-storming. A large number of ideas, or hunches, are hatched and collated by some, ostensibly, free thinking in teams. From the many ideas harvested, a subset is selected based on some assessment. However, given that all innovations start from a point of zero novelty, the novelty rather being discovered through the innovating, Perez-Breva argues the idea-harvesting pathway is forced to filter ideas based on low-information guesswork. Furthermore, the push to create a deluge of ideas to select from can make the process the victim of the law of large numbers, by which average beliefs come to dominate.

Instead, akin to evolution by natural selection, the preferred process is set up such that novel and good ideas self-select and survive to the next scale of prototyping and learning. The survival fitness is how much one has learned about potential outcomes and how much leverage one stands to gain by spending additional resources to allow the ideas to progress. It is the tangible item that provides a handle to this. In essence: “ideas progress when they prove — or disprove — the viability of the concept at the next scale.”

This perspective has therefore a far more immediate focus given the current status of any given concept. It is not built on guesses about what the full-scale innovation will be, or on an aggregation of hunches following the idea-harvesting.

So, we need a hunch to start from, parts and people that contribute to the discovery of novelty at a reduced scale, thus testing the viability. And, Perez-Breva stresses, the process needs a “primer” to get started. The primer is what the team need in order to overcome the fear of being wrong. Because in this evolving, forward-looking view of innovating, novelty emerges from the minority of pathways that has not been proven non-viable. Being wrong is part of the game.

Creative Actions and Thinking in the Process

What would this look like in actual applications? Perez-Breva discusses several examples that in his interpretation illustrates the actual forward-looking steps of innovating. I will not recount those examples here, however.

The reason is that at this level of granularity, domain specificity is much more relevant. Specific means to make the the object of the hunch tangible at a reduced scale include Rasberry-Pi for hardware prototyping, computer simulations of problems, maker magazines, massive open online courses, even slide-decks to promote conversations with people are mentioned by Perez-Breva.

The purpose of the tangible prototype is to enable discovery and testing in order to evolve the innovation, as described above. The innovator interrogates the prototype, asks questions, probes possibilities, accrue survival fitness for the process.

Questions to ask a prototype can for example explore counterfactuals. For example, what would it mean if some feature that is true was instead false? Would that radically alter the problem or solution? If so, is it possible to modify the prototype at the current or adjacent scale to free it from the constraining feature?

The list goes on. The common property of the questions Perez-Breva mentions is that they probe the concepts, assumptions, and beliefs that may hide from view a different, better way to understand or address the problem.

My Appraisal

The most welcome concept in Perez-Breva’s book is the advocacy of a forward-thinking process for innovating. A great deal of what is published about innovating builds on retrospective data, which easily is victim of two weak points in the human constitution: successor bias and overestimation of the accuracy of one’s introspection.

Successor bias is an error of data analysis using an inappropriate baseline or numerator. When successful innovations are studied in isolation, rather than in contrast to the far more numerous unsuccessful innovations, the prevalence of certain features or actions in the data are not instructive to an innovator wrestling with a problem in the present. It is at least required to also show that those certain features and actions are absent or rare in the unsuccessful cases of innovating.

There is also the very human quality of mostly unconscious reinterpretation of past events to fit a model of the world and of oneself. An innovator that was successful or unsuccessful may have opinions of what caused the outcome and what thoughts and facts preceded a seemingly fateful decision or insight. However, psychologists (and history) have revealed how limited our ability is to make these determinations. We are unreliable witnesses, our own minds included. Therefore, data collected from retrospection unconstrained by contemporaneous notes and records, are easily uninformative of what would help the present innovator.

Therefore, if we accept Perez-Breva’s theory that what is novel about an innovation is unknown from the start, and hence innovating is discovery, the meaningful question for the innovator is what might the process be for that discovery. An innovating process that favours testing and trials on a tangible representation of a current concept, and that enables efficient testing (that is more trials with a set of resources) would direct creative efforts to the right place.

This is a forward-looking process derived from principles or theory of innovating, not a construction from retrospectively derived associations and correlations.

On the other hand, this process, for all its good qualities, must guard against a dilution of efforts through branching explorations. The process outlined above builds on a progression of increasing scale. The prototype at any given scale should be interrogated and used to challenge current beliefs, and remove possible paths forward. The invitation to thorough exploration of prototypes can turn into never-ending testing at any given scale.

The decision to go from low-cost, low-stake prototyping to greater uncertainty and higher stakes at a greater scale, is a critical one. The comfort of low-stakes can be attractive, especially if the team enjoys the learning and testing efforts in themselves, and are encouraged by the process to engage in it. For some innovations, there is also a huge premium at being first-in-class. The rewards of a speedy arrival at the final innovation can justify pushing ideas that may not have self-selected, instead are outcomes of leaps of faith.

There are rule-of-thumbs to help with this decision: some say one should feel about 70% certain, then go for it; or some offers reminders of the Pareto principle that 20% of the effort yields 80% of the returns (or a related formulation); or some promote the idea that one should always do the currently most advanced test first in order to discard unfit candidates as soon as possible, and then fill in the gaps only once the closest to full-scale test is passed.

The above remarks are not a foundational criticism of Perez-Breva’s argument. A risk and decision analysis of some flavour can be combined with the innovating process as outlined above.

However, the emphasis on learning is seductive and in tension with an objective to arrive at some destination in the near future. The precise destination is unknown, but its necessary properties to be useful are not, be they a commercially viable product, an article that can pass peer-review in a top-tier journal, or a convincing policy argument that influences an ongoing debate.

In my experience, a successful implementation of the innovating process still requires a pull forward by some, possibly vague, notion of desired destination. Making learning and discovery for the next scale the only objective the innovator is concerned with at any moment, could make the path taken too slow and meandering. Constraints and the obsessive pull from far-away goals, are part of the full story.

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