Reusing Innovation
I’ve been building and iterating innovation systems for many years. They are like fingerprints, with many similarities, but ultimately, they are unique to each organization. One innovation system element in my blind spot is “proactive discovery” – the intentional act of casting a much wider net of potential new applications for an innovation.
In the Fall 2023 MIT Sloan Management Review, the authors Wenjing Lyu, Gina O'Connor, and Neil Thompson explore this activity, its failings, and suggestions for improving it. Their focus is technological innovation, but it can easily be extended to non-tech innovation and even everyday improvement.
My world is healthcare innovation. And many innovation systems in this space are linear: opportunity/challenge identification, prototyping and testing, building, and scaling. It is usually some combination of accelerators, innovation and design departments, quality efforts, and transformation initiatives. Over the years, I’ve experienced the people in these spaces being incredibly committed, open to sharing and learning from each other, and almost always focused on impact. But I rarely encountered the deliberate act of wondering, “How might what we just created be used to solve other problems?”
Because healthcare innovation systems are linear, it almost prevents seeking out new use cases. When a project is completed, it's passed from the innovation shop to the implementation shop, which is almost solely operational. The innovation shop then moves on to its next challenge. Often, the innovation shops hire people for their novelty superpowers rather than their ability to seek out reuse.
What might it look like if the innovation shop had a parallel track to implementation that curated additional use cases? Building in expectations of reuse and hiring people with reuse as a superpower would be a great start. Or much easier, while sharing with others, in whatever format (conferences, informal sharing, LinkedIn, etc.), a simple last question could be, “What other challenges might this help with?”
How are you building reuse into your innovation system?