One Way to Improve Innovation and Creativity

Earlier this week during dinner with a client I ordered tofu as a main course for the very first time in my life. I mean, up to that point the only tofu I’d ever eaten – ever – was at the bottom of the Japanese soup you get at a sushi restaurant.

But we were ensconced at the luxurious Lodge at Woodloch, in the Poconos, where the service is immaculate and the food is terrific, and I figured if anyone anywhere can do tofu in a tasty and exciting way, it will be these guys. So despite the fact that I was also highly attracted by both the filet and the duck, I ordered panko-crusted tofu served over steamed vegetables with a light chili sauce. And I was not disappointed.

I’m only telling you this patently self-indulgent story because my own “discovery” of a new experience for myself is directly related to the kind of discovery that goes into a business’s successful innovation process. And it all has to do with exploiting the theory of weak ties in networks.

Last month in “How to find Opportunities in Your Social Network” I reviewed the weak-ties theory. Your best new job opportunities, for instance, often come from the colleagues you aren’t very close to, because you and your closest acquaintances already know many of the same people. Any new job opportunities your close friends and colleagues know about are probably not news to you, while you're less likely to know about the opportunities your “weak ties” suggest.

The weak-ties theory also helps to explain the “wisdom of crowds” effect, in which a group of people with completely independent ideas can often come to a better, more creative or predictive conclusion than any single one of them acting alone, even the smartest member of the group. And one of the most important applications of the theory has to do with discovering new ideas for product and service innovations. Innovations come in networks, for the simple reason that all new ideas result from combining previous ideas and concepts. So technology itself is nothing more than a big network of connected ideas. But some combinations of previous ideas tend to generate more original new ideas than others. And this, also, relies on the theory of weak ties.

Your best new ideas, and a company’s most breakthrough innovations, will come when you tap your weak ties by interacting with the disciplines you know less about, or the experts you rarely consult, or the people you associate with less frequently. By contrast, the surest way NOT to have a creative breakthrough is to rely on all the experts you already know, and all the disciplines you’re already familiar with.

Consider the kinds of innovations generated by Innocentive, a crowdsourcing web site that connects hundreds of “seekers” with thousands of “solvers.” A seeker posts a problem and offers a prize or incentive to anyone who solves it. The problems posted on Innocentive are often scientific or technical in nature, but they can be anything that might benefit from a novel or unusual approach, as well. Most of the seekers are companies looking to improve their products or services and, not surprisingly, most of the successful solvers are engineers, scientists, and other technical experts.

Because of its structure as an explicit network of problems posed and solvers working to find solutions, Innocentive serves as a great laboratory for studying the kinds of traits and characteristics that mark successful new innovations. And, in fact, an academic study of successful solutions produced by Innocentive has found that a solver’s likelihood of solving a problem (that is, generating a successful new innovation) increases with the distance between the solver’s field of technical expertise and the problem’s domain. In other words, as Daren C. Brabham says in his new book Crowdsourcing, “a biologist may fare better than a chemist would at solving a chemical engineering problem.” And women, who are often part of the “outer circle of the scientific establishment,” have also been found to do better at problem solving than men do on this networking site.

So mix your teams up if you want to improve your company’s ability to generate new ideas, innovative solutions, and creative approaches. And remember that when teams are made up entirely of "experts" in a field, they're not likely to be particularly innovative. This is because as smart as your experts are, they probably all know similar solutions.

Instead, in addition to subject-matter experts, throw an engineer, a marketing manager, or maybe even a smart accountant or HR exec into the mix, and the "weak ties" that connect their disparate disciplines are more likely to generate a truly original and innovative idea.

And you can ratchet your own personal creativity up a step by simply by concentrating on enhancing the role of "weak ties" in all aspects of your life:

• Read a nonfiction book for at least 20 minutes a day (while you’re working out at the gym, maybe, or before you retire, or while having lunch at your desk).
• Make a new and different connection (online or off) with someone outside your immediate circle once a week, and find something to discuss that is of interest to you both.
• When you meet someone whose discipline or expertise you know very little about, spend some time trying to "get it" with respect to how they approach their own problems and issues.
• And if you want to learn more from a friend or colleague, ask them questions you're less likely already to know the answers to.

If you've never tried tofu, you're more likely to be surprised when you do.