Innovation

When Your Moon Shots Don’t Take Off

How science fiction and other unconventional tools can fire the imagination and lead to breakthrough growth.

by

Nathan Furr,
Kyle Nel,

and

Jeff Dyer

by

Nathan Furr,
Kyle Nel,

and

Jeff Dyer

From the Magazine (January–February 2019) · Long read

NASA

Summary.

Many companies looking for breakthroughs struggle to move beyond incremental ideas, because cognitive biases trap people in the status quo and prevent them from seeing big opportunities. But four tactics can help firms overcome biases and think far more creatively:

Science fiction.

Sci-fi writers have foreseen all kinds of innovations. When Lowe’s invited some in to envision its future, it got ideas for augmented reality phones, service robots, 3-D printing, and other new technologies that boosted sales.

Analogies.

These can help innovators make big leaps too. For instance, when Charlie Merrill applied the analogy of a supermarket to the brokerage business, he changed the industry.

First principles logic.

Often it helps to reexamine foundational assumptions and rebuild from the ground up. That’s how Regeneron cut drug development costs 80%.

Exaptation.

Why do we use something for one purpose and not another? Asking that question led to the creation of the Flex-Foot, a revolutionary prosthetic that doesn’t look anything like a foot but acts like one.

Idea in Brief

The Problem

Incremental thinking plagues organizations that are really looking for breakthrough innovation.

The Reason

Cognitive biases too easily distort our perceptions and prevent us from seeing possibilities.

A Solution

An assortment of tactics and tools can challenge our powerful instinct to avoid risk and choose the easy path.

Recently, the head of innovation at a major industrial conglomerate set up 10 cross-functional teams and gave them an audacious goal: to completely reimagine their businesses. To encourage fresh ideas and approaches, the company had the teams apply a design-thinking lens to customer research and prototype solutions using lean start-up techniques. The innovation leader expected 10 transformational proposals to come in. What he got instead were suggestions along the lines of adding a connected data stream to an industrial tool. He was dumbfounded. Where were the radical new concepts? Had no one even considered creating a digital platform, or flipping the business model, or reinventing products?

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2019 issue (pp.112–117) of Harvard Business Review.

Nathan Furr is a Professor of Strategy at INSEAD and a coauthor of five best-selling books, including The Upside of Uncertainty, The Innovator’s Method, Leading Transformation, Innovation Capital, and Nail It then Scale It.
KN

Kyle Nel is the CEO and cofounder of Uncommon Partners, a behavioral transformation consultancy, the former executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs, and a coauthor of Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company’s Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018).
Jeff Dyer is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at BYU’s Marriott School of Management. He is the lead author of the best-selling book, The Innovator’s DNA, and coauthor of The Innovator’s Method.

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When Your Moon Shots Don’t Take Off

Science fiction.

Analogies.

First principles logic.

Exaptation.

Idea in Brief

The Problem

The Reason

A Solution

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