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Toward a Model of Innovation - 4 April 2008
by Hugh Dubberly
Read this article in Chinese (translated by Dash, proofread by Can Zhao, Christina Li)
For the past few years, innovation has been a big topic in conversation about business management. A small industry fuels that conversation with articles, books, and conferences.
Designers, too, are involved. Prominent product-design firms offer workshops and other services promising innovation. Leading design schools promote “design thinking” as a path to innovation.
But despite all the conversation, there is little consensus on what innovation is and how to achieve it.
The current conversation about innovation is similar to an earlier conversation about quality. As recently as the late 1980s, quality was something businesses actively sought but had trouble defining. Today, statistical process control, TQM, Kaizen, and Six-Sigma management are common tools in businesses around the world.
As businesses have become good at managing quality, quality has become a sort of commodity—“table stakes,” necessary but not sufficient to ensure success. When everyone offers quality, quality no longer stands out. Businesses must look elsewhere for differentiation. The next arena for competition has become innovation.
The question is: Can innovation be “tamed,” as quality was?
A key step in taming quality was proposed by Walter Shewhart and Edward Deming’s process model [1]. Their quality cycle is now widely taught and has become an important part of the quality canon. But innovation has no corresponding model. Can we reach consensus on such a model for innovation? One step may be to propose models for discussion. Last year Lance Carlson, president of the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), initiated a project (through ACAD’s Institute for the Creative Process) to create a “concept map” of innovation. The Institute worked with ACAD faculty, Dubberly Design Office, Paul Pangaro, and Nathan Felde to develop a series of models and published one as a poster. This article describes the published model and illustrates its development.
A Model of Innovation, March 2007. Dubberly Design Office prepared this 27-by-38-inch concept map as a project of the Institute for Creative Process at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD). Written and designed by Hugh Dubberly, Nathan Felde, and Paul Pangaro, additional design by Sean Durham and Ryan Reposar. Research by Satoko Kakihara and ACAD faculty Chris Frey, Wayne Giles, and Darlene Lee.
The model is a direct product of interactions among the team, but it is also the indirect product of interactions with several others who shared their insights with the authors, including Robin Bahr, Chris Conley, Peter Esmonde, Shelley Evenson, Michael Geoghegan, Fred Murrell, and Rick Robinson.
Please click the image below to download the full-size, printable .pdf file of the model.
Concept Maps
This model of innovation takes the form of a concept map. “A concept map is a schematic device for representing a set of concept meanings embedded in a framework of propositions[4].” In a concept map, nodes and links form a web of meaning, a semantic mesh. Nodes are nouns. Links are verbs. A noun-verb-noun sequence forms a proposition, a sentence. Concept maps are similar to entity-relationship diagrams and entailment meshes, though less constrained and less rigorous.
This concept map uses text direction and arrows to indicate reading direction. Type size indicates importance and hierarchy. Colored backgrounds join related terms.
Creating concept maps involves trade-offs. Adding terms provides detail and may clarify intent, but more terms mean more links, increasing the reader’s effort.
Concept maps differ from traditional texts by making links explicit, creating multiple pathways. People often ask, “Where should I start reading?” You can start anywhere. Concept maps have no real starting point; they are webs. Still, like any model, concept maps benefit from explanation. They can be explained by telling a story. Conversely, telling a story paints a picture; it creates a model in the mind of the listener.
Separating the Model into Components
> The map places an innovation between two conventions, the one that precedes the innovation and the one it becomes. The map provides an “exploded view” of innovation —zooming in on innovation—as indicated by the yellow triangle.
> The map proposes that innovation entails insight /change/value. In other words: Innovation is a process in which insight inspires change and creates value. 
> An armature can aid development and reading of large concept maps. For example, a horizontal axis may set context, and a vertical axis may define the main concept. In this model, the vertical axis describes the process of innovation, wherein fit is disturbed and then restored. The horizontal axis places the source of innovation with individuals. The axes intersect at insight. Both axes loop, connecting the right edge back to left and bottom back to top, indicating that the innovation process cycles. Convention is overturned by innovation, which becomes a new convention, which is overturned by a new innovation.
> In the left-most column, convention mediates between a community and its context. As a rule, a concept map should not repeat terms. This map intentionally repeats community, convention, and context, indicating that all three change as time passes.
> At the center of the map are four nested feedback loops, emphasizing that innovation is not a linear, mechanical process. First is the simple iteration of prototyping and testing. Second is the design process, incorporating insight to drive new prototypes. Third is the learning process, in which problems or goals are reframed. And fourth is creative destruction, wherein an innovation in one area hastens change in other areas [2].
> Another set of loops fills out the right side of the map. These loops hinge on variety [3]. Variety is the language available to an individual or community. Pressure to create efficiency reduces variety. Yet increasing variety increases the likelihood of insight. A community seeking to increase variety must seek out individuals who can increase the community’s language and enrich its conversation.
Reading the Map
The map is built on the idea that innovation is about the evolution of paradigms. In contrast to innovation processes, quality processes typically work within existing paradigms. Quality is largely about improving efficiency, whereas innovation is largely about improving effectiveness. Improving quality is decreasing defects. Defects can be measured, progress monitored, quality managed.
Business Week design editor Bruce Nussbaum asserts, “You can’t Six Sigma your way to
high-impact innovation[5].” Although some Six-Sigma advocates disagree, Nussbaum points out a fundamental difference between managing quality and managing innovation. Innovation is not getting better at playing the same game; it’s changing the rules and changing the game. Innovation is not workin harder; it’s working smarter.
Chris Conley, head of the product design program at IIT’s Institute of Design, suggests a slightly different frame. He contrasts innovation with operations. He observes, “Most businesses organize for operation, not innovation[6].” Organizations by their nature are conservative: They maintain a way of doing business, a way of living, a way of using language. They conserve convention.
Vertical axis: The innovation cycle. The map situates innovation between two conventions. An innovation replaces an earlier convention and, in time, becomes a new convention. It is a cycle—a process in which insight inspires change and creates value. We rarely recognize innovation while it’s happening. Instead, innovation is often a label applied after the fact, when the results are clear and th new convention has been established. The process begins when external pressure or internal decay disturbs the relation between a community and its context or environment, a relationship maintained by some convention. The original convention no longer “fits.” Perhaps the context has changed, or the community, or even the convention. Someone notices the lack of fit. It causes stress and increases bio-cost. It creates enough friction, enough pain, to force its way into people’s consciousness.
Perception of misfit almost simultaneously gives rise to proposals or change, for reframing. It creates the opportunity for insight. Insights move forward only when shared, articulated, prototyped. Sharing is a test: Does the insight resonate with others? Proposals for change compete for attention. Most are ignored and fade away. The changes that survive are by definition ones the community finds effective. They spread because they increase fit, because they create value.
The map suggests a cycle moving from fit through misfit and back again. The vertical axis loops back on itself, reflecting the cycle.
The yellow loops: the role of feedback. Of course, innovation processes are rarely linear. The map includes several feedback loops, suggesting the role of iteration and the recursive nature of the process. At a basic level, innovation involves experimentation, making something new and testing it. To some extent, the process may be trial and error. The process may lead to new insights. Or it may prompt reframing of goals, consideration of new approaches, new generative metaphors. Success also leads to change: new beliefs, actions, and artifacts.
In turn, these lead to second-order change. Innovation in one place affects related conventions and may reduce their fit, hastening further innovation.
Ethnography and other research techniques can help identify opportunities for innovation. Design methods can increase the speed of generating and testing new ideas. But new ideas are still subject to natural selection (or natural destruction) in the marketplace or political process.
Variety: a regulator. The map posits variety as a regulator of innovation. Variety is a measure of information [3]. Here, it is the language available to an individual or community. Language enables conversation; conversation enables agreement; agreement enables action. At the same time, language constrains action, because language limits what can be discussed and agreed.
Pressure to increase efficiency creates pressure to reduce variety, as maintaining less variety requires less effort or saves time. Reducing variety decreases the number of options a community can discuss. Conversely, increasing variety increases the number of options that can be discussed—increasing the likelihood of insight. (In practice, an increase in variety may be required for some insights to be found.) A community seeking to increase variety must integrate individuals who can increase the community’s language, provide new points of view, draw on additional types of experience, foster new conversations, and provoke action [7].
Horizontal axis: The importance of individuals. The map posits individuals as drivers of innovation— and the source of insight. But to succeed, individuals must participate in a community, where they contribute variety.
Individuals who drive innovation also have a sense of what is not known but necessary for progress, and they understand how to find it. Individuals who drive innovation also seem to possess a healthy measure of optimism. They are motivated by the value that innovation creates (which need not be monetary).
Innovation remains messy, even dangerous. Luck and chance—being at the right place at the right time—still play a role.
Like the vertical axis, the horizontal axis also folds back on itself.
An invitation to interaction.
The story above describes one path through major points on the map, but the map offers multiple paths and invites closer reading.
While this model is not a recipe, it hints at ways in which we might increase the probability of innovation. But more important, it invites further thinking.
Computer scientist Alan Kay has noted, “We do most of our thinking with models[8].” They are “boundary objects,” enabling discourse between communities of practice [9]. This is what makes models powerful.
The poster includes an invitation to react and participate in improving this model of innovation. Just as quality is founded on the feedback loop of “plan-do-check-act” and feedback loops are necessary for successful innovation, we seek your insights and feedback as well.
The team’s hope is for this model to spur thinking and discussion—interaction among readers. We hope it leads to other, more useful models.
Twelve sketches developed during the design process. More than 50 were printed at full size for discussion. The sketches are arranged in chronological order. 
> June 29, 2006: (Landscape) The team began with research, reading all the articles and books they could find on innovation. During the process, they developed three collections: existing models related to innovation, prior definitions, and a list of words related to innovation. The first step in mapping was to group related words and begin to prioritize. An early hypothesis was that innovation involves a change of goals.
> July 11, 2006: This version is one of the first that links concepts, though many are still in lists. It posits innovation as “a process of purposeful change.”
> July 21, 2006: This version posits innovation as one of several processes organizations learn as they grow. An interesting idea, perhaps, but it does not fulfill the assignment of creating a concept map.
> September 4, 2006: Nathan Felde suggested a number of improvements. He also sent his own version. (See page 34, September 4th, in the next section.) And he urged the group to meet.
> September 10, 2006: The author, Nathan Felde, and Paul Pangaro met in Pittsburgh (at CMU’s Emergence Conference). They went back to the beginning, rehearsing the arguments and creating a rough outline using Post-it notes. Over two days a new consensus formed, with the team agreeing on the structure of their argument and a series of propositions.
> September 12, 2006: After the Pittsburgh meeting, Ryan Reposar created this version, documenting all the propositions. He also counted the number of times terms appeared in a proposition, creating a measure of their relative importance.
> July 27, 2006: This version focuses on ways of classifying innovation, reprising taxonomies from several authors. It posits innovation as “insight applied.”
> July 28, 2006: Sean Durham suggested a straightforward, journalistic approach: who, what, when, where, why, and how. It introduces the idea of consequence, which later became value.
> September 1, 2006: This version (one of many related studies) frames innovation as insight + change + value. Change is at the center with innovation behind it, sandwiched between two conventions. Innovation and convention are out of focus, suggesting the blurring of boundaries. The vertical axis defines the innovation process.
> September 19, 2006: Next, Ryan linked the terms so that none repeated, creating a version that was a “true” concept map.
> February 4, 2007: The next step was to give typographic form to the model. It still places the old convention at the top and the new one at the bottom. Terms and propositions continue to change.
> February 24, 2007: This version is relatively close to the final. The armature is in place, as are the feedback loops. But they are not differentiated from the rest of the terms. Innovation is still the same size as convention. Insight, change, and value have not been called out. The color metaphor of a spotlight shining on innovation is not in
place.
A series of sketches developed by Nathan Felde in chronological order. 
> July 25, 2006: Nathan sent this wonderful poem early in the process. Sean Durham later turned it into an animation. You can view the animation at http://www.dubberly.com/innovation_movie.html.
> September 4, 2006: This version responds to the map created on September 1. Together, they illustrate a central tension in the team’s discussions: Can innovation be defined? Nathan wrote: “I guess what I am concerned about [in prior models] is the representation of innovation as cut and dried. Fear, greed, need, perplexing situations and the associated behaviors and anxieties are messy and volatile. I realize that the progress of business requires order and command and control, but the chaotic flux within which or at least from which the seeds of innovation are sown needs some depiction in our rendering of the map/diagram/ output of this discourse. Can anyone do it or can it be taught? [These] are questions that have come up. Have we resolved that, or is it a starting premise to be confirmed or denied? Are we at a juncture that mandates innovation ourselves? Is this a predicament that fosters innovation? It appears to me that a fault or fault line discloses the opportunity to innovate, although the activities take names like think, wonder, search, toy, rummage, and guess. Design: a guessing game.”
> February 14, 2007: (Landscape) Nathan proposed this playful version in response to the grid structure of the February 4th version. He described this one as “my structural-engineering interpretation of the latest round.”
> February 14, 2007: (Landscape) Nathan’s assistant, Purnima Rao, created this version. It contains a number of very interesting ideas. Change is literally at the center of a whirl. It posits “motive, opportunity, and means” as necessary for change. (Does that suggest a crime?) It also describes innovation as “a label we assign after the fact.”
REFERENCES
[1] Shewhart, W. Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, Washington, D.C.: Graduate School of the Department of Agriculture, 1939.
[2] Schumpeter, J. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942.
[3] Ashby, W. R. An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1957.
[4] Novak, J. D., and D.B. Gowan Learning How to Learn. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
[5] Nussbaum, B. “The Empathy Economy.” Business Week, 8 March 2005.
[6] Conley, C. “Building a Creative Culture,” a presentation, Denver, Colo.: AIGA Image Space Object Conference, 2007.
[7] Esmonde, P. Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations. Menlo Park, Calif.: Sun Microsystems, 2002.
[8] Kay, A. From an interview in the video, “Project 2000.” Cupertino, Calif.:Apple, 1988.
[9] Star, S. L. and J. R. Griesemer “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907 - 1939.” Social Studies of Science 19, no.3 (1989): 387-420.
Hugh Dubberly manages a consultancy focused on making services and software easier to use through interaction design and information design. As vice president he was responsible for design and production of Netscape’s Web services. He was at Apple for 10 years where he managed graphic design and corporate identity and co-created the Knowledge Navigator series of videos. Dubberly also founded an interactive media department at Art Center and has taught at San Jose State, IIT/ID, and Stanford.
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