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DOI:10.1145/2093548.2093560 Peter J. Denning

Th P f n f iTTh id a id aWhat if practices rather than ideas are the main source of innovation?

ID e A s Pe rVA D e oU r pro es-sional work. We borrow them, we apply them, we solve prob-

lems with them, we create new ones, and we try to oster moreo them in our teams. We express what we are doing by re erring to the ideasbehind our work. We hope that someo our ideas become innovations by being adopted.

We also believe that ideas launch in-novations and that innovations ail or want o good ideas. As soon as we be-come aware o a success ul innovation, we automatically look backward to try to understand where the idea or it orig-

inated. When we see ailures, we imme-diately look to bee up our processes orstimulating imagination and creativity.

For several years I have been puz-zling over why it seems that our in-novation adoption rates are low eventhough our idea production rates arehigh. The overall success rate o inno- vation initiatives in business is around4%.2 Yet many businesses report they have too many ideas and waste pre-cious time and resources struggling toselect the ones most likely to succeedand then work them through to adop-tion. 1 We are idea rich, selection ba -ed, and adoption poor.

I have come to wonder i the con-nection between ideas and adoption ismuch weaker than we believe. What i innovation is not ideas generated, butpractices adopted? What i entrepre-neurs, rather than inventors, are thereal innovators?

I do not pretend to have any sort o fnal answer to these questions. I wouldlove to see them discussed and debat-ed. Yes-answers would have important

impacts on our pro essional work. Forexample, we would worry less aboutstimulating creativity and imagination,and more about developing our skills at

getting our communities to adopt new practices. We would approach designnot as an expression o ideas but as theramework or new practices.

My objective in this column is toexamine the ways in which ideas andpractices source innovation. I will pro-pose a position about these hypoth-eses, and I will draw conclusions aboutour pro essional work.

h w D it W rkG tt gid ad pt d?In discussing innovations we talkabout two distinct aspects: ideas andchange o practice. We o ten connectthe two with the word adoption orexample, when we get an idea adoptedinto practice.

Research is o ten seen as a majorsource o ideas and, by implication, o innovation. Dennis Tsichritizis (thenthe chairman o GMD in Germany) wrote in 1997 that he thought the no-tion o research being the source ismistaken. 5 He noted our ways in whichnew practices can be adopted:

Disseminate research: publicize the idea and exhort people to practice it ;

Create tools: build and distribute

easy tools that draw people into thepractice; Education and training: directly

teach people the new practice; andBusiness: start new businesses to

o er the new practice.Only the frst o these is explicitly

concerned with generating ideas. Theothers, which occupy much more at-tention and budgets, can succeed with-out telling any o the adopters whatideas are behind the new practice.

So are ideas as important in the

gen eration o innovations as we seemto think? How should we divide oure ort between generating ideas and working or adoption?

I you think ideas are the key to in-novation, you will put your e ort intogenerating, analyzing, selecting, andpublicizing ideas through papers,articles, books, blogs, and other ven-ues. This accounts or proposals toimprove creativity, imagination, bor-rowing, and recombinationall well-researched idea generators .

On the other hand, i you thinkadopting new practice is the key to in-novation, you will put your e ort intoselling people on the value o doing thenew practice, building credibility thatit works, teaching people how to do it,urnishing tools to help them do it, pro-

viding leadership, helping people pastobstacles and resistances they encoun-ter while trying to do it, and building and executing on teams to get it done.

Bob Metcal e, the inventor o Ether-net, calls these cases respectively theowers and the weeds. 3 He says the el-

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egant and alluring conceptual modeland mathematical analysis publishedin 1976 is the ower o Ethernet; 4 buthe spent 10 years in the weeds selling Ethernets to skeptical business leaders.His e ort on the weeds ar outweighedhis e ort on the owers. Ethernet be-gan as an idea but Metcal es deep con- viction that Ethernet would bring value was the real driver that kept him going him through the long work o adoption.

Lets take a look at the case or eachapproach.

T c r id f r tMany theories o innovation concen-trate on how ideas ow rom sourcesto products and services in the mar-ketplace. They tell us we will get moreinnovation by stimulating more idea

generation. They are accompanied by ascinating stories o how ideas werediscovered.

The idea idea has an attractive logic. Many innovations clearly start withsomeones idea (vision). I we traceback rom an innovation, we can al-most always fnd someone who men-tioned the idea frst. Even i the ideainventor did not participate in the work o adoption, that person o tengets credit or launching the processo refning and developing the idea as

it moves toward adoption.The popular notion o meritocracy

o ideas supports this theory. It saysthat innovation is the process o thebest ideas winning in a competition with many ideas.

Perhaps the most popular concep-tion o idea-source innovation is thepipeline model. According to thismodel, ideas invented by research-ers and visionaries ow through apipeline with stages or prototyping,product development, manu actur-ing, and marketing en route to be-coming products or services in themarketplace. The ow in the pipe-line is driven by economic pull romthe marketplace and proactive pushrom promoters and investors. Thisconception was made popular by Vannevar Bush, who, as the frst U.S.presidential science advisor in 1945,laid out a plan or government spon-sorship o research that was eventu-ally implemented as the National Sci-ence Foundation. Bush thought ideageneration is the main driver o inno-

vation and should be encouraged andsupported by government policy. Thesame notion pervades the organiza-tion o many businessesseparatedivisions or research, development,manu acturing, and marketing. How-ever, many businesses today try toovercome the pipelines ine fcien-

cies with cross- unction teams and with SCRUM and agile development .

Di usion is another conception, al-

most as popular as the pipeline. Firstproposed by Everett Rogers in 1962,this model assumes that innovationis a change o a social system broughtabout by communicating the innova-tion idea through the normal channelso the social community, leading in-dividual members to decide to adopt.The di usion model does not assumea pipeline; it emphasizes the adoptiondecisions made by community mem-bers, and the actors that bring themto that decision. Companies that sub-scribe to this model organize heavily around marketing and public relations.

The di usion and pipeline modelsshare a common eature: they both putidea generation as the source. They di er on how the ideas move rom thesource to the market.

T c r Pr t f r tNewer theories o innovation concen-trate on adoption o new practice in acommunity. An idea that changes noones behavior is only an invention, notan innovation.

The Prime Innovation Pattern, whichis part o the new theory, says that in-novators bring about changes o prac-tice in their communities through fvekinds o activities. 2 The innovator (1)senses a disharmony, (2) sticks with itlike a puzzle until it can be articulated,(3) discovers how the current common

sense o the community generates thedisharmony, (4) proposes a new com-mon sense that would resolve the dis-

harmony, and (5) commits to a path o action that leads to that outcome. Theinnovators goal is to change the com-munitys practice rom what they arealready doing to something new that re-solves the disharmony. The eight prac-tices ramework is the innovators skillset or moving through this pattern. 2

In this view, there is much more toaccomplishing innovation than gen-erating and pursuing ideas. There is alot o work to be in touch with the deepconcerns o the community, and thento guide them toward new thinking and actions.

Many innovations clearly start aspractices. Someone starts doing some-thing di erently, o ten as an improvi-sation. When the new way is superiorto the old, others imitate it; the prac-tice spreads. A ter a while, someonebuilds tools to acilitate the practiceand enable even more people to en-gage with it. People in the community experience this as responding to aneed or an opportunity to make thingsbetter or others.

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An example is blogging, which start-ed spontaneously when someone start-ed keeping a daily journal on a Webpage (a Web log) in the early 1980s. Oth-ers imitated the practice and it spread.

Various people created blogging so t- ware to help others publish their blogsand enable newcomers to start blogs.Still others built tracking services tohelp people fnd blogs o interest tothem. Although some names have beenproposed as the frst bloggers, thetruth is that no one really knows who was the frst and no one seems to care.

The current wave o apps andapp stores fts this pattern. Steve Jobs o Apple saw an opportunity tosell small pieces o so tware that cus-

tomize the iPhone. Many others haveollowed suit. App developers are athriving and growing industry, o er-ing over one million apps by mid-2010.Most o them are responding sponta-neously to perceived consumer needsand opportunities, and are not engag-ing in an idea-generation process .

Only later, in moments o re ection,do spontaneous innovators try to ex-plain the new practice. They call theirexplanation the idea behind the prac-tice, even though the doers o the prac-tice had no such idea. Many ideas arethere ore a terthoughts to explain in-novations that have already happened.

a c mb d appr When described side by side as above, we see that idea and practice are bothessential. However, that does not meanideas always come frst. It is o ten moreruit ul to experiment frst with trialpractices and later distill descriptionso the best practices into ideas .

Our best answer to the originalquestion at this point is: fnd a balance

between cultivating ideas and cultivat-ing practices. What is a good balance?

Birkinshaw and his colleagues fg-ure most companies are already plenty good enough at generating new ideas;they suggest the bottlenecks to adop-tion are elsewhere and consume asmuch as 95% o the work on innova-tion. 1 Metcal e spent one year per ect-ing his idea and 10 years selling it. 3

This makes the iceberg a use ul anal-ogy. The visible top part (approximately 10%) is analogous to the set o ideasdescribing an innovation. The invisiblesubmerged part (approximately 90%)is analogous to the practices constitut-ing the innovation. The practices keepthe ideas a oat. The iceberg analogy has a ratio o idea work to adoption work close to Metcal es experience.

Too strict adherence to the ideaside o innovation leads us to ocustoo much on the easiest part o theinnovation process and to de er workon adoption until a ter the idea isper ected. This imbalance is calledthe Innovation Myth 2 or the EurekaMyth. 1 The imbalance leads us to un-derestimate the work o adoption andit compounds the selection problem.Escaping this myth will require a radi-cal reorganization o approaches to in-novation. But the escape is well worth

it because it also escapes the dread ul waste o the 96% ailure rate.

You can put this to work at the per-sonal level immediately. Beware theidea idea. Put 10% o your e ort intoexplaining the value and principles o your ideas, and 90% into ostering thenew practices you advocate or yourcommunity. Get going on the work o adoption rom the very beginning.

References1. bi ki h w, J., bouqu , C., d b oux, J.-l. th 5

my h o i ov io . MIT Sloan Management Review

52, 2 (Wi 2011), 4250.2. D i g, P. d Du h m, r. The Innovators Way. MIt

P , 2010.3. M c , r. Iv io i fow ; i ov io i

w d. MIT Technology Review (nov. 1999). www.ch o ogy vi w.com/w /11994/? =

4. M c , r. d D. bogg . e h : Di i u d p ckwi chi g o oc compu wo k . Commun.ACM 19, 7 (Ju y 1976), 395 404; h p://doi. cm.o g/10.1145/360248.360253

5. t ich i zi , D. th dy mic o i ov io . IBeyond Calculation, P. D i g d b. M c , ed .Cop icu book , 1997, 259265.

Peter J. Denning (pjd@ p . du) i Di i gui h dP o o o Compu sci c d Di c o o hC ow ki I i u o i o m io i ov io hn v Po g du schoo i Mo y, Ca, i edi o oaCM Ubiquity , d i p p id o aCM.

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