How can abstraction help the innovation process?

In the context of Innovation challenges, should we only be “seeing” and “sensing” the reality as it is? Maybe this approach impedes innovation from truly flourishing!

To surpass reality you genuinely need to push yourself, your collaborators and your organization out of the comfort zone.

By “comfort zone” we mean the space, the time, the context and the knowledge that you are so well acquainted with, that you master, in which you feel comfortable and at ease! You must challenge yourself and/or your company to take a giant leap into the unknown by doing something entirely new for the first time.

This approach has proven its value in different parts of the innovation process, such as:

• Observation – do not limit your observations merely to issues and contexts very well known to you and situated in or directly connected to your own framework;
• Inspiration – look for inspiration in lateral contexts;
• Ideation – propose impossible solutions, non-existing techniques or materials. By doing so, you force your team to bring new, fresh, and innovative concepts to the table which, after an experimentation and testing stage, can bring new solutions to your framework. Furthermore, you could , use the reverse thinking and process method, i.e. commence with concrete examples to subsequently push the level up to a more conceptual and abstract level. By doing so you might experience the AHA-moment within this conceptual stage, during which new insights and solutions for the innovation challenges are born;
• Systematization – Is situated in a more business-oriented context and implies that by taking innovation challenges as regards your products and services to a level of real “solutions thinking”, you are upgrading this innovation exercise to “abstract level thinking”.

DO NOT FORGET...

...that this shift can be fully empowered by the ART concept as well as the in-depth knowledge on what you are “really” delivering to your customer, even when wrapped in a book, an App or a blueprint format.

During the past 10 years, psychologists such as Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman, and their colleagues have provided ample of evidence of what they call the “construal level theory:” i.e. the closer you are to an object or event, the more specifically you think about it. While the more distant you are to that object or event, the more abstractly you think about it.

This idea has important implications for your creativity competences and performance.

Every object living on this earth or every event happening in our world can be thought of and looked at in ample of diverse ways. The authors themselves give a good tangible example of what they mean: i.e. take the four-legged beast you see walking down the street on a leash. One can think of it as:

• Fluffy the poodle who lives next door (very specific)
• a French poodle (slightly less specific)
• a dog (a bit more abstract)
• an animal (more abstract)
• a thing (very abstract)

The second part of the construal level theory states that the tendency to think of something as either abstractly or specifically, depends on a person’s distance to that subject. Distance, in this case, can refer to physical distance, social distance, or even distance in time.

Therefore, to help yourself and/or your organization to think about a problem which needs to be solved, it is useful to create the necessary distance from that problem (be it in space, in time or even in meaning).

There are several ways to create that distance, e.g.:

1. Imagine that you are solving the problem for someone else rather than for yourself or your company;
2. Think about what the solution to the problem would look like 5 years from now rather than in the current setting;
3. Think about what other cultures would think about this concept.

Each of these methods aims at creating some distance, which can stimulate you to focus a bit more on the abstract parts of the situation and/or problem.

After having executed the “taking some distance” exercises and having rethought the problem thoroughly, it is as important to shift your focus back to the details again. This basically implies, that once you have gained insights that change the way you think about a problem, it is time to shift your focus again by putting the problem/issue/challenge under the microscope. This step is necessary to ensure that the solution you develop, will also address the little things that can make the difference between success and failure.

Or as Michael Michalko states it: “if you want to produce something creative, say a creative design for a new automobile, don’t think of an automobile --- at least not at first. There is much suggestive evidence that a process of accessing a more abstract definition of a problem can lead to greater creativity and innovation than the more typical ways”.

This approach should definitely be used in the ideation stage within an innovation process.

This is exactly what for instance Ford Motor Company is doing nowadays. This company pushes its co-workers and teams to first think about and tackle mobility innovation challenges instead of directly going to automobile innovation challenges. Mobility is a good example of an abstract concept to start the ideation process.  It allows the stakeholders to think about solutions in a much broader framework.  This extended framework often fuels the development of very disruptive and innovative solutions, which might lie very far from the current paradigm of what we consider and call automobiles today.

Our experience and expertise as Design and Creativity university lecturers, gave us the necessary insights and knowledge to develop a tool which is aimed at facilitating this process of going from the abstract to the concrete final solutions, by including the following steps:

• Describe an abstract definition of your problem. What is the principle issue of the problem?  What is its essence?
• Brainstorm for ideas on that problem/essence. Generate a number of different ideas;
• Reframe the problem so that it is slightly less abstract. Again, generate as many solutions as you can;
• Consider the real problem. Use your two abstraction processes' ideas and solutions as stimuli to generate solutions.

By following this approach, progressively stating a problem in less abstract ways, you will eventually be working on a solution to the real problem. The diminishing abstraction of each process guides your focus to the real problem, and its eventual solution.

Photos & Artist Credits: Motoi Yamamoto - Labyrinth in Salz/ Kunst-Station St. Peter Cologne, Germany  http://www.motoi.biz/

 This post was originally published on our company website under http://innokinetics.com/how-can-abstraction-help-the-innovation-process/