Innovating: a doer’s manifesto

‘At its genesis, no thing about an innovation is new’. This is Luis Perez-Breva’s opening sentence. His book makes and explores a number of other thought-provoking assertions about innovation. Two that resonate with me are that the language and mental models we use to describe innovation mislead the aspiring innovator to expect to begin with a breakthrough solution to a problem; and, that while much has been written about managing innovation once the solution to the problem is evident, little has been written to guide someone to innovation from no more than a hunch. Stuart Macdonald, the editor of this journal, seemed to be agreeing that little has been written in this area when he invited me to review this book. I had written a similar, but relatively unknown book, 15 years ago (Douthwaite, 2002). In it, I develop a model to guide grassroots innovation processes based on my experience developing rice harvesting and drying equipment in the Philippines and Vietnam. The model is tested and further developed on wind turbines, Linux software and local money systems. It begins with a bright idea that is prototyped and co-developed in a collaboration between an R&D team and the key stakeholders who will reproduce and use the innovation. Like the process laid out in Perez-Breva’s book, innovation happens as a result of repeated experiential learning cycles involving the innovators and the key stakeholders in which the innovation evolves and becomes fitter. Perez-Breva’s book made me realize that my model was weak on arguably the most important part of the process – coming up with the bright idea in the first place and developing it into something tangible with which the innovator can start to engage key stakeholders. The author explains that the reason we overlook the genesis of the innovation process is that our understanding of innovation comes from after-the-fact accounts of successful innovation processes. In all these accounts, the innovation and the problem it solves are clear, and because we know the end of the story, the steps along the way seem obvious, almost inevitable. Another reason we expect a linear narrative is that humans are hardwired to see the world as more ordered and predictable than it actually is (Kahneman, 2011). This, apparently, is adaptive, because if we were more realistic about how the world actually is, we would not risk getting up in the morning! But this ‘hindsight’ thinking, as Perez-Breva calls it, is misleading. Looking forward, at the beginning of a putative innovation process, nothing is clear. There will be many wrong turns before the form of the problem and solution become clear to key stakeholders, the ‘community’ as Perez-Breva calls them. Hindsight thinking carries two risks: on the one hand there is paralysis, an inability to start in the absence of perfect clarity about the bright idea; and, on the other hand, over-commitment to the prototype solution ending in costly failure. All you need to start, according to Perez-Breva (p.33), is: