Preface
On Innovating Effectively

In the middle of August in 2012, Congressional approval rating hit an all time low.1 This is saying something-the same figure has been less than impressive in earlier eras. Yet the United States Congress isn't the only institution with lukewarm support. People expect very little good news about the wars being fought (whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or on Terror, Drugs, Poverty, or Ignorance). The promising Arab Spring has given way to a recurring pessimism about progress. Gnarly health problems are on a tear the world over-diabetes now affects over eight percent of Americans-and other expensive disease conditions such as obesity, heart disease, and cancer are also now epidemic. The cost of education rises like a runaway helium balloon, yet there is less and less evidence that it nets the students a real return on their investment. Police have access to ever more elaborate statistical models of crime, but there is still way too much of it. And global warming steadily produces more extreme and more dangerous conditions the world over, yet according to about half of our elected "leaders," it is still, officially, only a theory that can conveniently be denied.

And yet . . .

We steadily expect more from our computers, our smartphones, apps, networks, and games. We have grown to expect routine and wondrous stories of new ventures funded through crowdsourcing. We hear constantly of lives around the world transformed because of Twitter or Kahn Academy or some breakthrough discovery in medicine. Esther Duflo and her team at the Poverty Action Lab at MIT keep cracking tough problems that afflict the poor to arrive at solutions with demonstrated efficacy, and then, often, the Gates Foundation or another philanthropic institution funds the transformational solution at unprecedented scale.

Storytelling is in a new golden age-whether in live events, on the radio, or in amazing new television series that can emerge anywhere in the world and be adapted for global tastes. Experts are now everywhere, and shockingly easy and affordable to access. Indeed, it seems clear that all the knowledge we've been struggling to amass is steadily being amplified and swiftly getting more organized, accessible, and affordable-whether through the magic of elegant little apps or big data managed in ever-smarter clouds or crowdfunding sites used to capitalize creative ideas in commerce or science.

One way to make sense of these opposing conditions is to see us as being in a time of radical transformation. To see the old institutions as being challenged as a series of newer, more agile ones arise. In history, such shifts have rarely been bloodless, but this one seems to be a radical transformation in the structure, sources, and nature of expertise.2 Indeed, among innovation experts, this time is one like no other. For the very first time in history, we are in a position to tackle tough problems with ground-breaking tools and techniques.

What Do You Do When the Problems Are Real, the Stakes Are High, Time Is Short, and Abstract Answers Are Inadequate?

That is what we've written this book to address: how you can innovate effectively. How you can get the future to show up just slightly ahead of its regularly scheduled arrival. How you can give teams that can't afford to fail the robust methods they need to succeed-whether the problem they are tackling is small or large, trivial or epic.

Part of the innovation revolution is rooted in superior tradecraft: better ways to innovate that are suited for tougher problems. Yet most teams are stuck using goofy techniques that have been discredited long ago. This book is part of a new vanguard, a small group of leading thinkers who see innovation as urgent and essential, who know it needs to be cracked as a deep discipline and subjected to the same rigors as any other management science.

Our Journey to This Book

Ten Types of Innovation has had a long gestation period. Broadly stated, it codifies, structures, and simplifies three decades of work from a consulting firm in Chicago, Doblin, which I cofounded along with the brilliant design methodologist Jay Doblin. From its inception in 1980, Doblin has asked one pervasive, deceptively simple-seeming question: "How do we get innovation to succeed instead of fail?"

Over the years we have kept three important dimensions in dynamic tension. We have a theoretical side, where we ask and seek real answers to tough questions about innovation. Simple but critical ones like, "Does brainstorming work?" (it doesn't), along with deep and systemic ones like, "How do you really know what a user wants when the user doesn't know either?"3 We have an academic side, since many of us are adjunct professors at Chicago's Institute of Design,4 and this demands that we explain our ideas to smart young professionals in disciplined, distinctive ways. And third, we have an applied side, in that we have been privileged to adapt our innovation methods to many of the world's leading global enterprises and start-ups that hanker to be future leading firms.

From the beginning, Doblin has itself been interdisciplinary, mixing social sciences, technology, strategy, library sciences, and design into a frothy admixture that has always tried to blend both analysis, breaking tough things down, with synthesis, building new things up. Broadly, we think any effective innovation effort needs plenty of both, stitched together as a seamless whole.

The heart of this book is built around a seminal Doblin discovery: that there are (and have always been) ten distinct types of innovation that need be orchestrated with some care to make a game-changing innovation. If you stick with the book, you'll read about that soon enough. What you need to know now, at the outset, is that this is not just one thin discovery. Along with the framework itself, we also describe what you should do to surround this better way of innovating with even more robust protocols and processes.

Our Authoring Team

It is an axiom in writing that when you have a bunch of authors the resulting work is likely to be a compromised hash. Any movie you see with a whole string of screenwriters listed is unlikely to be brilliant. But at Doblin we do nearly everything in teams. This stems from the unique nature of innovation itself: no individual can possibly know enough all by himself or herself to crack tough innovation challenges, and the best teams have many different disciplines involved. So too with this book. It may help you to know the roles each of us played and thus better glimpse what kinds of contributions go into any complex synthesis.

As the long-time president of Doblin, I have pioneered many ideas and methods at the core of innovation effectiveness, including the Ten Types. I have dedicated my entire professional career to thinking about how to create appropriate tools and techniques-and about how our clients can most effectively use them in practice. I have spent more than 30 years learning and thinking about what makes innovation succeed or fail. As the principal author of the text, I am responsible for the basic arguments throughout, and the system of ideas here either succeeds or fails because of me.

Ryan Pikkel has an advanced degree in innovation skills from the Institute of Design and is himself a skilled designer. He managed the collaboration with a deep and talented team from our colleagues at Pentagram and he worked to ensure that every page in the book is as clear, concise, and accessible as possible. He is also personally responsible for the creation of the incredible Innovation Tactics Cards, which now permit us to codify and deconstruct any valuable innovation-or to help you to build one of your own with the help of robust, reusable modules.

Brian Quinn was for many years a traditional strategist, who left consulting to become a screenwriter, and then returned to the field-but only on the condition that he could focus on solving innovation problems for clients. This makes him one of the rare individuals who really can integrate most of the necessary components for innovation effectiveness-and he has done so repeatedly and reliably for several of our largest clients. His voice in the book has been crucial in helping to make the ideas more actionable for firms that need to innovate.

Helen Walters was the innovation and design editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. She has built an amazing personal network of practitioners and practices the world over. Of course, as a journalist, she values telling clear stories with solid facts and getting details right-an indispensable skill for a book with tales on every page.

Finally, our work was materially aided by Bansi Nagji. While he was not an author of this book, he played a role in refreshing and advancing the Ten Types of Innovation. More broadly, Bansi made innovation a strategic priority at Monitor and continues to do so today as a leader in Monitor Deloitte. The team is grateful for his support.

None of this may matter to you as a reader, since the book stands or falls as a unified whole. It mattered a very great deal to us as a team, though. We wanted to make a book that would reveal the whole, remarkable, and important emerging discipline of innovation, because so many people now see the urgent need to innovate. They sense that old ideas and structures must give way. They imagine that newer, better futures are out there, lurking in the loaming, just out of...