This month’s Academic Focus features Professor John Hauser and the highly-regarded team at MIT. Perhaps no other university in the world stands for innovation as much as this one. MIT is an innovation powerhouse because of the way the faculty looks at innovation through multiple lens and collaborative approaches. MIT is a great blend of innovation research, technology research, and commercialization research.
From his online biography:
Sustainable innovation requires structured methods. But it also requires collaboration and information sharing among colleagues. Innovation is a team sport – groups produce better results than the lone genius. So how do you create a more favorable context for collaboration and sharing in your business unit?
Reputation is what matters. The degree to which a technical worker will share information with a colleague depends on that colleague's reputation for returning the favor. The rule of reciprocity states that people give back to those in the form they have received from others. It is a social rule taught by every human society to its members – you give back to those who have given to you. But the key is: to make the first move. You have to be seen as someone who gives and shares information with others, and has a reputation for returning the favor when others give to you.
Dr. Prescott Ensign and Dr. Louis Hebert investigated this phenomena by surveying more than 200 pharmaceutical scientists working in the R&D operations of 63 different companies in Canada and the U.S.. They found that technical workers often hold critical information privately without fear of sanction or consequence. What motivates them to share with others is when they see the other person as likely to give back – the other person has a well-deserved reputation for giving information back to the other person that is meaningful. The complete results and analysis of the study are described in the book Knowledge Sharing Among Scientists.
Here are the key findings (from Sloan Management Review, Winter 2010, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp 79-81):
Organizations who want to be more innovative need to do two things. First is co-location of knowledge workers and team building. Putting people in close proximity to one another and getting them to socialize will make them more likely to have the day-to-day, random encounters where they can share critical tidbits of knowledge and information. The second is training. Companies are recognizing a key gap in the skills of influence. People can be trained how to systematically and ethically influence and align their co-workers. Six universal principles of persuasion such as Reciprocity are well described by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his book, Influence: Science and Practice. Companies are conducting formal training courses in the practice of influence to make their knowledge workers more effective.
For individual innovators:
Imagine a Web site that detects a visitor’s “thinking” style and “morphs” its look and feel to suit that visitor’s style. Professor Glen Urban and his colleagues at M.I.T. describe an approach in the Sloan Management Review article, “Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales.” They collaborated with BT Group, a UK telecom company, to create a Web site that learns whether a person is more analytical versus holistic, and whether the person is more visual versus verbal in how they process information. Once the Web site learns this (based on a few preliminary clicks on the site), it adapts itself to present information in an optimal way:
This is an excellent example of the Attribute Dependency Template, one of five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method of innovation. Attribute Dependency takes internal and external attributes of a product or service and combines them to create new dependencies (or break existing dependencies). With Web site morphing, for example, the two attributes that have been linked are:
Dependencies can be passive, active, or adaptive. Passive dependencies are static – they don’t change once they have been established. Active dependencies are dynamic – an attribute changes only when another one changes. Adaptive dependencies change the way they change. In other words, they learn as they go. Attribute Dependency is a great tool for creating “smart” products – those that know and adapt to user preferences or environmental conditions.
Does Web site morphing work? The MIT researchers report that Web-originated purchase intentions for BT’s broadband service could increase 20% after morphing the site to match individual cognitive styles.