Love isn’t blind: why we seek out the imperfections in innovation
Nolan D’Souza, Challenge Prize Fellow, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
What’s love got to do with it?
We’ve all been there — you’re ready for the world to see the breakthrough idea you’ve obsessed over and that can create positive changes for the masses. A fire burns in your stomach and your blood pumps with excitement because the idea you’ve fallen in love with is about to become real. However, once you share it, other people might find the idea less than perfect — they might even tell you that it will never actually work. …Ouch.
As an Impact Canada Challenge Prize fellow, I worked with the Public Health Agency of Canada to design and launch the Type 2 Diabetes Prevention Challenge. When I shared the first draft of the Challenge prototype with subject matter experts in chronic disease prevention, their comments highlighted where my design (that I had spent countless hours creating), would falter and fail, enlightening me on “unknown unknowns” I had not yet uncovered. Soliciting these criticisms from problem holders and authorities in diabetes prevention was an extremely important part of using innovation as a problem-solving process. It allowed the Challenge design to be adjusted so that it could enable innovators to have the highest impact on preventing type 2 diabetes in Canada. Throughout this process, I routinely checked my biases to ensure I was not dismissing the shortcomings identified by others in an effort to see my own idea thrive. Some people refer to those that succumb to this mindset as being struck with “ugly baby syndrome” — the tendency to fall in love with your idea or innovation, believe it is perfect in every way, and think that it will continue along a charted course without requiring any changes.
The truth is that whether you are creating a Challenge prize, applying to one as an innovator, or think you found a breakthrough, every single idea starts off imperfect and needs to be nurtured to grow past its shortcomings to turn into something beautiful. To minimize the risk of creating something that nobody asked for or wants, trailblazers spend the time nurturing their idea to smooth out it’s edges or even drastically change it, rather than give it unearned praise. The process of testing your idea to see where even more time and energy need to be invested on top of the countless amount already put in is a growing pain that transforms the idea into something meaningful for a greater number of people.
”I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a [person] can take is always the next one.” — Brandon Sanderson
Gotta have faith
Challenge prizes run in partnership with Impact Canada use a stage-gated process to create the environment and timeline for innovators to continuously test and refine the idea. This process serves as a scaffolding for ideas to achieve partial outcomes related to a Challenge goal, and for ones that have developed the most potential for impact to proceed to subsequent Challenge stages. At each Challenge stage, innovators have access to financial prizes and non-financial supports that enable them to transform their innovation into more impactful versions of their initial idea. Even the Challenge’s assessment criteria focuses the innovators’ efforts (commensurate to the progress at each subsequent stage) to solicit, respond, and pivot their work, where necessary, in a way that yields the most value for the problems being solved. Participating in a Challenge prize helps innovators nurture their idea.
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things” — Theodore Levitt
Don’t stop believin’
I propose that loving your idea means ensuring that it is has every opportunity to become the best version of itself. This mindset does not mean letting everyone else direct the idea’s growth but means having the confidence to synthesize all the feedback received with your own expertise to make the idea better. Constantly re-examining what value the idea creates and who benefits from it are important parts of this reflection process used in an Impact Canada Challenge. When framing the problem, during an Understand phase, whether a Challenge is the right method to address the problem is a mantra that ensures the power of innovation to unlock persisting problems is truly leveraged. For example, we need to ensure that solutions for the problem area benefit from opening up to wider pool of innovators, that a Challenge does accelerate progress, that outcomes can be measured, and the solutions can be adopted or scaled once the Challenge is complete. During the Design and Test phases where the Challenge structure takes shape and is refined, it is important to collect the voices, opinions, and feedback of many people to protect against blind spots or group think, balancing delicate tensions related to what the outcomes will be achieved. A small sample of tensions I’ve encountered include the following musings:
· Does the design and outcome benefit a small group significantly or have a broader but less significant impact for many?
· Will it advance a new tool, technology, or process that has a benefit for some but create a gap for others to access it?
· Will it play off path dependency or facilitate breaking out of the mould?
· Does it create social good or economic development?
The constant examination of questions like these will nurture any idea (or Challenge aimed at surfacing ideas) to continue to develop and is the basis of giving it the requirements for growth. Thus, loving your idea means not being blind to its imperfections. It means trusting in a reflection process where even the most imperfect idea has tremendous potential to be unlocked — it is this potential that can lead to a breakthrough that could create profound change.
