Sarah Kaplan, a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Institute, studies innovation. She reports that, “We have this idea out in the world that…bringing distant and diverse knowledge together is the way to get creative insights, and that’s certainly true. However, what we discovered is that there’s an equally important process of the deep dive, of deep knowledge in one domain…brainstorming is not enough without the deep knowledge development that you would need in a particular domain to understand what the issues are so that you can break away from existing ways of thinking…we have to understand an area deeply enough in order to be able to identify the key problems, challenges or anomalies in the field. Once you have those insights, coming together in this process of combining different ideas makes a lot of sense. But if you just go straight for combination and diverse teams, you may be missing out on the highest impact ideas because you haven’t done what I consider to be the pre-work, which allows you to have that in-depth insight into innovation.”
Sarah Kaplan. 2016. “Are You Brainstorming the Right Way for Innovation?” Knowledge @ Wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/brainstorming-right-way-innovation/
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.