Solve resistance: focus on big picture

In a study at NASA’s Space Life Sciences Directorate, researchers realised scientists who were most resistant to open-innovation methods saw them as a challenge to their professional identity.

Open-innovation processes pro­mise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products or services arising from these approaches.

Crowd-sourcing plat­­forms (among other open-innovation methods) have yielded striking solutions to hard scientific and technological problems, prominent examples being the Netflix predictive recommendation algorithm and the approach to reducing the weight of General Electric’s jet engine brackets.

But most research and development organisations are still struggling to reap the rewards of open innovation. We believe we’ve hit on an important hidden factor for this failure, one that holds the key to the successful integration and execution of open-innovation methods.

We conducted an in-depth, three-year study at NASA’s Space Life Sciences Directorate to track the opportunities and challenges involved with open innovation in an incumbent R&D organisation across time.

During the course of one year, we observed as NASA took a two-track approach to solving 14 strategic problems: using the tradi­tional collaborative R&D model led by its experts, and open online innovation platforms led by crowds of non-domain experts.

The second approach led to relatively speedy solutions to three challenges and was particularly successful in predicting dan­gerous solar storms, producing a breakthrough in three months.

But bringing the open-source solutions to life proved more challenging. Some of the directorate’s scientists and engineers resisted the new approaches, citing process, budget and procedural issues. Managers were able to solve these challenges, yet tensions remained.

It took us months to realise what was going on: the most resistant scientists and engineers saw open-source methods as a fundamental challenge to their professional identities. They defined themselves as “problem solvers”, but open-innovation crowd-sourcing platforms didn’t let them play that role; instead, they had to frame problems for someone else to solve.

By contrast, there were other scientists and engineers who perceived the open methods as an opportunity to enhance their role and capabilities. As some engineers described it, this transition was a shift from thinking “the lab is my world” to “the world is my lab”. They argued for the need to let go of the “how” of their work and refocus on the bigger “why”. They called on their colleagues to shift their professional identities from “problem solvers” to “solution seekers”.

These identity dynamics are often hidden from managers and difficult for them to shape. We therefore remained at NASA for two more years to understand how managers could influence the way innovation professionals perceived their role and integrated open-innovation methods.

We saw that it was vital to refocus engineers and scientists on the higher purpose of their work — at NASA, this meant the bigger mission of getting to Mars — and to reframe open-innovation methods as tools that enabled R&D professionals to achieve their mission faster. As one scientist put it, “It’s about the big agenda versus the personal one. Science is about finding the truth!”

More practically, our research showed us that managers should encourage and reward solution seeking. In every successful R&D organisation there are hero stories about problem solvers; these organisations need to evolve to celebrate the innovators who find solutions in creative ways.

It is important to communicate that innovation is not only about creating ground-breaking technologies; it’s also about innovating the process of innovation. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf is an assistant professor of information, operations and management at New York University’s Stern School of Business; Michael L. Tushman and Karim R. Lakhani are professors of business administration at Harvard Business School.

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW