Irving Biederman, USC psychology and computer science professor, tries to explain why we find one thing more “interesting” than another.
According to his theory, we tend to be interested in things that are new to us but at the same time still connected to what we already know. New, but not too new…
Biederman proposes a simple mechanism by which the brain seeks to “maximize the rate at which it acquires new but interpretable information.”
His idea rests on the observation that in the cerebral cortex – the brain’s outer envelope where our “highest” levels of cognition are based - enkephalin-releasing cells are distributed in a gradient (enkephalins are one of the brain’s own natural opiates, the neurochemical basis of pleasure).
Biederman’s idea is that the more pleasure cells that are activated at once, the more subconscious, small attention-grabbing pings of pleasure we get. And because these pleasure cells are densest in the association areas, our attention is automatically biased toward complex percepts that have the most meaning. People’s preference for some experience is related to the amount of activity that’s created in certain brain areas. It keeps us efficiently attuned to the world in a way that feels really intelligent, yet it’s so simple.
When information about something very familiar gets in there, not much activity is needed, so there is not much pleasure associated with it. On the other hand, when our brain deals with something totally unfamiliar there is also little activity, because the brain cannot associate it to any known experience.
The advertising world takes advantage of this phenomenon. The most interesting ads are those that show a familiar object in a new setting. It may be a new environment or a new use.
For example, I recently saw an ad for a car rental company portraying a car as a fetus under an ultrasound photograph. The message was, “We treat our cars as if they were babies”.
When flying an airplane, we are much more interested in looking down at the surface when flying over a familiar territory than when flying over an unfamiliar one. We are interested in seeing a familiar territory from a new angle.
We find interesting ideas, stories, art, objects and artifacts that represent a balanced blend between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the existing and the new. The interesting thing is that it takes a very talented human being to PRODUCE this balanced blend.
Most people find it easier to operate at the two extremes of the familiar - unfamiliar spectrum. They can easily repeat known and hackneyed patterns or, slightly less easily, create new things that are not connected to anything known (think about how easy it is to utter a sentence that has never been uttered before).
SIT’s basic principles, the Closed World and the Qualitative Change, guide the problem solver to find ideas that are new but not too new. The Closed World forces us to use only existing types of objects - so our solutions are always built from known building blocks. The Qualitative Change principle, on the other hand, forces us to find new uses for these objects or to put them in a new setting.
In this way, SIT helps us achieve just the right balance between the old and the new and find really interesting ideas. What we call “The Innovation Sweet Spot”.
Dear Roni,
What would be your perspective about the identification of innovation sweet spot if you tried to apply it to Johansson’s way of innovate, which encompasses looking for intersections between two or more closed worlds?
In other words, should also the new closed world look for balance between the known and the unknown, or is the innovation sweetspot also open for disruptive innovation?
Thanks in advance for your perspective.
Fabian.
Fabian, I’ll offer a view to your very good question. I think the reason the Medici Effect works at all is because of what Roni has described here. People sense interesting intersections when they can connect what is known to what is unknown (new) to them. It’s interesting. If the balance is missed in either direction, the Medici intersection does not offer much.
I like your notion of the Medici Effect as intersecting two Closed Worlds. THAT is interesting.
Regarding disruption, my view is that finding sweetspots is not tied to disruption at all. Disruption happens more often because the incumbent (leading technology) resists change, regardless of the novelty of the threatening new entrant. They ignore, therefore they get disrupted. It’s not whether the new idea is disruptive, but rather how resistive the incumbent is to changing.
To Drew’s comment - i think this is a really important point about defining Disruptiveness not as a quality of the new idea but as a function of the incumbent being replaced (or probably as a function of both i.e. the relationahip between them). We had a project a few weeks ago in a large corporation which was defined as aiming for “disruptive” ideas, and the question what this definition applies to was pretty fundamental. Our colleague Nir is pretty involved int he subject, maybe this insight can be put to immediate practical use there
Amnon / Drew - thanks for your inputs.
Indeed in the project Amnon is referring to above, the aim was to reach disruptive ideas. this brought me and Amit (who facilitated with me the project) to the question:
How can the definition for disruptive innovation (as Clayton Christensen phrased in his book “the innovators dilema”, which Drew is referring to above) serve as a working tool for us to achieve the desired objective of disruptive ideas?
Here came the Innovation Sweet Spot model (the NFS model) to our assitance. The Near-Far-Sweet model and the 2 principles (1) Qualitative Change that pushes ideas outbound from the Near to Sweet and (2)Closed World which pulls back ideas from the Far to Sweet zone, helped us find those ideas that are interesting enough to offer a replacement for the incubment and also not too far out to be a super “cool”, breakthrough technology that will once again take the product to its next revolution, leaving the consumers with a highly sophisticated better product with improved features that will be easily disrupted.
Once again, this was a great excercise to take a theory and look for the practical working tool that can assist one in the somewhat amoprohic task of “i need disruotive innovation”. (same was done for the “Blue Ocean Strategy”, and the “Business Model Innovation” (that i think Drew you referred to it in your blog, no?
BTW - The results in the project were wonderful.