Rethinking ideation: a cognitive approach of innovation lock-ins

Abstract

Some industries are lacking the proposal of truly original new ideas to renew existing products and/or services, despite repeated efforts from all stakeholders to make innovative and original proposals. These situations, called orphan innovation, lead to revisit the contemporary approaches to the study of obstacles in ideation, as orphan innovation is a paradoxical situation.Conventional financial constraints and institutional level are released, the market demand is strong, niche strategies are possible and bold entrepreneurs abound.And yet, the proposals do not fulfil expectations regarding innovation.We advocate in this paper that cognitive sciences can contribute to making sense of this phenomenon. Based on recent studies in cognitive psychology on idea generation, we propose a model of ideation reasoning, contrasting heuristic-based reasoning and exploration-based reasoning. We then apply this model on a case study, showing how a cognitive model of ideation allows to diagnose orphan innovation and more generally innovation lock-ins.

Inventions and Scientific Discoveries: Impact of Designers’ Collaborations on Creativity. An Analysis Towards Fixation Effects

“…C-K theory has allowed further theoretical development regarding fixation effects. Indeed, as the theory helps to represent different design path, it has been used to show how a designer could be locked-in in a specific design path and then not able to explore more innovative path without being "defixed" (Agogué, 2012;Agogué et al, 2014). In particular, the literature in management identified some innovations pathways do not seem achievable for a specific firm due to lack of knowledge, lack of absorptive capacity or its own historical pathway depending on its starting point and hazardous events (Sydow, Schreyögg and Koch, 2009).…”

“…In particular, some fixation effects occur at a cognitive level due to the fact that people tend to generate ideas the most accessible in memory which might le ad to fixation effects (Hatchuel, Le Masson and Weil, 2011). Agogué and Le Masson (2014) distinguish two forms of ideation reasoning. The first is a fixated reasoning based on the use of cognitive routines calling for existing solutions with stable paradigms.…”

“…As shown in Agogué and Le Masson (2014) works, examples outside the fixed design path help designers to propose more creative solutions. In science-industry partnerships, invention and scientific model designers would be able to exchange defixated inputs.…”

“…It has also been showed recently that Design Theories are a powerful resource to model scientific discoveries. In particular C-K theory is a unified model of Design Theories that (1) allows us to model both invention and scientific discoveries, (2) has been previously showed as a key resource to model fixation effects (Agogué and Le Masson, 2014), and (3) has been previously showed as a useful theoretical framework to model partnership effects (Gillier, Kazakçı and Piat, 2012), in particular regarding science -industry partnership (Klasing Chen et al, 2017). We then first briefly recall to reader C-K theory basic reasoning and we propose a model of invention and scientific discoveries according to this framework.…”

Le projet d’exploration au prisme d’une théorie sociale de l’apprentissage

“…Distinguant le registre des concepts de celui des connaissances, les auteurs modélisent le raisonnement de conception innovante (le modèle C/K) en opérant des liaisons entre les deux registres. Si le modèle C/K ne se fonde pas explicitement sur des théories de l'apprentissage, des travaux soulignent la dimension cognitive de ce type de raisonnement (Agogué et Le Masson, 2015).…”