Commission A Portfolio
At the d.school, we tell students that a design-driven approach to innovation leverages “three P’s” to amplify creative output and increase the chances of an innovation effort’s success: Perspective, Process, and Portfolio.
Much has been written about the value of diverse perspectives on idea generation (“Perspective”), and about the impact of having a consistent language (“Process”) to facilitate collaboration across disciplines and perspectives. But what’s up with a “Portfolio?” “You mean a briefcase filled with high-res, glossy images of past work?”
Not exactly.
It’s a bit of a play on words: while designers often develop portfolios to showcase their work, the usage we intend actually has more in common with a financial portfolio (in diversifying risk across asset classes) than the ones carried in a leather satchel.
The reality is, innovation is an incredibly low-yield activity. Every individual endeavor is high-risk, and unlikely to succeed. And it took a PhD in mathematics in our Leadership course to point out that, the way you increase the chances of a low-probability event are by increasing the number of “shots on goal.”
Simply put, leveraging a portfolio approach is about increasing the likelihood of success. Innovation leaders who create a portfolio acknowledge the inherent odds, and stack the deck in their favor by trying more things.
And for good reason: we are often poor judges of our own ideas’ merits. As our Stanford colleague Justin Berg has demonstrated, “Creators exhibit myopia when forecasting the potential creativity of their initial ideas, leading them to overlook their most promising initial ideas.”
If we’re allowed to choose only one idea, we’re unlikely to choose the highest-potential one.
But there’s hope: leveraging a portfolio approach, and prototyping a portfolio of ideas in parallel, dramatically increases the chances of selecting and implementing the highest-value ideas.
Related: The Value of Being an Outsider
Related: Inquiry-Driven Action
Related: Parallel Prototyping
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The quality of our thinking is deeply influenced by the diversity of the inputs we collect. Implementing practices like Brian Grazer’s “Curiosity Conversations” ensures innovators are well-equipped with a variety of high-quality raw material for problem-solving.