The Opportunity of Recombination
The New Innovation Engine
In today's competitive landscape, organizations face a critical question: How should they innovate effectively? They're searching for sustainable approaches to innovation that will create value that keeps customers engaged and willing to pay and helps them avoid obsolescence.
Recombination: The Hidden Engine of Innovation
Evidence suggests a fundamental shift is occurring. Successful organizations are moving away from incremental improvements toward recombinant innovation. This powerful approach creates new ideas and technologies by combining or reconfiguring existing knowledge, concepts, and technologies in novel ways.
This approach is particularly powerful in digital environments, where each new combination exponentially increases future possibilities.
As Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain:
"Digital innovation is recombinant innovation in its purest form... Each development becomes a building block for future innovations... Building blocks don't ever get used up. In fact, they increase the opportunities for future recombinations."
Recombination thus creates a self-reinforcing flywheel effect. New combinations don't just solve immediate problems—they expand the "adjacent possible," opening doorways to previously unimaginable innovations.
Putting Recombination Into Practice
How can organizations harness recombinant innovation effectively?
Research Applications
At the Independent Voices/Creative Collisions summit, Killeen Hanson demonstrated how combinatory methods provide fresh perspectives that jumpstart research by:
Breaking established patterns of thinking
Creating unexpected connections between disparate fields
Revealing overlooked relationships in complex problems
You can watch her session here:
Exploration Techniques
Structured approaches to recombination include:
Forced Combinations: Deliberately pairing unrelated concepts to generate new insights
Cross-Industry Adaptation: Borrowing solutions from unrelated fields
Technology Fusion: Merging different technological capabilities to create novel applications
Organizational Implementation
Forward-thinking organizations cultivate recombinant innovation by:
Creating diverse, cross-functional teams
Establishing spaces for experimental thinking
Incentivizing connections across traditional boundaries
Building knowledge repositories that make existing concepts accessible
The true power of recombination lies not just in solving today's challenges but in continuously expanding tomorrow's possibilities. Time to get going →
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