Future from past: Columbia professor shows India the key to innovation

What makes innovation happen? Columbia Business School professor William Duggan's book Strategic Intuition answers that question.

While reading it, what struck me was how closely the principles he discovered mirrored those that I had used in creating my own innovations. You will frequently see "I agree" on the margins of my copy of the book.

One of the principles Duggan describes is: selective recombination of previous elements (perhaps from different disciplines) into a new whole." See how it applies to one of my innovations — the business process centric approach to software development (aka Process-Centered Design). Let me show you the original version of the approach, which actually was used in user interface (UI) design. Now, UI design belongs to a decades-old discipline called Human-Computer Interaction. I broke through the boundaries of the HCI discipline and borrowed from the business process management discipline to create the process-centric approach.

That's one of the little "secrets" to how innovators innovate!


Duggan is presenting "Strategic Intuition: The Keys to Innovation" at four cities in India starting Feb 8 (I attended his shorter version at Columbia Business School NYC).

If you really want to contribute to advances in your own field, you should study how others did it. As Duggan says, "The future comes from the past."