Innovation starts with defining the right constraints By Fiona Murray and Elsbeth Johnson
What drives big, breakthrough innovations? Often it’s constraints – limitations that force designers to rethink the whole problem and come up with something completely new to address it. The caveat here is that certain constraints spur big thinking, while others tamp it down. Limiting outcomes (a new product needs to
cost 10% what its competitors do) or time (design this product in nine months) or both creates specific bounds for designers, but leaves the path they take to reach this goal wide open, forcing them to consider bold new solutions. Most leaders, however, constrain budget and risk. They tell teams their innovation must cost no more than a certain amount – a figure based on assumptions about what kind solution the team will deliver – or communicate to the team, “Don’t do anything too risky, especially something that might cannibalize existing business.”
In 2012, MIT Professor Amos Winter was asked to develop a lighter, cheaper prosthetic leg for the huge Indian market. And not just a bit cheaper: The new limbs needed to be 90% cheaper than those sold in western markets to meet the needs of the over half a million amputees unable to afford prosthetics that often cost tens of thousands of dollars and lasted only 2-3 years. Under these dramatic constraints, Winter’s team went
12 California School Business Spring 2022
back to fundamentals and reframed the problem: What could the science of movement teach us about how to design and deliver a radically different prosthetic? Rather than taking a traditional approach, which sought to mimic a human foot, the team focused on a tunable but passive foot design that would instead mimic lower leg movements. By 2019, Winter’s team had unveiled their new, low-cost solution –
one that could cheaply and easily be tailored to a patient’s weight and height. It was fundamentally different from existing products in terms of cost, design and material. This achievement was only possible because the initial constraints imposed on the challenge forced a complete re-thinking of the problem. This story reminds us of a consistent lesson from the research on innovation: While unshackled creativity might intui-
