It's unusual that an analyst will ask you to stop thinking about the far future, but I need you to back away from the Corning A Day Made of Glass video on YouTube. All that clear glass is clouding your vision. More and more, as I talk with companies about their next big product innovation, they can't get far-flung ideas out of their mind. They can't wait to get there, but they can't justify making the investments needed to get there. They prevaricate while smaller, more proximal innovations, more likely to succeed rapidly, languish unattended.
The ideas won't pine forever; if you don't act on them soon, someone else will. We call these innovation opportunities adjacent possibilities and we have just written a new report about them called We've blogged elsewhere on the topic; let me share some more details with those who aren't reading Forrester's research.
To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started with evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to explain how such powerful biological innovations as sight and flight came into being. More recently, Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, showed that it's also applicable to science, culture, and technology. The core of the idea: People arrive at the best new ideas when they combine prior (adjacent) ideas in new ways. Most combinations fail; a few succeed spectacularly.
This has always been the case, but Johnson shows us that modern cities and networks accelerate the rate of idea formation. The more ideas circulate, the more they'll collide in new ways to generate new things. As they combine, these seemingly small ideas become big. Add a ubiquitous Internet and hungry developers and manufacturers around the globe and you should expect more of these innovations to accumulate in a shorter time than before. It's clear that this is happening. But what does it mean for you?
It means you should direct your team to obsess about today's adjacent possibilities, not tomorrow's distant improbabilities. Have the courage to set aside the ten-year future vision because there is no way you will anticipate all the adjacent possibilities that will have to combine between now and then to accurately predict what products you will sell or how you will sell them that far out. That's not for lack of intelligence on your part. It's because most of those adjacent possibilities on which you will ultimately depend have yet to emerge from the combination of other adjacencies on which they will depend.
Therefore, rather than try to predict what your company will be like in ten years, spend your time observing today's adjacencies more carefully. Start with the core customer need that you fulfill — understand it clearly by regularly scouting out other, sometimes nontraditional, ways customers meet the needs you think you are satisfying. In the world of whole-home audio where companies like Sonos and Logitech want to distribute music throughout the house, the biggest competitor to their products is the simple act of turning up a stereo really loud in one room so you can hear it in another.
Once you're ready to see all the adjacent ways that people meet the needs you hope to fulfill, you can then explore the entire product and service experience that you deliver. What are the adjacent product experiences that you could create to reinforce the value of your current product? Bathroom scales may not seem a fertile ground for innovation, but there is an entire revolution yet to occur in the digital relationship that wraps around that bathroom scale. If your company could offer a scale that connects to a health and weight loss app on your customer's mobile phone, would you even try to make money from the scale or would you give it away for free as long as people use your app?
Think of all the companies that should rightly think that this product experience is an adjacent possibility that they could offer — Logitech, Jenny Craig, the producers of The Biggest Loser, the insurance company — the range of possible competitors (and partners) is varied and extensive. This product is so obvious that if this is an adjacent possibility for your company, you should stop reading this and begin planning how you'll participate now.
That's the kind of urgency and immediacy that innovating the adjacent possible leads to. While it's intellectually stimulating to understand where good ideas come from, it's terrifying to realize just how quickly good ideas that can upend your business will appear in the future. If you're not prepared, it will be immobilizing to find just how easy it is for competitors to act on these ideas because they learned how to identify, depend on and even exploit adjacent possibilities — things that are already possible today and can be easily recombined in a new way to generate the next big thing.
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