I was honored to have my perspective on systematic innovation cited in a distinctive publication on strategic analysis of technology by Rias van Wyk.

Rias is former director of MoT program (Management of Technology) @ UMN / TLI (University of Minnesota / Technological Leadership Institute; an inter-disciplinary unit in the College of Science and Engineering)

Beginning in the twentieth century, and reaching into the twenty-first, a dedicated group of authors appeared who sought a more rational approach to systematic innovation. They had a fundamentally different point of view to mainstream thinking. Like Beckmann, they focused on overall context to group together detailed content.

One researcher, David Quimby, offered a major contribution. He identified a palette of ten initiatives concerned with context (2015). It appears below. The arrangement is taken directly from Quimby and does not reflect any particular order.

The present book develops one of these initiatives further: A Core Theory of Technology. The reason for focusing on this initiative is that the Core Theory is explicitly based on the notion of technology as a field of knowledge—i.e., it recognizes the value of the Beckmann synthesis.

Diagram 0.1: the Quimby palette of approaches to systematic innovation (p. 10)

Technology: Its Fundamental Nature @ ResearchGate

Technology: Its Fundamental Nature @ Amazon

personal inscription by Rias van Wyk

Systematic Innovation and Product Development {scroll down for description}

“Doug Engelbart didn’t invent the mouse — he discovered it.”

Identifying patterns of design and innovation that are common to various contexts and applying them within a product category — or even across product categories — is a cognitive strategy that enjoys an advantage over processing each creative opportunity in isolation from previous ideation

–  We’ll introduce the concept of systematic innovation and identify the various genres of systematic techniques

–  We’ll explore the history and the potential advantages / disadvantages of systematic approaches to innovation and we’ll compare the theory to our practical experiences

–  We’ll ponder a rather extreme notion in which systematic innovation might amplify itself by applying itself to itself (invoking the mathematical / computational concept of recursion)

–  We’ll review a practical application of a rather remarkable disruption in the user experience domain that resulted from a systematic approach

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Anatomy of Disruption: Systematic Innovation and Product Development

David Quimby on Systematic Innovation and Product Development

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