Rethinking ideation: a cognitive approach of innovation lock-ins

Abstract

Some industries are lacking the proposal of truly original new ideas to renew existing products and/or services, despite repeated efforts from all stakeholders to make innovative and original proposals. These situations, called orphan innovation, lead to revisit the contemporary approaches to the study of obstacles in ideation, as orphan innovation is a paradoxical situation. Conventional financial constraints and institutional level are released, the market demand is strong, niche strategies are possible and bold entrepreneurs abound. And yet, the proposals do not fulfil expectations regarding innovation. We advocate in this paper that cognitive sciences can contribute to making sense of this phenomenon. Based on recent studies in cognitive psychology on idea generation, we propose a model of ideation reasoning, contrasting heuristic-based reasoning and exploration-based reasoning. We then apply this model on a case study, showing how a cognitive model of ideation allows to diagnose orphan innovation and more generally innovation lock-ins.