Logic alone does not confer a competitive advantage and companies must increase collaboration to capture latent potential innovations that will improve the business, says entrepreneurial and innovation consultant Frans Johansson.

Expertise is not a sufficient differentiator in the rapidly and continuously changing business landscape because logical, incremental innovations will not be able to respond to or capitalise on fast-moving trends. Innovative ideas are not recognised as logical prior to their acceptance and only appear obvious afterwards.

“If everyone uses logic as a competitive advantage, everyone will end up with the same logical solutions. Company life cycles are getting shorter, with fewer companies remaining on top financial indexes for long, and the need for innovation has never been greater. However, innovation is constrained.”

For example, Finnish cellular company Nokia was dominant in the mobile handset market, but was swept aside by Canadian handset maker Blackberry, which, in turn, was relegated to marginal market share by other companies, such as Apple and Samsung, says Johansson.

“The only risk to companies’ sustainability is doing the same thing over and over. Most innovations are a series of small ideas that are tested and refined and might not logically indicate the sea-change innovation that has resulted from their being combined. There is a lot of work before a significant innovation happens.

“Most idea combinations will not successfully generate or deliver an innovation and we must let go of the notion of failure as inhibitive and increase the output of innovative ideas. We must escape the logic trap and allow for the unexpected,” Johansson explains.

Companies and innovators must, therefore, be willing to keep trying when the first few concepts do not work, as passion is an important element of innovation.

“Innovation must be made to happen and attempting to execute great ideas will inevitably lead to failures and mistakes. Because innovation relates to new concepts, one cannot predict what will work and, thus, companies must rethink risk management when it comes to the execution of novel ideas. Companies must have a strategy to stay random.”

However, “zombie” projects in companies, funded in the hope that they will produce innovation, stifle innovation by wasting resources. Innovation comes in pursuit of a well-defined goal or objective, as it is the vision, and exploration to achieve this vision, that lead to significant innovations, necessitating passion and perseverance, Johansson emphasises.

Further, he notes that diversity drives innovation and companies should ensure that they have diverse backgrounds, disciplines and ethnicities from which to derive inspiration.

Diversity also helps to avoid the same mistakes being made because there is less correlation of incorrect assumptions, which would occur in teams comprising similar-thinking people, notes New Yorker journalist and collective intelligence Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki.

“Cognitive diversity is important, as it means the team has a wider perspective and will assess problems in many different ways and, thus, provide more rigorous solutions than less diverse teams would.”

While working with a diverse team is challenging, dissent within a team is important to produce robust decisions, but must emerge organically. If the same person dissents every time, his or her objections will eventually be ignored or may become obstructive.

“A crowd is wisest when each member thinks for himself or herself. Thus, companies must ensure good team management and platforms to highlight unaddressed concerns, as more dominant or assertive people in the group may marginalise the input of less assertive or more demure members,” states Surowiecki.