The Combinatorial Innovation Network
Increase innovation by combining diverse ideas and experience
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Hanauer rejects a great-person account of innovation and describes technology as combinatorial: new tools emerge by joining existing tools, knowledge, and experiences in new ways. His simple illustration begins with sticks and rocks; combining them produces multiple tools rather than one isolated invention. The organizational implication is to expand the range of relevant ideas in the network and make it easy for people to recombine them around a defined problem. Diversity matters here as an input to the search space, not as decoration. The framework does not claim that any diverse group will automatically succeed. The group still needs a shared problem, usable knowledge, productive interaction, and tests that separate promising combinations from noise.
Origin
Extracted from The Diary of a CEO
Core principles
- 01New technology is assembled from existing capabilities
- 02Different experiences increase the available combinations
- 03Innovation is a network process rather than only an individual insight
How to run it
- 1
Frame the problem
State the human or operational problem precisely enough that combinations can be evaluated.
- 2
Inventory the building blocks
List existing technologies, skills, evidence, and practices that could contribute.
Pro tip Include mature tools from adjacent fields, not only novel ones.
- 3
Broaden the network
Bring together people with different relevant knowledge and lived experience.
Watch out Difference without relevant contribution or psychological safety will not help.
- 4
Generate combinations
Deliberately pair building blocks and perspectives to create candidate solutions.
Pro tip Ask which two existing capabilities have not been tried together.
- 5
Test in context
Evaluate candidates against the original problem and keep the combinations that improve the outcome.
Watch out Novelty alone is not innovation.
In the wild
Hanauer uses basic materials to illustrate recombination: joining a rock and a stick can produce a hammer, spear, axe, arrow, or shovel depending on the arrangement and purpose.
→ Existing building blocks create several new capabilities through recombination.
Common mistakes
Waiting for a lone genius
This overlooks the prior technologies and network of ideas from which an apparent breakthrough is assembled.
Mistaking variety for progress
A wider set of ideas matters only when the group can combine and test them against a real problem.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for complex product, technology, and policy problems that benefit from multiple disciplines.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when the task is routine, tightly specified, or constrained to one proven procedure.
From the transcript
“Innovation is always combinatorial.”
“The more diverse people in a network who come together with different ideas and different sets of experiences, that is what drives the rate of…”
From the episode
Death of the Middle Class: Billionaire vs Entrepreneur DEBATE - Daniel Priestley v Nick Hanauer