【中英双语】捕获“10倍创意”的秘诀

When Your Moon Shots Don’t Take Off

最近，某知名工业巨头的创新负责人组建10个跨部门团队，给它们布置了一项高难度任务：彻底重新构想各自的业务。为鼓励创新思路和方法，公司要求各团队运用设计思维和精益创业方法，着手客户研究和原型解决方案的工作。这位创新负责人原本期望收到10项变革提案，而提交上来的建议却只是给一种工业工具添加联网数据流，这让他目瞪口呆。激进的新理念在哪里？就没人考虑打造数字平台、翻转商业模式或重新打造产品吗？

Recently, the head of innovation at a major industrial conglomerate set up 10 cross-functional teams and gave them an audacious goal: to completely reimagine their businesses. To encourage fresh ideas and approaches, the company had the teams apply a design-thinking lens to customer research and prototype solutions using lean start-up techniques. The innovation leader expected 10 transformational proposals to come in. What he got instead were suggestions along the lines of adding a connected data stream to an industrial tool. He was dumbfounded. Where were the radical new concepts? Had no one even considered creating a digital platform, or flipping the business model, or reinventing products?

虽然我们掌握的创新工具日渐精细，但对渐进思路的偏好，仍然是各类企业发展的障碍。渐进式创新固然是可行的增长路径，但它无法支撑企业的长期发展。企业如何构想出更宏大、更有意义的东西？是什么在限制创造力？谷歌提出，“10倍创意”能带来10倍而不是10%的改进。为什么不是每家公司都能做到？

The tendency toward incremental thinking plagues companies of all sorts—in spite of our increasingly sophisticated arsenal of innovation tools. And though incremental innovations do have a place in a growth portfolio, they won’t sustain a business over the long term. How can firms come up with something bigger and more meaningful? What’s constraining creativity? Why can’t every company achieve what Google calls “10x thinking”—ideas that lead to 10-fold improvements rather than the more typical 10% ones?

人们很容易把原因归结为技术、竞争或监管，但这些障碍比我们想象的更容易克服。想想看，大众曾认为登月不可能、即时摄影不切实际、可回收火箭匪夷所思等等。实际情况是，约翰·F·肯尼迪激励了美国宇航事业，埃德温·兰德（Edwin Land）推出了宝丽来相机，埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）创建了SpaceX。

It’s tempting to point to technology, competition, or regulation as the culprit, but those barriers are much more permeable than we imagine. After all, people once thought that a moon landing was impossible, that instant photography was impractical, and that reusable space rockets were simply insane. Then John F. Kennedy inspired a nation, Edwin Land introduced the Polaroid camera, and Elon Musk launched SpaceX.

真正限制“10倍创意”的，是一些认知偏差。这些偏差扭曲我们的认知，阻碍我们看到更多可能性。认知科学已经开始揭示这些偏差，并总结我们如何“有规律地陷入非理性”。在经济学、营销和战略等很多领域，行为学方法已经颠覆了很多正统研究范式。但“行为学革命”尚未拓展到创新领域。在创新方面，我们尚未系统性采纳能带来重大跨越的视角和工具。

The real limits to 10x ideas are biases that distort our perceptions and prevent us from seeing possibilities. Cognitive science has started to unpack those biases and the ways that we are “predictably irrational,” and in many fields—such as economics, marketing, and strategy—a more behavioral approach has overturned the dominant paradigm. But the behavioral revolution hasn’t taken hold in the domain of innovation, where we’ve yet to systematically adopt the perspectives and tools that help us take big leaps.

在考虑创新路径时，大多数人会陷入认知陷阱。这些陷阱会强化研究者称为“本地搜索”的行为：可得性偏差，即用可获得数据代替典型数据的倾向；熟知性偏差，即高估已知事物价值的倾向；确证性偏差，即利用新信息证实已有结论的倾向。这些倾向会导致我们只看到与现状相关的机会，而非视野之外的更好机会。本文的目标是分享一些新方法，帮助企业避开上述认知陷阱。常见的精益创业和敏捷开发等框架固然有价值，但出发点并非克服阻碍真正突破的认知偏差。我们推荐的方法与之不同。在哈佛商学院进行的一项现场实验中，研究者发现敏捷方法实际上削弱了发散思维。问问自己：客户观察、A/B测试、Sprint等方法，真能带来可与晶体管、iPhone、SpaceX比肩的突破性创新吗？可能很难。

When considering new avenues to pursue, most of us fall into cognitive traps that reinforce what researchers call local search, such as availability bias, the tendency to substitute available data for representative data; familiarity bias, the tendency to overvalue things we already know; and confirmation bias, the tendency to think new information proves our existing beliefs. As a result we see only the opportunities related to the status quo, rather than more-valuable opportunities just out of view. The purpose of this article is to share some approaches that are helping companies sidestep those traps. They differ from popular frameworks like lean start-up and agile development, which—while valuable—aren’t intended to combat biases that prevent true breakthroughs. In fact, in a recent field experiment at Harvard Business School, researchers found that agile methodologies actually reduced divergent thinking. Ask yourself: Will customer observation, A/B testing, or sprints really lead to the next transistor, iPhone, or SpaceX? Probably not.

下面介绍的策略和工具，都将挑战我们规避风险、趋易避难的强大本能。我们曾运用这些策略和工具帮助组织发现更大的机会，或在针对激进创新者的研究中发现相关线索。有创造性的组织达成“10倍创意”的方式有很多，本文呈现的仅是其中几种。我们的目的在于提示出一些可能性，帮助企业思考如何克服障碍，实现更大潜力。

The tactics and tools we’ll describe all challenge our powerful instinct to avoid risk and choose the easy path. We have either used them to get organizations to see bigger opportunities or come across them in our research on radical innovators. Our list is by no means exhaustive; it represents just some of the ways that creative organizations are reaching for 10x ideas. The intent here is simply to shine a light on how businesses can overcome the forces limiting their possibilities.

科幻

Science Fiction

已过世的小说家厄休拉·勒古恩（Ursula Le Guin）曾说，她写科幻小说，是为了解放自己和读者的头脑，摆脱“我们现在的生活方式是唯一可能的生活方式”这种懒惰、胆怯的思维。科幻引领我们踏上精神的时间旅程，让我们畅想不同可能性。科幻作品曾预见或启发很多改变世界的突破性创新：《星际迷航》（Star Trek）中船长的通信工具相当于手机、19世纪爱德华·贝拉米（Edward Bellamy）所著小说描述未来社会中的信用卡、20世纪初卡雷尔·恰佩克（Karel Čapek）的一部剧作描写机器人、艾萨克·阿西莫夫（Isaac Asimov）预言自动驾驶汽车、雷·布拉伯里（Ray Bradbury）构想耳机、H·G·威尔斯（H.G. Wells）想象原子能等等。印象笔记（Evernote）前CEO菲尔·里宾（Phil Libin）指出，笔记软件的概念直接来自小说《沙丘》（Dune）描述的增强智能。他说：“科幻能提供某种严谨的乐观主义。这并非魔法，而只是灵感。你要做的就是根据这种灵感，制定严谨的计划并努力实施。”

The late novelist Ursula Le Guin once said she wrote science fiction to dislodge her mind—and her reader’s mind—“from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.” Science fiction helps us engage in mental time travel and allows us to dream about what may be possible. Consider some life-changing breakthroughs science fiction has envisioned or inspired: cell phones (which were based on the officers’ communicators in Star Trek), credit cards (a feature of a futuristic society in a 19th-century novel by Edward Bellamy), robots (conceived in one of Karel Čapek’s early-20th-century plays), self-driving cars (foreseen by Isaac Asimov), earbuds (a fictional invention of Ray Bradbury), and atomic power (imagined by H.G. Wells in 1914). Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote—who says the concept for that note-taking software came directly from augmented intelligence in the novel Dune—puts it this way: “Science fiction can provide a kind of rigorous optimism….There’s no magic. Science fiction just provides the inspiration and then you make a rigorous plan and go for it.”

在咨询工作中，我们曾见证科幻工具启发成熟大公司构想新的业务前景。本文作者之一凯尔曾是Lowe’s的创新负责人，借助科幻手段，该公司管理层开始思考运用增强现实、机器人等技术革新零售。

In our consulting work, we have seen science fiction help large, established companies visualize a new future for their businesses. Indeed, at Lowe’s, where Kyle was head of innovation, this approach got the executive team members to understand how they could revolutionize retail with augmented reality, robotics, and other technologies.

当时是2012年，Oculus Rift和Pokémon Go尚未问世。我们的做法很简单：把Lowe’s的客户和技术数据发给一些科幻作家，请他们想象公司5到10年后的样子。我们随后汇总作家们的理念，找出重合和不同的地方，然后整合并完善各个故事。最后，我们以漫画的形式，与公司高管分享最终完成的“预测小说”。

And that was back in 2012, before Oculus Rift or Pokémon Go even existed. The process simply involved giving customer and technology data to a panel of science fiction writers and asking them to imagine what Lowe’s might look like in five to 10 years. We then gathered their ideas, noted where their perspectives converged and diverged, and integrated and refined the stories. Finally, we shared our “speculative fiction” in comic book form with the Lowe’s executives.

项目最终的成果是，Lowe’s成为第一家将全自动机器人用于客服和库存管理的零售商，推出第一批3D打印服务，并参与国际空间站3D打印机（用于制造工具）的制造。公司还研制了可用于卡车卸货和店内货物搬运的机器人外部骨架，以及用于设计改建方案的增强现实手机（第一批在四天内售罄）。Lowe’s不仅在财务上取得成功（3D成像能力推动在线销售额增长50%），2018年更在《财富》“最受尊敬公司”排行榜中零售创新方面位列第一，并在《快公司》“最佳创新公司”榜单中增强现实方面位列第一。

As a result of that project, Lowe’s became the first retailer to deploy fully autonomous robots for customer service and inventory, created some of the first 3-D printing services, and helped place a 3-D printer for making tools on the International Space Station. It also created exosuits (external robotic skeletons) for employees unloading trucks and moving goods onto the store floor, and came up with the first augmented-reality phone for planning remodeling work (which initially sold out in four days). Not only has Lowe’s achieved financial success (3-D imaging capabilities have boosted its online sales by up to 50%), but in 2018 it was named number one in retail innovation in Fortune’s Most Admired Companies ranking and number one in augmented reality on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list.

虽然Lowe’s案例突出的是技术，但创新并不一定与技术相关。在一些完全没有技术背景的案例中，我们也曾应用同样的方法，例如帮助百事构思有益健康的产品，以及帮助Funko思考如何在收藏品业务之外进行拓展。

Although technology features heavily in the Lowe’s example, innovation isn’t about technology. We have used the same process even when no technology was involved—for example, to help Pepsi imagine how to create healthful products and Funko to envision how to expand beyond the collectibles business.

类比

Analogies

一天晚上，诺贝尔物理学奖得主维尔纳·海森堡（Werner Heisenberg） 走过哥本哈根的一个公园时，认识到了能量的基本性质。他当时走的那条路很黑，只有零星的路灯亮光。前面的人走到路灯下时会被照亮，随即又消失在黑暗中，如此反复。海森堡突然想到，质量如此大的人还可以消失又重现，那么几乎没有质量的电子在与某些物质接触前，是否也可能处于“消失”状态呢？作家、物理学家卡洛·罗韦利（Carlo Rovelli）指出，海森堡之所以得到这一关于能量体如何相互作用的认识（即著名的“测不准原理”），是因为他使用了类比法，将在路灯间行走的人比作电子。

One evening, as the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg was walking through a park in Copenhagen, a fundamental insight about the nature of energy dawned on him. The path he was on was very dark, save only for occasional circles of light cast by the street lamps. Ahead of him, a man appeared in a pool of light under one lamp and then disappeared into the night until he reemerged in the next pool. Suddenly, it came to Heisenberg: If a man, with so much mass, could seem to disappear and reappear, could an electron, with almost no mass at all, similarly “disappear” until it interacted with something else? According to the author and physicist Carlo Rovelli, that insight into how packets of energy interact—which later became Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle”—struck him because he applied an analogy, comparing the man walking between lampposts to an electron.

在商业领域，类比同样能带来突破［见乔瓦尼·加维蒂（Giovanni Gavetti）和扬·里夫金（Jan Rivkin）2005年发表于《哈佛商业评论》的文章《用类比法思考战略》（“How Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy”）］。查理·梅里尔（Charlie Merrill）以超市类比券商，让投资者从一系列产品和品牌中自由选择，从而革新了证券经纪业。20世纪70年代，电路城公司（Circuit City）在电子产品零售领域推出超级店铺，后又采用相似逻辑（海量选择、低固定费用、不还价），推出了CarMax二手车零售服务。虽然电路城在电商时代破产，但CarMax现在是全球最大的二手车零售商。

Analogies have led to breakthroughs in business as well (as Giovanni Gavetti and Jan Rivkin noted in a 2005 HBR article, “How Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy”). Charlie Merrill revolutionized the brokerage industry by applying the analogy of a supermarket, which lets shoppers choose among a host of products and brands. Circuit City, which introduced the superstore approach to electronics retailing in the 1970s, transformed the automotive industry by applying a similar logic (wide selection, low fixed prices with no haggling) to used-car sales, creating CarMax. Though Circuit City went bankrupt after the shift to online retailing, CarMax is now the largest used-car retailer in the world.

不同领域之间的类比，有时可以带来重大突破。例如，优步和爱彼迎的快速成长，无疑预告了类似“共享经济”公司的出现，如房车租赁平台RVshare.com、储物空间分享平台Neighbor、杂货配送服务商Instacart等。另一个拓宽思路的方法是，从否定的方向寻找类比：谷歌绝对不会做什么？你也可以从失败案例中学到东西：某公司采用的什么方法导致失败？

Analogies from different domains can sometimes help us make big leaps. The rapid growth of Uber and Airbnb, for example, certainly foreshadowed the emergence of similar “sharing economy” businesses, from recreational vehicles (RVshare.com), to storage (Neighbor), to grocery delivery (Instacart). Another way to jog your thinking is to use an analogy involving how not to do something: How would Google never do it? You can also draw on lessons from failures: What approach did a company that missed the mark try?

第一原理

First Principles Logic

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals是一家知名医药公司，擅长以竞争对手几分之一的成本开发新疗法。该公司创新流程的核心是“第一原理”方法：为挑战现状，创新者审视某件事情的基本原理，并从零开始重新构想。“从概念到科学原理，我们质疑每件事，并在团队内部充分争论。”公司总裁兼首席科学官乔治·扬科普洛斯（George Yancopoulos）说。例如，测试新疗法的主流模式是先在老鼠身上测试，然后进行人体测试，但由于老鼠和人类之间的巨大差异，失败率很高。Regeneron对这种模式提出挑战，尝试将人类基因植入老鼠，以获得更接近人类的反应。开发新药的平均成本高达43亿美元，而对老鼠进行基因改造的方法，已帮助公司将成本降至这一水平的20%以下。

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is renowned for developing new treatments at a small fraction of its competitors’ costs. At the core of its innovation process is a “first principles” approach, which questions the status quo by reexamining the foundational principles about something and then redesigns it from the ground up. “We challenge everything—every concept, every scientific principle—and we argue about it amongst ourselves,” says George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s president and chief science officer. For example, the firm questioned the dominant paradigm for testing new treatments—trying them first on mice and then on humans, which often leads to high failure rates because mice and people are so different. Yancopoulos and his team sought to reinvent the process by developing a mouse implanted with human genes to more closely simulate human reactions. The modified mouse has enabled Regeneron to develop new drugs for less than 20% of the average $4.3 billion cost of developing new therapies.

SpaceX使用的可回收火箭，同样来自第一原理方法。公司创始人马斯克本想从俄罗斯购买废弃的火箭，但遭到拒绝。阿什利·万斯（Ashlee Vance）在《硅谷钢铁侠》中写道，在从俄罗斯回国的飞机上，马斯克怒气冲冲地做了一些计算，对后来担任NASA局长的麦克·格里芬（Mike Griffin）和SpaceX创始团队成员吉姆·坎特莱尔（Jim Cantrell）说：“我想我们可以自己造火箭。”坎特莱尔回忆道：“我们在想：‘是啊，你和哪里的军队一块造？’”但在研读过推进技术、空气动力学、热力学和燃气涡轮的基础理论后，马斯克总结出火箭的基本原理。根据他的分析成果，团队使用更简易、较小号的商业级而非航天级部件，组装出了低成本的可回收火箭。到今天，SpaceX已经成功完成60多次发射和29次回收，帮助主要客户NASA节省数亿美元。“大多数情况下，人们会照搬现成的解决方案，只做一些微调，”马斯克告诉我们，“我则尊崇物理学的第一原理分析，将某个领域的事物归结到最基本的原理，然后再以此为基础进行扩展。”

SpaceX’s reusable rocket emerged from a similar first principles approach. Founder Elon Musk wanted to buy castoff rockets from the Russians but was rebuffed. As Ashlee Vance recounts in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk was furiously crunching numbers in a spreadsheet on a flight back from Russia when he turned to Mike Griffin, a future NASA administrator, and Jim Cantrell, a founding executive at SpaceX, and said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” Cantrell recalls, “We’re thinking, ‘Yeah, you and whose army?’” But after reading up on the fundamentals of propulsion, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and gas turbines, Musk had broken rockets down to their basic principles in his spreadsheet. With that analysis, his team came up with a way to develop affordable, reusable rockets by using simpler commercial-grade, rather than space-grade, components in a smaller architecture. Today SpaceX has performed more than 60 successful flights and 29 successful landings and saved NASA, its major customer, hundreds of millions of dollars. “In most cases people solve problems by copying what other people do with slight variations,” Musk told us. “I operate on the physics approach of analysis by first principles, where you boil things down to the most fundamental truths in a particular area and then you reason up from there.”

扩展适应

Exploring Adjacencies Using Exaptation

在寻找突破性创新机会时，你能找到的所有机会都是由起始要素决定的。生物学家斯图尔特·考夫曼（Stuart Kauffman）在“邻接可能性”理论中描述了这个规律。但我们通常看到的，只是显而易见的要素的用途或组合方式。取得突破的关键，在于发现完全不同的用途。在进化生物学中，这一过程即“扩展适应”：为实现某一目标而进化出的某种特性，经过调适后应用于另一种完全不同的目标。例如，羽毛的功能最初可能是保暖和吸引配偶，后又成为飞行的关键。与此相似，早期鱼类进化为陆地生物后，原有的复杂下颌骨演变为耳朵。在没有人类干预的情况下，扩展适应尚且在生物界自然发生，那么在选择与想象的世界中，它就具有无限可能性。

As you search for breakthroughs, the set of available opportunities is always determined by the elements you begin with—a concept that the biologist Stuart Kauffman described in his theory of “the adjacent possible.” But we tend to see only the uses or recombinations of those components that are obvious. The key is to discover completely different uses. In evolutionary biology, this happens in a process called exaptation—in which a characteristic that evolved for one purpose is adapted laterally for another use entirely. For example, feathers, whose initial function may have been to provide warmth or attract mates, became the key to flight. Similarly, the complex jawbones of early fish evolved as those creatures became land dwellers, developing into ears. If exaptation works in the biological world without any human agency, then in a world of choice and imagination, its possibilities are infinite.

潜在创新者如何利用扩展适应的力量？可以从质疑某物的特定用途开始。例如，范·菲利普斯（Van Phillips）在滑水事故中失去一条腿后，打算自己设计假肢，因此开始研究生物工程学。他很意外地发现，自二战以来，假肢设计就几乎没有变化。进一步研究之下，他发现设计者都在关注美学层面，即让假肢看上去像脚。但菲利普斯想，为什么假肢一定要像脚？它只要像脚一样发挥功能不就行了？他参考撑杆跳高、跳水板和猎豹足部，设计出刀锋假肢。这种假肢外观完全不像脚，但大大提高了使用者的自由度，现在大多数残奥选手使用的都是这类假肢。通过重新思考假肢的用途，菲利普斯彻底革新了这一领域。

How can would-be innovators tap the power of exaptation? They can begin by asking why we use something for one purpose and not another. For example, after Van Phillips lost his leg in a waterskiing accident, he studied biomedical engineering to learn how to design prosthetics. He was surprised to discover that prosthetic design had changed little since World War II. When he explored why, he learned that designers focused on aesthetics—making the prosthesis look like a foot. But Phillips asked, Why does it have to look like a foot? What if instead it acted like a foot? Drawing ideas from pole vaulting, diving boards, and the feet of cheetahs, he created the Flex-Foot, a prosthetic that looks nothing like a foot but gives wearers far greater freedom of movement. (Most Paralympians use versions of it.) By reexamining the purpose of artificial limbs, Phillips revolutionized the field of prosthetics.

杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）在亚马逊也采用类似的思考方法，鼓励团队寻找现有能力的更广泛用途，或探索已有客户问题的新解决方法。“关于如何决定进入哪些相邻领域，我们有两种方式，”他说，“一种是从客户需求倒推，一种是从自身能力正推。”亚马逊最赚钱的业务之一AWS即源自后一种方式。“做AWS的时候，我们需要吸引一批新客户，但团队具备分布式计算的卓越能力，”贝索斯说，“对于Kindle，虽然我们没有硬件相关的经验和能力，但有客户需求。”

Jeff Bezos applies a similar kind of thinking at Amazon, where he encourages teams to look broadly for new uses of their existing capabilities or new ways to solve the problems of existing customers. “If you’re talking about how do you decide what adjacencies to move into, we do it two ways,” he says. “We do it customer-needs-backwards, and we do it skills-forward.” Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the company’s most profitable businesses, emerged from the skills-forward method. “With AWS we had to recruit a new set of customers, but we had extraordinary skills inside the company on distributed computing,” says Bezos. The Kindle was the product of the other method. “With Kindle we had no hardware experience, so we didn’t have the skills,” says Bezos. “But we had a customer need.”

上述四项创新策略的目标，在于打破思维惯性、摆脱固守已知的自然倾向，从而克服认知偏差。当然，除此之外也有其他方法。例如，亚马逊要求员工撰写关于假想新产品的新闻通稿，以此设想几年后可能出现的产品。这一策略甚至会对个人的职业发展有帮助：你可以在1月提前给自己准备一张圣诞卡片，写下到12月将会完成的事情。还有一些工具也可以帮助你取得进步。例如，你可以制作一幅“通关”图，从当下开始，通过实现一个个小目标来达成愿景；也可以参考实验设计流程，检验自己是否处于正确方向上。

The point of these four innovation approaches is to shake up our thinking and get us past our natural inclination to stick with what we know—to sidestep our cognitive biases. There are certainly other techniques. Amazon, for instance, asks employees to write press releases that introduce an imaginary new product to the market; this encourages them to envision what new offerings could be in a few years. That tactic can even help you with your career. In the month of January, you can write Christmas cards describing what you’ll have accomplished by December. There are also tools to help you make progress. For example, you can create an “artifact trail”—a set of small wins leading up to your vision, which you can begin acting on immediately—or apply experimental design processes to see whether you’re heading in the right direction.

无论采用哪些框架或方法，你都要聚焦于可能性。当下存在的事物有其偶然性，潜在创新者却经常陷在这些事物的细节中，不敢去追寻看起来有点疯狂的创意。但要想获得“10倍创意”，我们就必须摆脱渐进思维，克服对失败的恐惧。你必须要敢想。

Whatever frameworks or approaches you use, the goal is to focus on what could be. Too often would-be innovators get bogged down in details of what happens to exist today and tone down ideas to make them sound more palatable. But to achieve 10x thinking we have to break free of incrementalism and face down the fear of failure. You need to dream big.

爱因斯坦在寻找广义相对论的数学表达式时，优秀数学家大卫·希尔伯特（David Hilbert）也在做同样的工作。爱因斯坦当时进展缓慢，每周的计算方式都不一样。根据罗韦利的描述，对于爱因斯坦在细节方面的困难，希尔伯特很惊讶，并说：“哥廷根街上的每个孩子对四维几何都比爱因斯坦懂得多。”然而希尔伯特承认，爱因斯坦先解决了问题。为什么？在罗韦利看来：“因为爱因斯坦具备独特的能力，能想象世界如何被构造，在自己脑中‘看到’它。”

Consider Einstein. While racing against David Hilbert, a brilliant mathematician, to articulate a general theory of relativity, Einstein struggled to frame up the specific mathematics to describe his theory. He presented his thinking every week, and every week the calculations were different. As Carlo Rovelli recounts it, Hilbert was struck by Einstein’s difficulties with the details, noting: “Every boy on the streets of Göttingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein.” Yet, as Hilbert himself pointed out, Einstein solved the problem first. Why? In Rovelli’s opinion: “Because Einstein had a unique capacity to imagine how the world might be constructed, to ‘see’ it in his mind.”

我们在这里总结的创新方法，并未穷尽通向“10倍创意”的全部路径。但我们相信，企业确实需要找到实现突破的新方式。本文描述的即是其中几种。我们同样认为，创新领域需要一场行为学革命。借助行为学研究，我们能更好地突破限制视野的障碍。这非常重要，因为我们的未来并不是客观决定好的，而是由我们自己创造的。

We don’t claim to have identified all the ways to generate 10x insights. But we do believe that firms need new approaches to reach such discoveries more effectively, and we’ve described several of them here. We also believe it’s time for a behavioral revolution in the field of innovation. By taking the cognitive sciences seriously, we can become better at breaking the bonds that limit our vision. Why is that so important? Because there is no objective future out there that we will arrive at one day. There is only the future that we create.

内森·弗尔是英士国际商学院战略学助理教授。杰弗瑞·戴尔是杨百翰大学万豪商学院战略学Horace Beesley教席教授。凯尔·奈尔是变革管理咨询公司Uncommon Partners联合创始人、CEO，曾任Lowe’s创新实验室执行主任。弗尔和奈尔合著有《引领变革》（Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company’s Future，哈佛商业评论出版社2018年出版）。