There’s a growing awareness among R&D managers that tapping the expertise of people in distant, analogous fields can yield highly novel solutions to innovation problems. But finding these experts poses a significant challenge of its own. Who and where might they be? The prospect of searching for them can seem overwhelming.
Let’s say, for example, you’re a manager of a company that makes truck-mounted forklifts, and despite your best efforts, you can’t figure out how to make the mounting and unmounting of the forklifts safer, more efficient, and more user-friendly. You have a sense that radical solutions might be floating around in other industries, but where would you even begin to look for fields that are analogous to yours?
It turns out there’s an effective way to answer: a method called pyramid search, with the word “pyramid” meaning, essentially, a subject area. Although it’s a significantly creative endeavor on its own, the steps involved are quite straightforward. We’ve also discovered that it has widespread implications — we often find ourselves using pyramid searches in other contexts (which we’ll get to in a moment).
Pyramid search was pioneered and studied by Eric von Hippel of MIT and others. It’s not the only way to look for analogous-field solutions to innovation problems — another well-known method is broadcast search, studied by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School and others. But pyramid searches can be remarkably effective in finding that needle in a distant haystack: identifying rare knowledge within large and poorly mapped search areas.
Unlike broadcast searches, pyramid searches are unconstrained by the makeup of the “crowd” of crowd-sourced solvers. Moreover, pyramid searches allow for learning on the fly: Solution seekers can adapt, refine, and even replace the original question as they go. (For those who are familiar with the search-method literature, pyramiding builds on ideas from snowball sampling and small-world searches but is specifically appropriate in hunts for innovations.)
The basic idea is that you identify people who might have some knowledge of or interest in a given topic area, and you ask them who else might know even more than they do — or who else might know of others with greater knowledge. Then you contact those people and repeat the process until you’ve gotten to the top of that particular topic area, or pyramid, and found individuals with the highest levels of expertise and passion.
Once you’re at a peak of a pyramid, you’re more likely to get a referral to someone in a distant but analogous topic area (when we say “distant,” we’re not referring to geography but to contextual differences between subjects). That’s because the highly curious, knowledgeable, well-connected people at the top of pyramids tend to reach out to people outside their domains.
It works like this:
Our research has shown that you have to be careful and systematic when conducting pyramid searches. First, brainstorm starting points in numerous potentially analogous fields. For this stage, don’t just stick with your target area — interviewees outside your immediate domain are more likely to provide referrals into analogous domains.
Make sure your team is made up of experienced interviewers who understand the principles of successful pyramid searches. The way they formulate and communicate the initial problem matters a lot: They need to be able to communicate it so that interviewees connect their knowledge to it.
With each interview, measure the level of knowledge you’ve gained. If you aren’t gaining much, you’re on the wrong track. But if you’ve gained a lot with each successive interview and then suddenly stop getting referrals upward, you’ve probably reached a peak. Another indication that you’re at a peak is that you’ve heard the same name from several people.
In our study, 35.2% of the 600 interviewees who provided a referral at all and 18.4% of our total sample of 1,147 interviewees were able to perform the creative task of referring into at least one analogous domain. Each of those 211 interviewees provided one to seven boundary-crossing referrals, representing a large potential trove of analogous knowledge sources.
Moreover, we found clear confirmation that top-level experts were significantly more likely to provide referrals into analogous domains, and 40.2% of interviewees who provided domain-crossing referrals did so into distant, rather than nearby, fields. That’s a plus: More-distant fields are more likely to contribute radical new ideas.
Our involvement in the forklift case provides an example of the process. We used brainstorming to identify promising starting points, including a logistics-firm owner who is a heavy user of truck-mounted forklifts. That led to a maker of machinery-mounting systems for farm tractors and eventually to a person in the entertainment-events industry with tremendous knowledge about safely and quickly mounting and unmounting stage equipment for shows and concerts. The forklift company had found the needle in the haystack: Although the industries are very different, the event-technology solutions were transferable to the forklift problem with only minor modifications.
In another case, we worked with an inventory-management company to search for ideas about improving parts tracking. One starting point was a journalist who had written about robot soccer, which led us to a player whose work on self-orienting sensing technologies for robots was easily transferable to inventory management and helped the company improve its tracking systems.
The ideas from these analogous fields probably would have been out of reach if the companies had used traditional ways of searching for knowledge.
Once you’ve tried pyramiding, it becomes a whole new way of thinking about people and knowledge. It has become our go-to method of searching for expertise. In one case, when we needed an expert in the market-analysis method known as adaptive conjoint analysis, we launched a pyramid search that connected us with people around the globe. The funny thing is that it eventually led us to an expert whose office was two floors below ours in our own institution. Pyramids take strange shapes sometimes.
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