In an era of low growth, companies need innovation more than ever. Leaders can draw on a large body of theory and precedent in pursuit of innovation, ranging from advice on choosing the right spaces to optimizing the product development process to establishing a culture of creativity.^[1]See, for example, W.C. Kim and R. Mauborgne, “Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant,” expanded edition (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard … Continue reading In practice, though, innovation remains more of an art than a science.

But it doesn’t need to be.

In our research, we made an exciting discovery.^[2]See T.M.A. Fink, M. Reeves, R. Palma and R.S. Farr, “Serendipity and Strategy in Rapid Innovation,” March 2017, https://arxiv.org.Innovation, much like marketing and human resources, can be made less reliant on artful intuition by using information in new ways. But this requires a change in perspective: We need to view innovation not as the product of luck or extraordinary vision but as the result of a deliberate search process. This process exploits the underlying structure of successful innovation to identify key information signals, which in turn can be harnessed to construct an advantaged innovation strategy.