How Thomas Kuhn can help your business innovate

In today's business environment there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of talk about disruption and innovation. Businesses in both the private and public sectors are constantly striving to remain relevant in a highly competitive and often unforgiving market. In this context, innovation seems to be the key to keeping disruption at bay. Yet many established businesses find themselves victims of a shareholder and stakeholder pressure that keeps them chained to their established products, unable to drive innovation in a way that delivers meaningful results.

But what if your business could both innovate and remain relevant? What if you could disrupt your own business in such a way that it would shift your entire company paradigm, and create a whole new market in the process?

Enter Thomas Kuhn. This 20th-century American physicist and philosopher of science is the author of the influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he lays out a new model of scientific development. Before Kuhn, most theorists believed scientific discoveries were the result of an evolutionary process that replaced a less truthful model with a more truthful one. For Kuhn, the development of science was instead a revolutionary process, in which a new paradigm would completely supplant the old one.

In Kuhn's view, scientists work for decades or centuries to refine a theory, say Newtonian physics. At its peak such a theory can explain almost every phenomenon in the universe bar a few minor issues; in the case of Newtonian physics, the energy distribution in blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect. In trying to solve those issues, an upstart scientist comes along, an Albert Einstein or a Max Planck, and proposes a radical new theory of everything that ends up profoundly disrupting the previously accepted one.

Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. For obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

Thomas Kuhn

If this sounds familiar, it is because the same model appears to be at work in our brave new world, where established businesses are disrupted by upstart start-ups that do not play by the old rules but rewrite the rules of the game to their advantage.

While every established business is at risk of disruption, you are still in time to take a page or three from Kuhn's playbook and grow your business to be its own disruptor.

Stop sweeping anomalies under the rug. If your business model feels comfortable today, chances are there are still one or two small problems you have not been able to solve economically, despite your best efforts. It may be the loyalty card that never takes off, or the city where you cannot overtake the competition. Stop pretending these are insignificant blips on the radar, and start talking about your problems openly.

Look at the fringes. Your top performers will not help you here: they have too much to lose in the short term to see the long-term benefits of disrupting your current model. Look instead to those at the fringes of your organisation, the people with fresh eyes, passion and something to gain from change. If you are serious about innovating, they are the ones who can figure out how to get there.

Accept the pain with the gain. Shifting the paradigm is painful, and at times you will feel disoriented, because what got you this far will not take you where you need to go next. Remember that while classical physics gave us the turbine and combustion, quantum physics gave us nuclear power. It is better to be on the right side of history.

Thomas Kuhn will not help you sell your new ideas to your shareholders or convince your customers to embrace a new paradigm. But he will support an internal culture that can deliver paradigm shifts of a magnitude that makes it very hard for anyone to deny the benefits.

A version of this article was first published by Dr Marco Motta on LinkedIn.