A searchFootnote 1 for the term innovation in Simon’s numerous writings returned only one title, “The executive’s responsibility for innovation,” a short piece delivered at a summer institute in 1957. In this talk, Simon argues that in order to survive in a changing business arena, executives are charged with designing organizational environments conducive to innovation. Such environments stimulate and facilitate various processes of creativity characterized by Simon as follows (1957, pp. 2–3):
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Alternatives are not given but must be searched for.
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It is a major part of the decision-making task to discover what consequences will follow each of the alternatives being considered.
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We are more often concerned with finding an acceptable alternative than with finding the best alternative. The classical theory of decision was concerned with “optimizing”; a theory of innovation will be concerned with “satisfying.” It can be shown that this change in viewpoint is essential if a satisfactory theory is to be constructed.
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Problem solving involves not only search for alternatives, but [also] search for the problems themselves.
Simon further points to the inadequacy of rational choice theory for capturing these features and suggests developing an alternative theory capable of conforming to these four elements of the creative processes of innovative action (For a comprehensive account of many concepts of innovation, see Shavinina 2003).
In practice, to deliver on their responsibility of fostering creative activities, managers must excel at regularly delegating the surveillance of once-novel-now-routine operations. This deliberate distance from standard operations is essential to free up time for breeding innovation at an organization. Other requirements include “radars” for scanning the environment, technologically enhanced staff, long-range planning activities, and imagination. In summary, managers’ and employees’ attention and efforts have a tendency to be consumed by the “programmed” operation routines in an organization; innovation, by contrast, requires a deliberate break from routine to make space and provide resources for the “nonprogrammed” operations, which themselves have to be identified by an intelligent search of the environment and by imagining the potential needs and possible improvements outside the familiar settings.
We observe that the process of habitually breaking from routines can itself be viewed as a routine or a heuristic. One may call this routine the innovation heuristic. The main proposal of this paper is that the process of generating knowledge while the innovation heuristic is at work is itself a heuristic, namely that of generating a satisfactory amount of knowledge to set an innovative action in motion. Furthermore, Simon (1957) declares that the many-faced mystery of human thought processes has been reduced by computer simulations to “nothing more than complex sequences of simple processes of selective search and evaluation.”Footnote 2 We emphasize that the simplicity of heuristics is the very property that supports their use as structures for information search in situations of uncertainty, which typify creative/innovative processes.
Finally, new knowledge is both acquired and created in an innovative procedure. The part of knowledge already in place, which can be triggered by the changes in the environment, is referred to as tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge exists to different degrees, depending on features such as articulation ability, presence of standards, and (not) requiring face-to-face transmission. Viale (2006)Footnote 3 views knowledge on a spectrum from fully codifiable, that is, transformable into propositionals, to completely tacit, that is, uncodifiable, and presents a categorization as in Table 1 (p. 341).
Table 1 Categorization of knowledge according to the degree/form of tacitness and modes of acquisition and transmission The innovation heuristic can be viewed as involving different degrees of tacitness. In deliberate problem solving, one is aware of paying attention to a certain issue or evoking and utilizing relevant knowledge. In situations that call for heuristic problem solving, attention still plays a major role, whether concurrent with awareness of specifics or not. Next, we demonstrate the important role of attention allocation in every type of problem solving through a famous puzzle that Simon used to discuss with his students in class.