Pillar article

Innovation is a muscle you can train

By Pat Villaceran

Can innovation be learned? Yes. I believe innovation can be trained like a muscle. The data backs it up. A review of 70 studies found that well-designed creativity training usually improves performance, especially when it trains specific thinking skills on realistic exercises. And so my advice is small. Do it daily. Every morning, name the pattern, crash an outside idea into it, and write down one move.

Creativity can be trained, according to two research reviews, and Pat Villaceran teaches innovation the same way. In 2004, Ginamarie Scott, Lyle Leritz and Michael Mumford pooled 70 evaluations of creativity training and found that well-designed ones typically improve performance, especially when they teach thinking skills. In 2023, Jennifer Haase, Paul Hanel and Norbert Gronau combined 332 effect sizes and concluded that creativity can be enhanced, though results varied. She teaches it as a daily practice: name the default pattern in your field, test an outside idea against it, and write down one thing to build.

It behaves like a skill

Picture a planning meeting. Someone says the company needs more innovation. Every head turns to the one "creative" person in the room. Everybody else relaxes.

Most founders have been told that story. Some people are creative. The rest run operations. Innovation lives in a lab. It has a whiteboard and a budget. Everybody else waits for a memo.

That story lets people off the hook. Ideas are a gift? Then not having them is bad luck. Ideas are a department? Then they're someone else's job. I wrote this for our site, and I still mean every word: "Innovation was never a talent, and it was never a department."

I said it plainly in the episode on the sameness trap (S1 E1): "you have to learn how to think first." Thinking is the muscle. You load it often and on purpose. It gets stronger.

Yes, the data backs it up

Someone tells you everyone needs eight hours of sleep. Yes, for sure. "If there's data that supports that, we listen". The same rule applies here, so let's listen.

In 2004, Ginamarie Scott, Lyle Leritz and Michael Mumford pooled the results of 70 evaluations of creativity training programmes. Their finding: well-designed creativity training programmes typically induce gains in performance, and the gains held across different measures, settings and groups of people. The better programmes had two things in common. They focused on cognitive skills and the heuristics for applying them. And they used realistic exercises that fitted the field people worked in.

The programmes that worked trained a way of thinking. They practised it on problems that looked like the real job.

A larger meta-analysis came out in 2023. Jennifer Haase, Paul Hanel and Norbert Gronau combined 332 effect sizes from studies of methods meant to make adults more creative. On average, creativity can be enhanced, they concluded. Complex training courses, meditation and cultural exposure did best. Drugs taken to sharpen thinking did close to nothing.

They were honest about the limits. Results varied a lot between studies, enough to expect the occasional reversed effect. Training works on average. It won't work every time, or for every person.

And one caveat from me. These studies measure creativity, which means generating ideas and solving problems in new ways. Innovation goes one step further. You pick the idea. You build it. You own what happens next. The research covers the thinking. The building and the owning are on you.

Where the hour rule falls apart

Now take a founder who logs hours like a gym streak, day after day. They're still building the same thing as everyone else.

The "10,000-hour rule" was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, drawing on Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice. Ericsson himself pushed back on how it was read. In an interview with Behavioral Scientist, published on 24 May 2016, he said: "We don't think there was anything magical about 10,000 hours." The best performers, he explained, put in huge amounts of focused practice on their own.

In 2014, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald ran a meta-analysis across every major field where deliberate practice had been studied. Deliberate practice explained 26% of the differences in performance in games and less than 1% in professions. Their conclusion was that it is important, but not as important as has been argued.

Founder work is messy. Nobody hands you the same problem twice. That is why I don't count hours. I give you a method instead. You can run it on your own problems every single day. At the end, there's a move you can check against what actually happens.

Three steps, in the same order

It's Monday morning. You have a coffee, a notebook and your phone face down. You take one problem from your week, and you work it in three steps.

The pattern is the default move everyone in your space is making. Name it, and you can stop making it.

The collision is where you take something from far outside your field, like philosophy, systems or the history of a trade, and push it against your problem until a new answer shows. Your own life counts. Often it's the best source you have.

The move is one thing you can build with today. Your name goes next to it.

A food business, worked through

When we recorded the episode on AI agents, Nathan Reardon put a question to me. What should a founder do first if they want agents in the team "without losing what makes their people original". I answered with a food business.

Pattern, named. Right now the default is to point AI at headcount and see who you can do without.

Collision. Think of a good neighbourhood restaurant where the staff remember you. Now move that memory out of a waiter's head. I described a food business that hands booking, reservations, preferences and feedback to agents, so "you're not wasting" "resources for the waitress to say, okay, this person actually likes sea bass", or who is "chicken allergic". The memory lives on "a dashboard that is AI native", so when a regular sits down on a Friday night, "We know exactly who Jessica is."

Being known is why customers come back. Now it doesn't hang on one person's memory. The agents hold it. The staff give their attention to the table.

Move. List every job in your business that depends on someone remembering a customer. Next to each, write whether an agent should hold that memory or a person should use it. Do it before you pay for one more tool.

Writing that took a few minutes. Naming the pattern and finding the collision are the parts that get better with practice.

Train it a little every day

We read, we write, and we talk it out. It's plain and a bit old-fashioned. This is how our own team works: "Read, read, write, read, podcast the thing." Reading feeds the collision. Writing makes you name the pattern. It makes you commit to a move. Talking it out tells you if the move holds.

Do it before you open your feed. Do it before you open a chatbot, too. Hand your first thought to a tool, and "you are giving away the creative thinking patterns that you should be developing as a muscle to a computer." I use AI all the time. It just doesn't get my first thought.

Once you start, look at your feed again. It's the same. So much of it is one idea shipped again and again.

Start tomorrow morning

Go for it, founder. Take a problem you have right now. Name the pattern, find one collision, and write one move. Then do it again the next day.

Our numbered reads start at No. 001, "The Flawed Metaphor".

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