Space Shuttle Lessons: Backtracks Can Create Breakthroughs
hubie writes:
What does the space shuttle have in common with the original iPhone? According to Francisco Polidoro Jr., professor of management of Texas McCombs, they're both breakthrough inventions that integrate webs of interdependent features.
In an iPhone, he notes, its size, weight, camera, and Wi-Fi capabilities influence one another. Push one feature too far, and the phone becomes heavier, bulkier, or more expensive.
Companies can't test each feature in isolation, and they can't experiment with every possible combination. So, how does an organization design a complicated product for which there's no existing template?
In a new study, Polidoro finds present-day answers in an old story: how NASA developed its space shuttles, which flew from 1981 to 2011.
Rather than a straightforward sequence, NASA used a meandering knowledge-building process, he finds. That process allowed it to systematically explore rocket features, both individually and together.
"With breakthrough inventions, the number of combinations of possible features quickly explodes, and you just can't test all of them," Polidoro says. "It has to be a much more selective search process."
His findings have implications for both modern-day rocketeers and other cutting-edge fields, from phones to pharmaceuticals.
To trace NASA's design process, Polidoro combed through its archives with Raja Roy of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, as well as Minyoung Kim of the Ohio State University and Curba Morris Lampert of Florida International University.
The archives included 7,000 pages of books, papers, and technical documents - such as internal memoranda between engineers and managers - along with published and unpublished accounts and oral histories by NASA scientists, engineers, and historians.
From that material, the researchers created a timeline of successive space shuttle designs, from 1969 to 1971.
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