The Importance of Empathy in Innovation - Reflections on Satya Nadella's HBR Interview

"To me, what I have sort of come to realize, what is the most innate in all of us is that ability to be able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and see the world the way they see it. That's empathy. That's at the heart of design thinking. When we say innovation is all about meeting unmet, unarticulated, needs of the marketplace, it's ultimately the unmet and articulated needs of people, and organizations that are made up of people. And you need to have deep empathy. So I would say the source of all innovation is what is the most humane quality that we all have, which is empathy." - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

"...the source of all innovation...is empathy"... After I read this in an INC. article, I could not get this thought out of my head. Is it really true that empathy is the source of all innovation? How does one square this with the work of scientists involved in vaccine discovery, or the work of physicists racing to quantum supremacy, ...? Empathy seems to have very little (or nothing) to do with these scientists' day-to-day work. But then I noticed what Satya did. He cleverly narrowed the scope of innovation, "...meeting unmet, unarticulated, needs of the market place...". With this scope of innovation in mind it becomes much easier to buy into his claim that empathy is the source all innovation, because empathy is required to discover unarticulated needs...but now we are left with another problem. Is innovation all about meeting unmet, unarticulated, needs of the market place, or does innovation have a place in meeting unmet, articulated, needs as well? Take for example the two counter-examples I mention above. The need for each is well articulated, it is the solution that is unclear:

• "Discover a vaccine to cure COVID-19"
• "Build a computer that can solve computationally intractable problems, instantly"

As mentioned earlier, there is very little empathy required to solve these problems, but certainly a tremendous amount of creativity, pure problem solving prowess, and deep content knowledge is required. Another way of saying this, solving these problems requires a tremendous amount of talent and knowledge, not empathy! Even Microsoft participates in this type of innovation (e.g., think of the tremendous amount of creativity, problem solving prowess, and content knowledge required to ensure the full breadth of Azure services are secure, reliable, and cost effective, especially at the scale of which Azure operates). I would argue that Azure's system engineers are innovative not because of their capacity for empathy, but rather, because they are able to find creative solutions to some of the hardest engineering problems in the most technically complex environments.

If we widen the scope of innovation to include both the articulated and unarticulated needs, I would argue that empathy, talent, and knowledge are all three very important in the innovation process, one is not more important than another a priori.

I believe most technology executives already understand the importance of taking a balanced view in driving innovation in an enterprise (i.e., it is not just about design thinking), and that a complex set of capabilities, culture, and ways of working need to come together to drive innovation. Certainly empathy is an important ingredient, but there is much more. After all, "[innovation] is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration".

link to: INC. Article

link to: HBR Interview