This paper examines strategies to innovate to meet a grand challenge—inclusion of individuals with disabilities. Drawing on innovation and inclusion research, we propose that a synthetic strategy to innovation, reliant on individuals with disabilities sharing their needs and experiences during the innovation process, would lead to greater innovation. We posit that the typical, market-oriented, analytic strategy to innovation that exploits existing knowledge sets, such as medical knowledge on disabilities, would likely lead to incremental improvements rather than significant innovation. We conducted a global field experiment through an online platform, Hackster.io, involving more than 300 problem-solvers to test the benefit of the synthetic strategy in advancing innovation in rehabilitation and assistive technology. We find that the synthetic strategy encourages greater participation from individuals with disabilities and problem-solvers but, surprisingly, that the analytic strategy led to more innovative solutions. Our ongoing post hoc interviews aim to understand this surprising finding.
