Eric Morrison is a research lead who is less interested in how things are, and more interested in what they could become. While his resume includes names like Disney, TikTok, and now Google, Eric doesn’t see himself as a corporate auditor of “user friction.” Instead, he sees his role as an enabler of novelty.
With a background in history from Yale and organizational science from Oxford, Eric brings a specific kind of academic depth to the high-velocity world of Silicon Valley. We sat down with him to talk about the thrill of building things that haven’t existed before, the lessons learned from being wrong, and why he’s more interested in “meaningful impact” than “incremental gains.”
When you hear the word “success,” what does it actually mean to you?
For a long time, the industry has framed UX research as a way to “optimize”—to make things 5% smoother or slightly faster. But for me, that’s not what gets me out of bed. Success, in my eyes, is empowering a team to build something genuinely novel.
It’s about that moment when research helps a team take a leap of faith into a new space—something that doesn’t just improve an existing habit, but creates a new one. Success is when we move past “what is” and actually build a “what if.” If I can provide the evidence and the confidence for a team to ship a meaningful innovation that actually changes how someone works or creates, that’s the highest form of impact I can have.
How did your early life shape that desire to create a meaningful impact?
I grew up in a household where work was tied to responsibility. My father was a doctor, and my mother worked as an immigration paralegal. I saw how rules and systems could either protect people or create stress for them. Success was never framed as status. It was framed as whether you did your job well and treated people fairly. That perspective stayed with me.
How did your academic training influence your approach to innovation?
It sounds counterintuitive, but studying history at Yale is what made me obsessed with the future. History is just a series of moments where someone introduced a novel idea that shifted the world. It taught me how to recognize the “patterns of the new.”
When I went to Oxford to study the social science of the internet, I realized that true innovation isn’t just a technical achievement; it’s a social one. My academic background reminds me that “novelty” for its own sake is just a shiny object. To create meaningful novelty, you need a deep, almost historical understanding of the social patterns by which key innovations have diffused across both people and time. You have to know where we’ve been to know where we can go next.
What’s an overlooked skill that helps teams land breakthroughs?
To build something truly new, you have to be willing to be wrong—frequently and publicly. When you’re optimizing an existing, mature product, the risks are lower. But when you’re trying to build a novel innovation, you have to interrogate your core assumptions constantly.
I’ve had moments where I was sure a new concept would be a breakthrough, only to realize in the lab that we were solving the wrong problem. Humility is the price of admission for innovation. You have to be okay with the “messy” stage of creation. Success isn’t about being the person who had the right idea first; it’s about being the person who stayed curious enough to find the actual breakthrough hidden in the data.
Working at places like Disney, TikTok, and Google involves massive scale. How do you push for novelty in such large organizations?
It’s definitely a challenge. In large systems, the gravity always pulls toward the “safe” choice—the incremental update. But I’ve learned that my role is to be the bridge between a bold idea and a viable product.
At TikTok, success wasn’t just about having a big vision; it was about bringing the evidence that made that vision feel possible to teams and leadership. You have to be a bit of a translator. You take a “novel” idea that feels risky, and you use research to show how it actually maps to a deep, unmet human need. When you can align a team’s creativity with a user’s reality, that’s when breakthroughs materialize.
You’re currently focused on research about AI in the workplace at Google. What’s that like?
What’s been exciting to me is that we aren’t just building better tools; we’re building entirely new ways of working. It’s incredibly exciting, but it demands a lot of rigor.
There is so much hype in the AI space, and it’s easy to get distracted by the sheer amount of noise. My focus is on how we can use this technology to empower people—to give them back their creativity or to solve workflows that have been broken for decades. Success for me is helping my team navigate all that noise to filter for the applications of AI that can actually meaningfully improve people’s experience of work.
How do you keep your own perspective fresh?
Cycling and weight training are my ways of resetting. When you’re constantly thinking about the “future of work,” you need something that anchors you in the physical present.
I also read a lot. I think novels are actually the best “innovation” training there is; each one is a world built from scratch. It keeps my imagination flexible. If I only read tech news and data reports, I’d lose the ability to see the world from different perspectives. And in research, if you lose your perspective, you lose your ability to innovate.
What’s your best piece of advice for someone who wants to create a meaningful impact in tech?
Don’t simply stop at “making it better.” Ask yourself what would happen if you made it different.
People are often afraid of novelty because it’s higher risk than simple optimization. But the most rewarding work comes from those moments where you stop tweaking the edges and start rethinking the core. Be the person who brings the evidence that makes a bold idea feel inevitable.
