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February 19, 2009

Innovation Revisited, Kinda

Wharton's project with the Nightly Business Report convened a panel to select the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years. A key problem for the panel was to have a working definition of "innovation". And the next key problem was to rate the importance of innovations against each other.

Listing signature characteristics of "importance", the panel came up with this:

-Impact quality of life
-fulfill a compelling need
-solve a problem
-exhibit a "wow" factor
-change the way business is conducted
-increase efficiency
-spark new innovations
-create a new industry

Like many lists, this is a collection of "notables" that leaves open the matter of which ones may overlap or compete with each other. That might not matter except that the list is one of competitive "qualifiers" or "criteria", so we need to know when to apply them, and when not. It doesn't make sense that all of them would apply to every issue thought of as an innovation, so it's fair to imagine that some kind of categorization is implicit in the list. To investigate that, let's reorganize the list a bit.

1a. Impact quality of life
1b. create a new industry
1c. change the way business is conducted

2a. fulfill a compelling need
2b. solve a problem

3a. spark new innovations
3b. exhibit a "wow" factor

4. increase efficiency

Group 1 clearly shows what we want innovation to affect. Life, industry and business are of course strongly interconnected because they co-exist in a shared environment, and they co-operate in the creation of that environment.

Group 2 clearly shows "how" we want the innovation to affect any of the members of Group 1.

Group 3 clearly, but somewhat abstractly, represents a sense of "why" -- of whether the innovation is compelling due to the "push" of its character (sparking) or the "pull" of its character. (And these would not necessarily exclude each other.)

And Group 4 is a throwaway. The mystical attracton of "efficiency" might be nicely appreciated as a need to avoid waste or resistance; but at best this is a type of micro-problem to be solved, and at best it should be a member of a list of various things dealt with by group member 2b. Additionally, the different members of Group 1 probably have some micro-problems in common, but (for example) surely the idea of inefficiency versus "quality of life" is not the same as inefficiency versus "new industry". So going ahead, we'll drop it (at least until the other worthy micro-problems, from various perspectives, are also identified).

What the new grouping offers is three dimensions of consideration -- the what, how, and why -- that ought to account for the competitive inclusion of each given innovation in the Top 30 list. 3-D space is of course a framework, and with a framework in hand it should also be possible to anticipate (predict), find (detect), and position other issues that would be candidates or actuals of "innovation"...

We don't know exactly how much the panel may have made decisions this way -- whether explicitly by agreed formula, or intuitively. But for the panel, there was also the prior matter of defining an "innovation" in the first place. Their definition was as follows: "It's something new that creates new opportunities for growth and development", which resulted in "a list dominated by technological and medical advancements".

Let's go back to that loose end of "inefficiency", though. With this panel, it seems either clear or feared that inefficiency is a major thorn in the side -- perhaps the single most aggravating barrier to innovation itself? This would be an indicator that innovation is perceived almost entirely in the context of an already known or targeted outcome, objective or goal. What else could the context be?

For one, conspicuously absent from the list is both (a.) specific unprecedented "concepts" and (b.) virtually all "fine art". In other words, nothing having to do with the evolution or revolution of consciousness made the top 30 list. Granted, the initial invitation to compile the list most likely did not try to attract a range of candidates that included those two. However, aside from entertainment value, what is the point or use of a Top 30 list? There will be those who study the list in order to try to understand where innovation comes from. And for that very reason, it is critical to survey as well the growth and development of the mind that we will eventually watch, hire, or follow because we expect innovation from it. It was Einstein, wasn't it, who said that "To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science... The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." The most important innovation(s) would be ones that allow, or even force, us to think in a different way than we did before.

And another take on context involves the ability to undertand growth and development not as checkpoints towards a known or certain end, but instead as evidence of new potential and/or capability despite being accompanied by uncertainty. Normally we reserve the term "innovation" for something that we can retrospectively view; but the difference here is that the desired certainty need not be about what comes "next" due to the innovation. Instead, it can be about "what became different" from a past known or shown to be obsolete. In this sense, a surprise encounter with something that already exists, but that is a clear alternative that might then be adopted, makes the adoption itself an innovation, and should be understood alongside our interest in inventions.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at February 19, 2009 8:53 AM