Opinion piece - Innovation

What is innovation?

The dictionary definition is fairly bland. Dictionary.com defines innovation as "Something new or different introduced: numerous innovations in the high-school curriculum. The act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods." I have no idea which dictionary OS X uses but it defines innovation simply as "a new method, idea, product, etc. : technological innovations designed to save energy."

The OS X dictionary is, I think, slightly more revealing and in line with what people normally understand by innovation. From the Dictionary.com definition, innovation could simply be regarded as newness for newness sake. The example given in the OS X definition – new technological innovations designed to save energy – has an implied additional context of newness with a purpose, of newness with a tangible benefit. This also implies some kind of standard to be met, a bar to be cleared if you like, before something can be thought of as innovative.

There are a lot of differing opinions about where that bar should be set. On the one hand you have the die hard technology geek. Innovation to them is something big and brand new, something that has never been achieved before. A fusion reactor, a flying car, a quantum computer – that kind of thing. Internet forums inhabited by the die hard geeks tend to be full of posts along the line of 'yeah, not bad but wake me up when it does this'. Or this ever popular sequence:

'Company A has released this incredible new technology – wow!'

'Meh – that's just a tweak on what company B was doing years ago – company A is just copying them.'

'Pfff – Company B got all their best ideas from Company C. Besides, real engineers know that Company D did it first and anyway product X by company E is what you really should be using.'

At the other end of the spectrum you get the popular press and marketing hype where every incremental improvement is trumpeted as 'Innovation'. Using the dictionary definition, I suppose it is but that strikes me as sticking to the letter rather than the spirit of said definition. Naturally the die hard geek dismisses this level of innovation as 'marketing' – a catch all dismissal of any product that manages to be far more popular than a competing product, even though it is technologically 'inferior'.

(Yes, this post is full of sweeping generalisations. That's why it's marked as an opinion piece.)

Personally I think it would be a much saner world if we could avoid either of those extremes. It would certainly save a great deal of time, energy, paper, marketing budgets and recycled arguments. Most innovation consists of incremental improvements on a concept, or the repurposing of old concepts, rather than brand new concepts. To quote Ambrose Bierce - “There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.”

Loudly proclaiming the 'innovation' of each and every advance or minor variation on an old theme isn't helpful and simply degrades the word to the point where the bigger advances or genuinely useful reworking of old themes get lost in the noise. On the other hand, dismissing everything that isn't absolutely brand new as not being innovative does a similar disservice to those same advances or reworkings. To my mind, taking an existing but little used product, working out why it's not used and then designing a similar product to overcome those barriers to use, most certainly qualifies as innovation. It might not be a brand new product, it might not be exciting to the purists or technological connoisseurs but it can certainly be innovative.