relentless focus

So what exactly does the word innovation mean in a business context? Like other words of its ilke like “Art” and “Freedom” there are no agreed on definitions. Define innovation too broadly and you find that every small change or alteration is considered innovative. Just listen to Robert Scoble’s enthusiastic gushing about every new twist in social media and you’ll quickly lose your appetite for the word. The Oxford Shorter Dictionary pins the earliest use of the word innovation in English (1548) to the introduction of novelities and the alteration of existing practices. By (1726) the meanings had come to include “A rebellion or insurrection”.

David Kappos, Director of the US Patent Office spoke yesterday (Sat, 12 March 2011) at SXSW on the topic of measuring innovation. A patent of course is the government’s formal recognition of a new process or technique for achieving some result which differs significantly from earlier ways of doing things. 

“Patent filings do not equal innovation, by any stretch,” says Kappos. While his solution to the problem may not completely satisfy those eager to see the United States move beyond the patent paradigm, Kappos is pressing experts and universities to come up with new measures of innovation, such as job creation and job growth that arise from a particular idea. (as reported in Fast Company).

Innovation seems to have something to do with newness but also some clear result in a change of behaviour or economic activity. It must be a rebellion or insurrection against the established way of doing things with a measurable outcome that is significant. Of course we won’t ever be able to pin down all these parameters: how measurable, how significant, how different?

The UK actually has a department of government known as the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. In a 2008 white paper they define innovation as  “the successful exploitation of new ideas”. Again we see that innovation doesn’t just equal new, it requires the successful exploitation of new.

FutureLab, a UK based marketing agency surveyed 700 SME business leaders in London in the early part of the first decade of the millennium and asked for definitions of innovation and received the usual wishy washy generalisations yet when they were asked to name a tangible product that was innovative, “most people mentioned the iPod”. Matt Rhodes, the author of the FutureLab report went on to say “ This was surprising to me and when we explored why people mentioned this it became clear that they associated innovation with something that was either “not an idea I could come up with” or was “a cool bit of kit that lets me do something I couldn’t before”.

Here we see 2 factors as a measure of innovation, 1) it’s not simply something new but something that redefines our conceptions and 2) it results in a change in behaviour that was not possible before the innovation. Innovation is disruptive both conceptually and behaviourally.

The Freakonomics Blog has an interesting report by Stephen J. Dubner on innovation. He breaks the concept of innovation into 3 sub categories: 

1) Incremental Innovation (“cheaper, thinner, faster and, of course, more features.”)

2) Architectural Innovation (which involve a restructuring of the very building blocks of a product family, industry, or infrastructure). Examples include VOIP which restructures the traditional packet switching telephone technology and Flash memory and SSDs which restructure computer memory based on writing to a physical media in motion.  

3) Disruptive Innovation (which alters the social practices of society)

Of the 3rd they go on to say: “Many students of innovation question if something can even be called a real innovation if it doesn’t end up altering social practices.” They cite mobile phones, digital cameras, personal computers and the world wide web as examples of disruptive innovations. While there may not be an agreed on set of metrics to measure these innovations, its clear that each has changed our relationship to the life we live and society in general on a mass scale.

While the article goes on to explore ways of measuring innovation and the difficulties that arise and whether the lines between Architectural Innovation and Disruptive Innovation don’t perhaps blur at the edges one thing seems clear to me, innovation is either incremental or disruptive. 

I have to agree with those critics who question the value of attaching the word innovation to incremental change (thinner, faster, cheaper) but see great value in using innovation to mean disruptive change to how we live our lives.

In an earlier essay I brought up the issue of tablet computing and posed the question was it Microsoft or Apple who were innovators in tablet computing and I think I can now clearly show why I think it was Apple even though Microsoft first came up with the term and a product. Microsoft’s product never sold well and was really based on the earlier paradigm of the personal computer using the same conceptual architecture and operating system as in their traditional laptop computers. Apple redefined both the conceptual architecture and the operating system of their tablet and as a result came up with a product with immediate customer appeal (the first or second fastest growing product in history according to people who measure and record these sort of things) which disrupted previous markets and is changing both how we use computers and the role they play in our own lives.

As Steve Jobs said on the introduction of the iPhone on 9 January 2007

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. “