Myths of Innovation
Via Boulder Future Salon, here's a lecture from Carnegie Mellon University on the subject of innovation.Scott Berkun worked on the development team for Internet Explorer, where he says that innovation was his job. One interesting moment is when he claims that he managed to do some good, innovative work "in spite" of the company he worked for.
He provides some good example of innovators from a lot of different fields, pointing out that they tend to be renegades and rebels. But their most important common characteristic is that they believed in an idea that they thought was interesting or cared about, and pursued it.
Berkun starts out by dispelling what he calls the "myth of epiphany," the notion that a mgic moment of inspiration touches innovators and moves them to make their contribution. He believes that we use the myth of the epiphany to absolve ourselves from responsibility for innovating. After all, if you don't have a magic moment, and the "Innovation Muse" passes you by, whose fault is that?.
He uses the familiar stories of Archimedes in the bathtub and Newton and the apple to explain how the "myth of the epiphany" lets us focus on trivia -- Archimedes running through the streets naked; Newton getting bonked on the head by the apple -- and ignore the hard work and extensive thinking that lay behind the moment of inspiration.
He points out that creativity literature is focused on developing habits for playing with ideas, and lowering inhibitions to new ideas. The "eureka moment" has a lot less to do with the actual moment than it does with the habits of mind the innovator has developed.
He provides some great examples of how following an idea can lead to highly unexpected destinations.
For example, the guys who developed Youtube actually started out trying to develop a video version of Hot or Not. And the folks who developed Flickr were got there by way of trying to start a software company.
He closes with the story of William McKnight and 3M , explaining how a company called "Minnesota Manufacturing and Mining" (3M) came to be in the Post-it Notes business.
Berkun also retells the story of the Luddites -- from the Luddites' point of view -- to make a point about resistance to change. An innovator is someone who wants to introduce change. In order to do that, we have to be willing to get past that resistance, to negotiate with those who don't want the change to occur. He quotes Everett M.Rogers -- Diffusion of Innovation -- who describes the adoption of technology in psychological and sociological terms. Why does one population adopt a new technology while another does not? The short answer is culture
This makes me eager to read Rogers' book (as well as Berkun's.) I would think that there is an inherent evolutionary advantage for a culture to adopt innovations. But maybe not too quickly. After all, as Berkun points out, innovation involves a good deal of failure and false starts. A culture that tired everything new wouldn't last long. On the other hand, we've spent some time recently talking about how well some innovation-resistant cultures have hung on in the face of competition with more innovation-friendly competitors.
Interestingly, I doubt there is any evolutionary advantage to being an innovator. It's advantageous for society to have them, but with the level of risk involved, is it advantageous to be on? Many innovators we know very well today were pretty much failures in their own lifetimes. But then there are others who enjoyed tremendous success. Is it the allure of potential success, or simply the will to make something new happen that pushes innovators on in spite of the odds?
Either way, it's a good thing they push on.
Comments
For a similar take on the concept of innovation see 'Innovation - a Dangerous Guest' at http://www.uh.edu/engines/dangerousguest.htm
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April 18, 2008 09:15 AM