First, I’d like to thank the creators of cph127 (although I am still wondering what it stands for…) and for inviting me to be a guest blogger. With the fury of postings by the founders over the past month, everyone can see they are serious about this. After trying to digest all the great ideas and links already posted, I realized it’s time to join the game!
How do you think about innovation? Is it a once in a lifetime achievement? Is it anything new that someone thinks is really good? Does the world not see the value of most innovations?
The rhetoric around innovation is significant. About two years ago I argued that innovation is incremental. And recently, I presented that innovation is defined as something "that is new AND is a commercial success." Innovation requires adoption and without it, you just have another idea…
Everett Rogers wrote the seminal book, Diffusion of Innovation, and it explores how new and valuable things diffuse into society. The reason I think innovation is incremental is because any significant change in how we do things, even if amazingly useful, takes time for people to understand and adopt. Consider that we are roughly 30 years into the adoption of the internet. Truly an innovation, it has taken some time for it to diffuse. Of course, smaller commercial successes diffuse and wane more quickly than this. The iPod, iTunes, and iTunes music store are certainly an innovation for the music industry. When did the iPod debut? It’s already been 4 years. But it has reached 10 million units sold and is one of the fastest adoption of an consumer electronic product ever. Much faster than the Sony Walkman.
Innovation is a new product or service that becomes widely adopted. But it always takes time. This is a hard thing for most organizations to accept and build into their definition and development plans.
How do you think about innovation?
5 comments so far
I believe that innovation comes in many different forms, depending on context - this makes it difficult to think about in a certain way. In my books, classification as innovation doesn’t necessarily require adoption, because the basic ingredients to innovation are simply new ideas. But….
Firstly: ideas are tacit/vague things, and they need to be transformed into at least a partial state of explicitness to be useful to anyone. So, as soon as ideas spread between people, they gain potential for innovation.
Secondly (and this is pretty obvious): innovation isn’t necessarily something completely new, so different approaches to existing ways could also be innovation.
Thirdly (and this is most important to me): innovation is a state of mind. It’s often just a subconscious way of approaching challenges. Even if the person who’s overcoming these challenges isn’t aware of the fact that they’ve just innovated (because they’re simply concerned with the most effective/efficient solution), they can still have innovated dramatically, if judged from an outside perspective.
Interesting to discuss, whichever way you look at it… 
I agree with you Chris that some innovation-processes appears as incremental, but isn’t is so that other processes looks more like radical changes? Now and here innovations, combinations of thoughts/ideas/resources from different knowledge paradigms? Within a very short timespan?
On a more philosophical level everything is an add on to something existing, isn’t it? And for that reason it’s incremental. Or?
All the best
Hans Henrik
I can really recommend “Diffusion of Innovations” - great book! The author shows that innovations is not only technical products but can also be ideas, beliefs etc. Really an eye-opener.
I don’t believe that an innovation has to have commerciel succes for it to be an innovation. I my view innovation are based in an idea (something new) which is diffused and adopted in some form of social context. The diffusion is what separates innovation from ideas.
If you then look at innovation over time, you may argue that all innovation is incremental - as Hans Henrik said it is an add on to something existing. Still, I think that the separation between incremental and radical innovations have its uses - radical innovations can then be separated by incremental innvoations by looking at the impact that the innovation has on the social system in which it diffuses - does it cause a major or a minor change? Also radical innovations can be separated from incremental by looking at the two dimension, market & technology. Is the innovation new in the view of the market/social system & in the view of technology? In this way the Walkman isn’t classified as an radical innovation since it wasn’t new in a technical sense (the same technology inside the walkman as in normal transistorradios).
Just remembered the theory of paradigmeshifts by Thomas Kuhn and thought that it might be relevant when discussing if innovation is incremental.
Kuhn argues that science isn’t only incremental (as believed earlier) but instead is characterized by shifts in paradigmes. For example the move from Isaac Newtons theories to the theory of relativity. Might the same not apply when discussing innovations? For example by major, radical shifts in technology? Can we then say that innovation… is incremental?
This is interesting Kristoffer – maybe we should wait for an answer from Chris?
In my humble opinion – and I’m not that strong into the academics – appears the groundbreaking and very interesting innovation in the shift between – or should I say in the bridging - different knowledge paradigms.
That doesn’t mean that incremental innovations isn’t important and right.
That’s why we have to focus on in depth knowledgecreation in every aspect of businesslife, but also in motivate bridgebuilding.
Isn’t it?
All the best
Hans Henrik