Bonus Round From Finland: "Stick Innovation Up Your A**"!

We all need to take care on how we use the word "innovation" and what we mean by it.

A Finnish anti-austerity demonstration gathered huge crowds in Helsinki last weekend, and my social media feeds were filled with pictures of demonstrators holding up a banner stating “Stick Innovation Up Your Ass!”. There was unanimous condemnation of the message, with various expressions of mirth and condescension.

Rather than joining up in the simplistic “those anarchists/communists/whatevers don’t understand”, I think it’s worth taking a look and considering what prompts assumedly smart university students (the banner was originally created for a demonstration opposing university restructuring) to parade such a message.

1. Innovation Is Badly Defined

My favourite definition of innovation comes from Fresh Consulting (from an old article from 2008: https://www.freshconsulting.com/what-is-innovation/) that states: “something fresh that creates value”. 

The problem is that often what gets termed as innovation is neither fresh nor creating value. Although cost innovation – providing a valuable service at a significantly lower price – is a fascinating area, I’ve heard the term simply used as a replacement for cost cutting. In this context the word innovation becomes Orwellian newspeak, a word you can use to replace anything unpalatable to make it sound like something cool.

Next time you use the word innovation pay attention: what do you mean by it? What other word could you use to replace it?

2. Innovation is neither Good or Evil

Although change (and hopefully renewal driven by it) is an accelerating constant in our world, there is a tendency to assign a quality like good or evil to innovation.

I’d like to argue that innovation – like technology – is neither good or evil as such, but rather a force of nature that can be harnessed for either use. A great example is military research, which has been a driving force for innovation ranging from the Arpanet (the predecessor of the Internet) to GPS – same technologies that allow a bomb to be precision dropped a continent away is allowing us to navigate places where we’ve never been before.

At the same time innovation impacts society, and how we relate to that is a question of active policymaking. While ride-sharing allows us to get essentially a cab faster than ever and get to our destination on the cheap, the questions of commoditized labour and what it can mean for our society are not something we should dismiss to the margins of progress – a great post about the subject can be found here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/shelf-life-sharing-overlooked-distinctions-economy-charley-wang.

3. Not All Innovation Drives Growth

Finally, the work by one of my business heroes Clayton Christensen outlines why not all innovation is created equal in driving growth (something Finland is in desperate need of). In The Capitalist’s Dilemma (https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-capitalists-dilemma) he focuses on the outcome of innovations in terms of growth creation.

I highly recommend reading the whole article, but as a summary Christensen categorises innovations into three types: Performance-improving innovations that replace old products with new and better models. They generally create few jobs because they’re substitutive – when customers buy the new product, they usually don’t buy the old product. Efficiency innovations help companies make and sell established products or services to the same customers at lower prices. Market-creating innovations, Christensen’s third category, transform complicated or costly products so radically that they create a new class of consumers, or a new market. Think Nokia, which made mobile phones essentially a commodity.

As a nation-state, Finland should and could create a system that pushes companies to think longer term and incentivises them in solving the Capitalist’s Dilemma. Like Christensen and his team write in the article: “We’re happy to report that we think we’ve figured out why managers are sitting on their hands, afraid to pursue what they see as risky innovations. We believe that such investments, viewed properly, would offer the surest path to profitable economic and job growth.”

In Conclusion

So. Instead of sticking innovations up your a**, be aware that the word can be used as an escape by the intellectually lazy – and take a moment to figure out what prompted the banner.

For us all working on building the future, remember that it’s your responsibility to use language precisely to avoid precisely this kind of miscommunication. Please. Watch out for newspeak and focus on creating those innovations that really matter.