Innovation

Innovation is a buzzword these days. We keep hearing about it very often.

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So, what is innovation?

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services.

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To explore the topic further, I picked up a book by Matt Ridley titled How Innovation Works.

This book offers a perspective on innovation by giving anecdotes and events that happened in the past. Here are a few excerpts from the book. Through a series of posts, will try to explore more about the topic.

Essentials of Innovation

Innovation is gradual

Does innovation need to have a Eureka moment? Probably not. It is usually a gradual process involving multiple iterations and few wrong turns here & there. We have read stories about how Archimedes started running naked. But this is usually not the case. It usually is an increment from previous version, more like evolution. In case of car, the early version of car looked like the old version of previous technology such as the carriage, steam engine, cycle. This is a key characteristic of evolutionary systems. The move to the adjacent possible step. In case of Wright brothers, a series of events gradually happened before the breakthrough moment.

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Innovation is different from Invention

Innovation is achieved after an idea or invention is turned into a workable affordable solution. People who find ways to drive down the costs & simplify the product make the biggest difference. The unexpected success of mobile telephony in 1990’s was not caused by breakthrough in physics or technology, but by a sudden fall in prices. As per Joseph Schumpeter, the achievement of capitalist system does not consist in providing more in quantity but by bringing it within the reach of masses in return of steadily decreasing amount of effort.

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Innovation is Serendipitous

Serendipity is making discoveries by accidents, of things which one is not in quest of. An important attribute of innovation is accidental discovery. Take the case of Teflon, which was supposed to be a refrigerant but due to some chemical reactions got very different properties.

It later went on to be widely used in different applications not related to cooling. Other accidental inventions, which resulted from unexpected events and were recognized & used to our advantage were Kevlar, Post It Notes.

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Innovation is Recombinant

Every technology is a combination of other technologies. Every idea is a combination of other ideas. Innovation happens when ideas have sex. There has been historical evidence from different geographies where innovation thrived and collapsed based on the amount of trade and whether the places were isolated or underpopulated. Innovation is one technology borrowing parts from other technologies.

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Innovation involves Trial & Error

Thomas Edison & his team tested more than 6000 different materials for the filament. Humphry Davy once said, the most important of his discoveries has been suggested by his failures. Innovators who like to play around are more likely to find something unexpected. Dick Fosbury came up with the idea of ‘Fosbury Flop’, a novel technique of jumping using a trial & error approach. Most human innovations evolve through a process that looks awfully like natural selection, rather than are created by intelligent design. America’s greatest advantages has come from its relatively benign attitude to business failures. In states that have favorable bankruptcy rules have shown more innovation than those without.

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Innovation is a Team Sport

Innovation is a collaborative phenomenon. One person may make a technological breakthrough, another work out how to manufacture it and a third how to make it cheap enough to make it affordable to masses. There is a long list of innovative industries during the industrial revolution such as wind mills, engines for boats, cotton spinning that have advanced by collective research and development among many actors freely sharing their ideas. This pattern is a rule not an exception.

P.S.: This is a part of series of posts on innovation.