The problem with innovation

For quite some time now, ‘innovation’ has been a major buzz-word. It’s not enough that a company is good and capable of producing results, it has to be ‘innovative’ as well.
For those of us in the web industry, this is even more important—we’re perceived to be on the ‘bleeding-edge’ of this high-tech interweb business, pushing the boundaries of innovation itself.

Or something like that, anyways. See, for all that every company involved with ‘new media’ talks about how innovative it is, there seems to be a depressing lack of any kind of innovation going on in the new media world. Lots of marketing hype, sure… but nothing substantive.

So what’s happening?

Innovation and business

Being truly innovative requires a lot of time and money. It requires a willingness to spend a couple of weeks trying some new idea out, deciding it doesn’t work, and starting all over again. It requires a willingness to repeat the process before perhaps abandoning the whole thing because it doesn’t work.

For technology geeks like myself, this isn’t a problem—we’re the kind of people who’ll happily spend a week on a proof of concept only to find out that it doesn’t work… and we don’t care because we’ll know what not to do next time. We’re the kind of people who’ll combine technologies in entirely unholy ways just to see what happens, who believe that whatever may be available off-the-shelf, we can do it better.

But to someone trying to run a business, the idea of spending tens, hundreds, or even thousands of man-hours on something which may not work and may even have to be thrown away at the end of it all… all sounds a bit like using bundles of money as firelighters: it’s not something they really want to contemplate.

If a business wishes to truly innovate, it either has to eat the cost itself or pass the cost onto a customer, at which point you meet another problem.

People don’t really want ‘innovative’

It’s true: people like what they know, what’s familiar, what everyone else is doing. A client may start off by saying “we want something new and innovative”, but as you work through the design process, you’ll get feedback like “we don’t feel our customers will understand ‘x’”, and “we like the way ‘y’ does this, can we do the same thing”.

Innovation is new and exciting, it requires you to have the conviction to pitch something that is a little ‘out there’ and conveying that confidence to your client. It requires your client to be willing to take the risk to be ‘different’, to invest in something that may not be quite what their customers are expecting, that may be the Next Big Thing but equally could be a huge flop.

Most clients… probably won’t be willing to take the risk—they’d rather sink their money into something which they know will work, because it works for everyone else.

But what is innovation, anyways?

Good question.

A lot of people talk about ‘web 2.0’ as being a great ‘innovation’ within the sphere of the web—the advent of social media an user-generated content.
But if you look at what actually happened, there were no new technologies, no radical innovations involved. Online communities, blogs and user-generated content have been around since the bulletin-board systems of the 1970s. Web developers have been doing ajax-like things since advent of JavaScript in the mid 90s.
All that happened was the internet reached a critical mass—from being the preserve of pasty white geeks to being yet another commodity piped into everyone’s home, along with Oprah and Domino’s Pizza. It wasn’t so much an innovation, more an inevitable change in the social landscape (whether for the better is something for another article).

When it comes to it, much of the output we see from ‘innovative’ companies tends not to actually be particularly innovative—it’s either been much of the same-old same-old, or a way of rebranding something that’s already been done before but this time in a newer, shinier package. In the case of web 2.0, maybe it’s just capitalising on the inevitable.

However, Larry Page’s ‘PageRank’ algorithm was arguably a tremendous innovation in the way search engine indexes work, but is often overlooked in lieu of Google’s greater achievements.

Personally, I believe that innovation is subjective: that someone sat in their house, utilising existing bits and pieces to achieve something new to them… is just as innovative as the company who comes up with the great new digital technology.
To me, innovation is having the creativity and courage to try something new, to break the mould… it’s a challenge to make something better, or at the very least ‘different’.

What it isn’t is a label you can mindlessly stick to yourself. Innovation takes commitment, it takes courage, it takes time.

A final thought

At the beginning of this article, I said that all manner of companies promise innovation as part of the package, and it irritates me when they continue to do the same thing as everyone else because it’s ‘safer’, because that’s not innovation, and it ‘dilutes’ the word.

So I end with a call to innovate—everyone promises it, why not let’s deliver on it once in a while. Why not let’s spend some time thinking about what we can do to make things better, rather than sticking with what we’ve been doing for years because it’s easier. We may just change the world.