Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation | Illiteracy is the inability to read and write. Though the percent of sufferers has halved in the last 35 years, currently 15% of the world has this affliction. Innumeracy is the inability to apply simple numerical concepts. The rate of innumeracy is unknown but chances are that it affects over 50% of us. This tragedy impedes our ability to have a discourse on matters related to quantitative judgement while policy decisions increasingly depend on this judgement.
But there is another form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. My contribution to solving this problem is to coin a word: I define innoveracy as the inability to understand creativity and the role it plays in society. One example is in the following quote: “Lastly, nationally circulating tabloid Ilta-Sanomat gets a look at Nokia’s fabled tablet computer that was developed nine years before the iPad hit the market. Note that the taxonomy has a hierarchy.
Moonshot | When describing the process of disruptive innovation, Clay Christensen set about to also describe the process by which a technology is developed by visionaries in a commercially unsuccessful way. He called it cramming. Cramming is a process of trying to make a not-yet-good-enough technology great without allowing it to be bad. In other words, it’s taking an ambitious goal and aiming at it with vast resources of time and money without allowing the mundane trial and error experimentation in business models. To illustrate cramming I borrowed his story of how the transistor was embraced by incumbents in the US vs. entrants in Japan and how that led to the downfall of the US consumer electronics industry. Small upstarts were able to take the invention, wrap a new business model around it that motivated the current players to ignore or flee their entry.
The history of investment in transistor-based electronics shows how following the money (i.e. Notes: The policymaker’s dilemma. Here is an exchange with Robert van Apeldoorn, Journalist with Trends Tendances Magazine in Belgium. (www.trends.be/fr). The exchange took place in early September via e-mail. Robert: -Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is considered in Europe as a way to push growth, and is a target of national and EU policies (digital growth,etc), but the result seems to be a failure: the European computer industry (hardware) is almost dead (ICL, Siemens computers bought by Fujitsu, Olivetti almost out of computer business, Nixdorf dead) since the 90’, and the telco industry seems to be in crisis.
All European companies are out of the handset business (big and fading exception is Nokia, but with American software), and Alcatel is suffering with telco equipement manufacturing. It seems that at best, Europe can be a good niche player, with companies like ARM (chips). My answer: You are correct in this observation. Almost all growth has come from companies that entered the space. Please, Can We All Just Stop "Innovating"? - Bill Taylor. By Bill Taylor | 11:33 AM May 30, 2012 There’s something about the culture of business that tends toward excess — in financial markets, to be sure, but also in the “market” for new ideas and management techniques. The dynamic is always the same, whether the idea in question is reengineering, six-sigma quality, or lean production systems: A genuinely original strategy is born in one company or industry, consultants discover the practice and turn it into a marketable commodity, executives in all sorts of other companies race to “buy” the product — and then they wonder why the technique didn’t work nearly as well in their organization as it did in the place that created it in the first place.
I fear that very dynamic is unfolding today with respect to a piece of language and a leadership aspiration that has become the Holy Grail for business thinkers like me. That piece of language, that aspiration, is innovation. Ouch, that’s gonna leave a mark! Diffusion of innovations. The diffusion of innovations according to Rogers. With successive groups of consumers adopting the new technology (shown in blue), its market share (yellow) will eventually reach the saturation level. In mathematics, the yellow curve is known as the logistic function. The curve is broken into sections of adopters. History[edit] The concept of diffusion was first studied by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in late 19th century[3] and by German and Austrian anthropologists such as Friedrich Ratzel and Leo Frobenius.[4] The study of diffusion of innovations took off in the subfield of rural sociology in the midwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1962 Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology, published his seminal work: Diffusion of Innovations. Elements[edit] The key elements in diffusion research are: Characteristics of innovations[edit] Studies have explored many characteristics of innovations. Characteristics of individual adopters[edit] Process[edit] Decisions[edit] Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition (9780743222099): Everett M. Rogers, Everett Rogers: Gateway.
From creation myth to the reality of innovation today. On the surface, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article for The New Yorker, “Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation“, is a story about the mouse and how inventions travel – and evolve – across time and place. But examined more deeply, the article is really about the factors that determine whether you end up with an invention or an innovation. Simply put: “invention” is the manifestation of an idea or creation of something new. It doesn’t become an “innovation” until it’s applied successfully in practice – i.e., it reaches the market and impacts people’s lives. The story of PARC – and for that matter, any other innovative company – is indeed a mix of hopeful inventions, world-changing innovations, and missed opportunities, as Gladwell observes.
We agree with many of the key points illustrated by the anecdotes and quotes in his article. On the challenges of invention and innovation 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. A note on the popular story of the mouse The missing piece: Open innovation. How any business can innovate like Apple. By Josh Bernoff Yeah, right. Innovate like Apple. You can do it. Sure. One of the smartest guys I know is James McQuivey, who works with me at Forrester Research. James decided to take a close look at how new breakthrough products actually get created. It's very human to think about the linear evolution that created a product like the iPad. It's also wrong. In fact, breakthrough new products come about from a combination of forces. You can do this too. Exploit the adjacent possible. It's not that easy, you say. Photo by Grant Robertson via Flickr.
Case studies. Resources. INNOVATION.