Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Monday, November 15, 2004Innovation Is What People Adopt
I became aware of Michael Schrage not long after he wrote Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate in 2000. Schrage's insights helped me articulate my own instincts, experiences, frustrations, and aspirations regarding collaboration, modeling, and prototypes and prepared me to deepen my understanding through my work with Laura Black and Don Greer of Greer Black Company, in particular.
Schrage recently wrote his final "Making Good Ideas Matter" column for Technology Review magazine, titled Innovation Diffusion:
Simply put: innovation isn't what innovators do; it's what customers, clients and people adopt. Innovation isn't about crafting brilliant ideas that change minds; it's about the distribution of usable artifacts that change behavior. Innovators -- their optimistic arrogance notwithstanding -- don't change the world; the users of their innovations do.
In other words, innovation is a social phenomenon. In a world of increasing customer choice and more powerful networks, innovation is the product of effective collaborations between companies and customers. Those companies that can create effective conversation spaces conducive to collaborative explorations of possibilities with customers through the skilled use of prototypes, models, and simulations have an advantage.
Nevetheless, the language of innovation sometimes seems to imply a linear research-develop-make-sell process. Features, benefits, brand, price, and quality are all featured in conversations about how to reduce the barriers of adoption. But, adoption of innovation isn't solely in the hands of the innovator, nor is it always proportionate to the quality of the innovation.
Consider the following from Duncan Watts :
The innovators and revolutionaries, in other words, who act out of conscience, ideology, inventiveness, and passion are an essential component of a global cascade, forming the seed or trigger from which the cascade can propogate. But--and this is what makes cascades so hard to understand--the seed alone is not enough. In fact, as far as the success or failure of a cascade is concerned, seeds of change, much like their biological counterparts are a dime a dozen...Trees spread their seeds in profligate numbers for a reason: only one in very many will grow to fruition, and not because that one bears some special, unique quality, but because it lands in the right place...
Like most generalizations, this statement is not always true. Sometimes individuals exert so profound an effect that their influence truly seems to have been guaranteed...Sometimes, in other words, a profound outcome implicates an equally profound cause. Breakthroughs in this nature, however, are exceedingly rare, and most social and scientific change is not wrought by cognitive leaps of singular genius...And so it is apparently with cultural fads, technological innovations...and other manners...of mass action. The trick is to focus not on the stimulus itself but on the structure of the network that the stimulus hits.
Cleverness matters. Price and performance matter. So does brand, consumer awareness, and breadth of distribution. But, they aren't the only factors that matter when it comes to the realization of innovation. To me that suggests that organizational innovations are as important as innovative products and technologies.
I'm going to miss Michael Schrage's column. I hope he re-emerges in print soon.
