The Meaning of Innovation

Finally, the last of our first generation team of contributors, Legal Janitor begins his virgin post by offering his thoughts on the meaning of innovation.

I’m not an entrepreneur, nor do I have any practical experience running my own business. My experiences in business are very much from the perspective of frontline staff: I’ve worked at a bar serving drinks, as a waiter serving food, as the guy who carries crates of alcoholic drinks to the VIP rooms etc. Thus the opinions that I express here are based on my observations and research that I have done. I do not claim to be authoritative on the topic of innovation, but I do hope that people find this post to be interesting and thought-provoking.

When it comes to abstract or hard-to-define concepts, it often helps us to understand if we also consider what it is NOT. That is the approach I am taking in this post. By discussing what Innovation IS and is NOT, hopefully we might be able to get closer to the meaning of what IS innovation.

Mostly evolution, sometimes revolution

“Businesses have to innovate, create a new business model to be successful. Innovation is not seeing other people selling a red bean bun and then you copying and selling that too,” he said, urging companies to create their own unique intellectual property.
— Mr Lee Yi Shyan in TodayOnline

What happens if you copy the red bean bun, but change the recipe such that it is more delicious than the red bean bun of your competitors? Is that still copying? Or is it innovation?

The first suggestion I wish to make here is that the basis of all innovation is copying. What we usually consider “new” or “innovative” usually consists of copying a prior idea, altering or adding to that idea to create a different result. This means that innovation is usually evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

For example, let us consider the red bean bun. The two obvious constituent ideas are red bean paste, and buns. So can we consider whoever first thought of sticking red bean paste into the middle of buns a copycat? I say no. While buns might have been a pre-existing product, as with red-beans, it is clear that red bean buns are an innovation. A different product as been created as a result of combining two prior concepts.

There are instances however, where an idea is clearly revolutionary. For example, the innovation that is bread. How did the first baker think of grinding millet into flour, and then using that flour to make dough, which is in turn made into buns? I can only hazard a guess that it must have been discovered by trial and error. Regardless of how it came about, it was a revolutionary invention. Its creation allowed people to transport staples for longer distances, thus increasing the distances that people can travel.

Human history has many examples of innovations that are arguably revolutionary: language, fire, the wheel, boats, animal domistication, agriculture, money, the steam engine, electricity, transistors, microchips, and such. These tend to be few and far in between. The majority of innovation, in my opinion, is evolutionary and incremental. They improve upon existing ideas, making things faster, better, more efficient, or more aesthetically pleasing to people. In order for incremental innovation to happen however, an important prerequisite is to be able to “copy” the prior ideas.

Not first, but better

To substantiate this point, let’s look at an example. Authoritatively speaking, neither Creative nor Apple were the first companies to come up with the concept of a digital audio player. That honour goes to the Eiger Labs MPMan. Click on the link and take a careful look at the picture: ask yourself what does the product look like. Next, take a look at Creative’s first hard-disk based player, the Nomad Jukebox, and compare. What do you notice? The MPMan effectively resembles a Walkman, and the Creative Nomad looks like a chunky Discman.

What this tells me is that there is no point to being first to a market if you can’t do it better than your competitors. The MPMan is fairly large by modern standards, but at least its form factor had been constrained by the available hard disk technology at that time. There is however, absolutely no excuse for Creative to style a hard-disk player in the same form-factor as a Discman. Surely that is at least some indication of a lack of imagination or creativity on the part of its designers.

The success of the iPod is down to giving consumers what they want. Giving consumers what they want, is also how “better” is defined. You take an existing idea, the “hard-disk audio player”, and then you ask yourself, what do people want out of this. You make it as small as you can, because you know the reason why people buy PORTABLE products is because they don’t want to carry a hi-fi in their pockets. You make it as easy to use as possible, because listening to music should an activity enjoyed by everyone, not just 1337 h4x0rs (elite computer hackers). You make it look good, because you want people to use it anywhere they want in public, show it, display it, wear it as a badge of honour. When you take into consideration all the factors that people want out of a product, and apply it to an existing idea that is deficient in these ideas, you are making a product better. This must also be considered innovation.