Why 'innovation' needs to take a step back

http://ijnet.org/en/blog/why-innovation-needs-take-step-back

by cguess • 11 years ago

10 5 11 years ago

This and "disrupt", please.

mfoy_• 11 years ago

I think that if we, as a community, innovate on our rhetoric we can really disrupt the overuse of "innovate" and "disrupt".

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

I agree, except for:

There are many, many examples of recent innovations that were absolutely necessary. The advent of mobile applications for newspapers truly changed the game.

...Twitter... — these are innovations that truly changed the media world.

Nope.

Mobile applications for newspapers aren't innovative. It's a generic type of application that happens to run on a widely available platform - which, in of itself, is not innovative either.

Twitter is not innovative either, because its impact is not related to the product itself, but its widespread adoption. The actual application is relatively basic, the infrastructure backing it aside. Now, one could retort that it's a "media innovation", not a technical one. But then the term becomes diluted, as just about anything widely used becomes an "innovation" in that it almost logically changes how something is done to that end. It becomes a truism.

Basically, if it can be boiled down to "Something... but on a computer", then it's most likely not innovative.

For actual examples of technical innovations, see this David A. Wheeler essay: http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html.

hitchhiker999• 11 years ago

Thank you for writing this down. There is so much bullcr*p in tech, and always has been. It's false advertising and effectively devalues the entire industry.

p00b• 11 years ago

This definitely plays well with an idea I've pontificated on for a long time, to the dismay/annoyance of my close friends and colleagues.

The thought is simply that the process of iconifying anything (words, people, companies) inherently decouples the item from the original idea behind it. This introduces a dangerous implication wherein the icon can then be re-appropriated in support of literally any idea, including the antithesis of the original idea this thing was supposed to represent.

Everything from "Disruptive Technology" to "Christian" to "ObamaCare" to "Terrorist" (feel free to replace the last with Witch, Homosexual, Communist, or an assortment of derogatory racial slurs, depending the era you're discussing) is subject to this sort of propagandizing via the iconifying process.

Scary stuff, and very important to notice and discuss now, before "Freedom of Speech" becomes simply another of the icons.

Why 'innovation' needs to take a step back

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