Half a decade ago, I laid out a perspective on the evolution of innovation. Now, I return to these reflections with a sentiment of both awe and unease as I observe the profound impacts of AI on innovation and business at large. The transformation unfolding before us presents a remarkable panorama of opportunities, yet it also carries with it the potential for disruption, hence the mixed feelings.
1. The Reign of R&D (1970-2015): There was a time when the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) held the reins. The focus was almost exclusively on Research and Development (R&D), with the power of the CTO often towering over the innovative impulses of the organization. Technology drove progress, but a tech-exclusive vision could sometimes be a hidden pitfall.
2. Era of Innovation Management (1990-2001): A shift towards understanding innovation as a strategic force began to emerge in the ’90s. The concept of managing innovation, previously only a flicker in the business landscape, began its journey towards being a guiding light. Pioneers like Christensen brought innovation into the educational mainstream, marking a paradigm shift in the mindsets of future business leaders.
3. Business Models & Customer Experience (2001-2008): The millennium ushered in an era where simply possessing superior technology wasn’t a winning card anymore. Process refinement, service quality, and most critically, innovative business models became the new mantra. Firms like Microsoft demonstrated this shift, evolving their strategies to stay competitive in this new game.
4. Ecosystems & Platforms (2008-2018): This phase saw the rise of ecosystems and platforms, representing a shift from isolated competition to interconnected collaboration. The lines that once defined industries began to blur. Companies from emerging markets, particularly China, became global players, and we saw industries morphing and intermingling. Case in point: was it still the automotive industry, or had the mobility industry arrived?
5. Corporate Transformation (2019-2025): With the onslaught of digital technologies, corporations faced the need to transform from within. Technological adoption wasn’t a mere surface-level change anymore; it demanded a thorough, comprehensive rethinking of strategies, structures, and processes. Anything less was simply insufficient to weather the storm of this digital revolution.
6. Comborg Transformation (2025-??): As we gaze into the future, the ‘Comborg’ era comes into view. This era sees organizations fusing human elements and digital capabilities into a harmonious whole. In this stage, the equilibrium between human creativity and AI-driven efficiency will be crucial, an exciting but challenging frontier to explore.
I believe that revisiting this timeline of innovation’s evolution highlights the remarkable journey we’ve undertaken. As we now figure out the role of AI in innovation and business, it’s an exciting but also challenging time. Even though it can be a bit scary, I believe we can create a successful future if we use AI in a responsible and thoughtful way.
Image Credit: Stefan Lindegaard, Unsplash
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Innovations don’t have to be complicated to be impactful. They just need to deliver enough additional value that existing solutions become widely replaced, or flipped around, for the new solution to be widely adopted.
Recently I have been seeing a new simple, yet elegant, solution driving around the streets of Seattle.
It’s pictured in the photo above and it is quite simply the delivery of a temporary license for a newly purchased vehicle that can be printed and installed in a license plate holder in the same way that the eventual traditional license plate will be.
Now, perhaps your state or country already has this, but for me, every vehicle I have ever purchased was instantly defiled by a piece of paper and tape or tape residue that could be difficult remove after a couple months baking in the sun (especially in the summer).
This instant cheapening of a brand new vehicle is now a thing of the past!
Some may say that this is not really that big of a deal because you’re just moving the temporary registration from the back window to now live in the license plate frame, but there are several tangible benefits for multiple parties from this seemingly small change:
Car Owner – improved aesthetics – the car just looks better!
Car Owner – improved safety from increased visibility while driving
State and Car Owner – increased toll revenue so everyone is paying their fair share
Car Owner – improved safety – easier to identify hit and run drivers
Police – improved safety – easier to identify vehicle during traffic stops
Car Owner – improved convenience – easier to quickly find license number when it’s requested
What is your favorite simple innovation that you’ve seen or experienced recently?
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Throughout America’s history, technological innovation has been key to security and prosperity. Whether it was through entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Thomas Watson, or government programs like the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program and the Human Genome Project, The United States has been on the cutting edge.
Today, as we enter a new era of innovation, America remains at the forefront of scientific discoveries in advanced areas such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, new computing architectures and materials science. Continued investment in science, both public and private, provides the “seed corn” for continued dominance in the 21st century.
Still, scientific advancement is not enough. We need entrepreneurs to start companies and mid-level technicians and engineers to implement technologies. The truth is that America’s human capital is being hollowed out and that’s becoming a serious problem that we need to address. Once we lose our competitive edge, we might never get it back.
1. Food Insecurity
Awhile back I was speaking to a group of community college administrators and I asked them what their biggest challenge was. I was shocked when every single one of them told me that it was food insecurity. Apparently, it is the number one reason that kids drop out. Only about 20% of students at community colleges earn a degree.
I was even more surprised that there are similar trends at four-year institutions. In fact, a study found that about half of all college students struggle with food insecurity. This number becomes even harder to stomach when you consider that there is also an unprecedented construction boom on college campuses.
So colleges are spending billions to build fancy dorms and rec centers while half of their students don’t have enough to eat. Is it any wonder that they are dropping out? In Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil points out that much of university spending is driven by college rankings like those published by US News & World Report. Maybe a “food insecurity index” should be included?
Any way you look at it, we are undermining a significant portion of our most ambitious young people because we can’t provide them with enough to eat. How can we expect to win the future when kids are dropping out of school to get a meal?
2. Tuition And Student Loans
One of the most important factors that led to American technological and economic dominance has been our commitment to higher education. The Morrill Acts in the 19th century created land grant universities that trained students in agriculture and engineering in every state. Later, the G.I. Bill helped an entire generation go to college and became the basis for a new era of prosperity.
This commitment to education made America the most educated country in the world. More recently, however, we’ve fallen to fifth among OECD countries for post-secondary education. This hasn’t been because less Americans are going to college, in fact, more people go to college today than in 2000. It’s just that the rest of the world is moving faster than we are.
A big factor in our decline has been tuition, which has risen from an average of $15,160 in 1988 to 34,740 in 2018. Not surprisingly, student debt is exploding. It has nearly tripled in the last decade. In fact student debt has become so onerous that it now takes about 20 years to pay off four years for college and even more to pursue a graduate degree.
So the bright young people who we don’t starve we are condemning to decades of what is essentially indentured servitude. That’s no way to run an entrepreneurial economy. In fact, a study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that student debt has a measurable negative impact on new business creation.
3. A Broken Healthcare System
There has long been a political debate about whether health care is a right or not and there are certainly moral issues that deserve attention. When I travel internationally, it is not uncommon for people to comment on how barbaric they find our healthcare system, where the uninsured die from treatable diseases and many go bankrupt due to medical costs.
Leaving the moral concerns aside though, our healthcare system represents a huge economic burden. Consider that in the US healthcare expenditures account for roughly 18% of GDP. Most countries in the OECD spend roughly half that. To add insult to injury, healthcare outcomes in the US are generally worse than the OECD average. In fact, the CDC reports that life expectancy is actually declining in America.
Think about trying to run a business that not only produces an inferior product, but also gives up 9 points of margin due to higher costs. Clearly that’s untenable. A study in the Journal of Health Economics also found that, much like student debt, concerns about health insurance inhibits entrepreneurship.
It’s important to note that each of these are uniquely American problems. No other developed country has the same issues with healthcare or student debt. While food insecurity is an issue in some developed countries, it is far more severe in the US. All of this represents a significant competitive disadvantage.
There’s Plenty Of People At The Bottom
Far too often, we see innovation as strictly a matter of startup companies and R&D labs. So we invest in science and entrepreneurship programs to fuel technology. Yet while those things are surely important, they don’t drive advancement by themselves. We need normal, everyday people to make the most out of their potential.
As I explained in Mapping Innovation, developing breakthrough technologies is a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. The transformational part is often overlooked, because it relies not on a single entrepreneur or company, but on an ecosystem to support it. That takes networks of firms working together, each forming a piece of the overall puzzle.
Most of these companies are not household names. They supply components, implement solutions, create complementary goods and so on. Many are small businesses. We need not only geniuses to create the future, but also technicians, consultants and service providers.
In 1959 the physicist Richard Feynman gave a famous talk titled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom to alert the scientific community to the possibilities of nanotechnology. I think the same can be said of innovation in America today. Our most valuable resource is our human capital. If we can’t feed, educate and nurture that talent, our future will not be bright.
There’s plenty of people at the bottom with almost limitless potential to increase our national capacity for prosperity, security and well being. Yet instead of empowering them, we undermining them and, in doing so, assuring our own decline.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and an earlier version appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Pixabay
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
If I asked you whether something was possible, your answer would probably be based on your understanding of our current technologies and capabilities.
An electric car? Sure.
Finding a restaurant using your phone? No doubt.
Teleportation Star Trek style? No.
But that’s not how an innovator thinks about what’s possible. For them, it’s an entirely different question. The notion of what’s possible can have two quite different meanings. One that favors innovation and one that resists it.
If you asked someone living in the 19th century whether powered controlled flight was possible, or whether communicating through the air was possible, they would have said, No. And yet people like Marconi and the Wright Brothers set out to invent those technologies because they believed it was possible—if they could figure out how. So, there are these two very different ways of thinking about what’s possible.
The first answers the question: Can we go do that?
The second answers the question: Could we do that if we can figure out how?
Based on the first definition, teleportation is clearly impossible. But based on the second definition, it’s an open question. We don’t know, and we won’t know, until someone figures out how to do it. The fact that we haven’t figured that out yet, doesn’t mean we won’t or can’t.
We now know that for powered controlled flight, the answer to both questions is: Yes. It’s possible now; and it’s always been possible in the sense that the rules of the universe permit it.
No doubt many things are possible that we can’t yet do. That’s true of our technologies, and it’s true in your life. When you think like an innovator—with an Innovator Mindset—you believe all sorts of things are possible. And those beliefs are what prompt you to pursue all those amazing possibilities.
Here is a video version of this post:
Image Credit: Unsplash
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
On this Veterans Day I send my thanks to all of my fellow veterans for the sacrifices they and their families have made in support of the great nations of the world. Military science has long been a source of innovation that goes beyond the defense of a population. From duct tape, GPS, jet engines and the Internet to nuclear power, sanitary napkins and digital photography, there is an endless list of innovations that owe their existence to investments in military research.
Innovation has always been fueled by exceptional ideas that push the boundaries of what is possible. Some of the most groundbreaking inventions in history have originated from the most unexpected sources, proving that inspiration knows no boundaries. One such remarkable innovation that emerged from the realm of dreams is the M9 Gun Director, a groundbreaking concept envisioned by David Parkinson. Today, we explore the fascinating story of how an ordinary dream sparked an extraordinary revolution in military technology.
Dreams have long been a source of fascination for humanity, acting as the gateway to our subconscious minds, guiding our creativity and problem-solving abilities. Great minds throughout history, from Albert Einstein to Nikola Tesla, have attested to the transformative power of dreams shaping their inventions and discoveries. In the case of David Parkinson, the M9 Gun Director serves as a testament to the astounding potential that lies within our dreams.
The Birth of a Revolutionary Concept
In 1895, Parkinson, a modest engineer by profession, experienced a vivid dream that would forever change the world of military technology. In this dream, he envisioned a device capable of automatically predicting and adjusting the trajectory of a gun, enabling unparalleled precision in aiming and firing. This visionary concept would ultimately become the foundation for the M9 Gun Director and revolutionize artillery warfare as we knew it.
Pursuing the Unconventional
David Parkinson, driven by an insatiable curiosity and an unwavering belief in his dream, embarked on a journey to transform this abstract idea into a tangible reality. Despite facing skepticism and opposition, Parkinson remained undeterred, recognizing the immense potential in his concept. He tirelessly invested his time in research, experimentation, and collaboration, all the while fueled by the hope of revolutionizing military technology.
Bringing Dreams to Life
After years of relentless persistence, Parkinson succeeded in developing a prototype that embodied his vision of the M9 Gun Director. It incorporated advanced mechanisms, including gears, gyroscopes, and other innovative technologies, to predict and adjust artillery gun trajectories with remarkable accuracy. This revolutionary innovation significantly enhanced the efficiency, precision, and destructive power of artillery systems, forever changing the course of warfare worldwide.
Implications and Significance
The advent of the M9 Gun Director marked a turning point in military history, fundamentally altering the dynamics of armed conflict. By harnessing the power of dream-inspired innovation, Parkinson had unlocked a whole new level of precision previously unimaginable in the realm of artillery. This groundbreaking invention significantly reduced casualties, transformed strategic planning, and tilted the balance of power on the battlefield.
Embracing the Power of Dreams
The story of David Parkinson and the M9 Gun Director serves as a testament to the incredible creative potential that lies within each of us. It encourages us to embrace the unexplored territories of our dreams, recognizing them not just as fleeting nocturnal experiences, but as wellsprings of unmatched inspiration. Who knows what other world-changing ideas are waiting to be unleashed from within our subconscious minds?
Image credits: Pixabay
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Unhappy: When you want things to be different than they are. Happy: When you accept things as they are.
Sad: When you fixate on times when things turned out differently than you wanted. Neutral: When you know you have little control over how things will turn out. Anxious: When you fixate on times when things might turn out differently than you want.
Stressed: When you think you have control over how things will turn out. Relaxed: When you know you don’t have control over how things will turn out.
Agitated: When you live in the future. Calm: When you live in the present. Sad: When you live in the past.
Angry: When you expect a just world, but it isn’t. Neutral: When you expect that it could be a just world, but likely isn’t. Happy: When you know it doesn’t matter if the world is just.
Angry: When others don’t meet your expectations. Neutral: When you know your expectations are about you. Happy: When you have no expectations.
Timid: When you think people will judge you negatively. Neutral: When you think people may judge you negatively or positively. Happy: When you know what people think about you is none of your business.
Distracted: When you live in the past or future. Focused: When you live in the now.
Afraid of change: When you think all things are static. Accepting change: When you know all things are dynamic.
Intimidated: When you think you don’t meet someone’s expectations. Confident: When you know you did your best.
Uncomfortable: When you want things to be different than they are. Comfortable: When you know the Universe doesn’t care what you think.
Image credit: Pexels
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
November 10, 2023 from 8:30-11:30 AM in Issaquah, WA
Wow! Crazy news!
In honor of Veterans Day I will be giving away up to 20 copies of my bestselling book Charting Change at the East Lake Sammamish Starbucks tomorrow, November 10, 2023 from 8:30am-11:30am until the last copy in the box is gone. That’s about $1,000 worth of books.
Usually people give Veteran’s like me a thank you offer. But, I thought I would flip it around to help spread the benefits of the human-centered change methodology even farther and wider for the benefit of non-profit, for-profit and governmental organizations looking to plan and execute transformations and change initiatives.
Here is a map of the Starbucks location where I will be giving away the books:
I created the Human-Centered Change methodology to help organizations get everyone literally all on the same page for change. The 70+ visual, collaborative tools are introduced in my book Charting Change, including the powerful Change Planning Canvas™. The toolkit has been created to help organizations:
Beat the 70% failure rate for change programs
Quickly visualize, plan and execute change efforts
Deliver projects and change efforts on time
Accelerate implementation and adoption
Get valuable tools for a low investment
REMINDER: I will be at this Starbucks from 8:30am-11:30am or until the twenty (20) books are gone ($49.99 retail value each).
SPECIAL BONUS: Whether you stop by to grab a copy of the book, or already have one, anyone who stops by and leaves their business card or email address will be entered into a drawing to win one of two (2) LIFETIME Change Planning Toolkit™ licenses (a $36,999 value with a discounted retail price of $999.99/each).
Additional reminder: Everyone can download ten free tools from the Human-Centered Change methodology by going to its page on this site via the link in this sentence, and book buyers can get 26 of the 70+ tools from the Change Planning Toolkit (including the Change Planning Canvas™) by contacting me with proof of purchase. Annual toolkit licenses are available for as little as $99.99/year (there are site/city/state/country licenses as well).
One of the more enjoyable activities in my life is playing hockey. When I’m in town – not out speaking at conferences – I lace up the skates several times a week to play in a friendly hockey game. In close games, when my team is up by one or two goals, I remember my school days when our coaches encouraged us to continue playing to score, even when we were winning, versus switching to more defensive play to prevent the other team from scoring.
So, what does this have to do with business, specifically customer service and CX? Plenty!
In any team sport, the goal is to win. In the customer service world, we should create a “game plan” to deliver an experience that is perfect, never requiring a customer to reach out to us because of problems. Consider what Jeff Bezos of Amazon said many years ago: “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.” That’s a perfect example of playing to win.
But that doesn’t always work. Bezos quickly discovered that as perfect as Amazon might be, once the package left the warehouse, control was in the hands of delivery companies such as the USPS, FedEx, or UPS. If there was a delivery problem, even if it wasn’t Amazon’s fault, the customer still called Amazon.
That’s where Amazon learned to play great defense, typically managing complaints or issues so well that the company has earned a reputation for amazing customer service. And they still play to win. They continue to open more distribution sites and grow their fleet of airplanes and vehicles to manage the entire experience, so they don’t have to rely on outside vendors as much. And as perfect as they try to be, there will still be problems, so a good defense, as in a good customer service experience, supports the effort to win.
While we can’t all be Amazon, we can play a similar game. We need defense, which is the ability to respond to our customers’ questions, problems, needs, and complaints in a way that renews confidence for them to continue doing business with us. However, we must also play to win, which means continuously improving the customer experience, including eliminating or mitigating any of those customer issues.
In the customer service world, playing to win in customer service means eliminating the reasons customers call us for problems and complaints. Playing defense is focusing on being good at handling our customers’ problems or complaints. We need to be good at both.
Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Pexels
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Our world requires collaboration. Just about every job now requires collaborating on teams and every employee’s calendar is full of evidence of collaboration. In one study, up to 85% of participants’ work weeks were spent working in direct collaboration or a result of collaboration with a team.
But it can be difficult to collaborate with people whose perspectives, preferences, and personalities are different from our own. Still, getting what you want from your work and career requires being a great team player. And if you want to be a leader, you’ll need to be a great team player first. (And really…that will never stop…even leaders often lead in teams.)
In this article, we’ll outline the five (5) essential qualities needed to become a great team player—and offer a few ways to develop those qualities and get them noticed.
1. Capable
The first quality is that great team players are capable. This is a fundamental quality of anyone working, really. You must have the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities to do the tasks being asked of you. But on teams, it’s just as important to be seen as capable by the other members of your team. The team needs to know they can rely on you—and that when you say you’ll have something completed it will be completed on time and as you said.
Working with teams, the way you demonstrate your capability is two-fold: Do what you say you’re going to do, and don’t say something you don’t know to be true. Over time, keeping these two commitments will demonstrate that you can be relied on—because you are capable.
2. Humble
The second quality is that great team players are humble. While great team players are capable, they also don’t think too highly of the skills and knowledge they have. Great team players don’t think little of themselves, they just understand that the needs of the team come before their own. Humble teammates aren’t fighting for their ideas to be heard all the time or seeking to dominate in debates. Instead, they use their voice to amplify others and contribute the bigger, team-wide wins.
Working with teams, humility is often inferred based on behavior in meetings, whether in-person or virtual. Humble teammates aren’t trying to be the lead role in the meeting, instead they’re often acting as a facilitator ensuring every teammate has a chance to speak. And when they do speak, it’s often to build upon others’ ideas instead of constantly insisting on their own.
3. Helpful
The third quality is that great team players are helpful. The best way to put capabilities and humility into practice is by helping others on the team—not constantly trying to convince others to help you. Great team players are the ones in meetings thinking about what they can contribute and how they can help others get unstuck. At the same time, it’s important to be careful not to over-help and lose the needed time to complete your own commitments.
Working with teams, the easiest way to assess your helpfulness is to audit your calendar. Look at everything scheduled on your calendar last week and compared the appointments that furthered your personal goals versus the appointments that helped others hit their goals. You don’t want helpful appointments to dominate, or even be half and half. But if 25 percent of your calendar is spent helping others, then it’s a safe assumption that they see you as helpful.
4. Flexible
The fourth quality is that great team players are flexible. As teams work to complete projects, changes will happen—pivots are required. All work requires flexibility. But often in the face of change many people respond by becoming more stubborn and insisting even more on their original ideas or plan of action. Great team players serve the team by reading the changes in the environment and helping the plan pivot quickly.
Working with teams, the most common changes that require flexibility often happen around priorities. New tasks get added to the team’s list, or environmental changes reshuffle what is urgent. When that happens, taking the lead to check-in with the team and discuss how changes affect priorities can keep the team more productive and keep you seen as a flexible, but high performer.
5. Purposeful
The fifth quality is that great team players are purposeful. All great teams have a sense of purpose behind their work—they know why their work matters and that keeps them bonded together and motivated to achieve more. Great team players amplify this purpose by becoming a source of supporting stories and constant reminders about that purpose. This includes not just talking about why the work that team does matters, but also how it fits into the larger mission or vision of the organization and why that matters.
Working with teams, the easiest way to reinforce purpose is to share gratitude on a regular basis. But not just any old thank you note. Purposeful gratitude expresses appreciation for the effort someone else put in, but also includes a reminder of how that effort helped serve the purpose of the team. Regularly done, it not only builds camaraderie amongst the team, but it also enhances motivation.
As you review this list, one or two qualities probably stood out as ones you already embodied—but one or two probably stood out as ones you need to work on. That’s true for nearly everyone, and it creates a great plan of action. Get started improving where you need to—and get started getting noticed where you already shine. That will help you not only raise your own performance, but help support everyone else on the team as they do their best work ever.
It’s great to have an excuse to post an Eddie Van Halen video to the innovation community. It’s of course fun just to watch Eddie, but I also have a deeper, innovation relevant reason for doing so.
Art & Science: I’m a passionate believer in cross-pollination between art and science. And I especially believe we can learn a great deal from artists and musicians like Eddie who have innovated consistently over a career. Dig into their processes, and we see serial innovators like The Beatles, Picasso, Elton John, Bowie, George Martin, Freddie Mercury, William Gibson, Lady Gaga, Paul Simon and so many others apply techniques that are highly applicable to all innovation fields. Techniques such as analogy, conceptual blending, collaboration, reapplication, boundary stretching, risk taking, learning from failure and T-Shaped innovation all crop up fairly consistently. And these creative approaches are typically also built upon deep expertise, passion, motivation, and an ability to connect with future consumer needs, and to tap into early adopters and passionate consumers. For me at least, that’s a pretty good innovation toolkit for innovation in any field. Now, to be fair, often their process is intuitive, and many truly prolific artists are lucky enough to automatically and intuitively ‘think that way’. But understanding and then stealing some of their techniques, either implicit or explicit, can be a great way to both jump-start our own innovative processes, and also to understand how innovation works. As Picasso said, ‘great artists steal’, but I’d argue that so do good innovators, at least within the bounds allowed by the patent literature!
In the past I’ve written quite a lot about Picasso and The Beatles use of conceptual blending, Paul Simon’s analogies, reapplication and collaboration, Bowie’s innovative courage, and William Gibson’s ability to project s-curves. Today, I’d like to to focus on some insights I see in the guitar innovations of Eddie.
(a) Parallel or Simultaneous Innovation. I suspect this is one of the most important yet under-appreciated concepts in innovation today. Virtually every innovation is built upon the shoulders of giants. Past innovations provide the foundation for future ones, to the point where once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, many innovations become inevitable. It still takes an agile and creative mind to come up with innovative ideas, but contemporary innovations often set the stage for the next leap forward. And this applies both to the innovative process, and also to a customers ability to understand and embrace it. The design of the first skyscraper was innovative, but it was made a lot more obvious by the construction of the Eiffel Tower. The ubiquitous mobile phone may now seem obvious, but it owes its existence to a very long list of enabling technologies that paved the way for it’s invention, from electricity to chips to Wi-Fi, etc.
The outcome of this ‘stage setting’ is that often even really big innovations occur simultaneously yet independently. We’ve seen this play out with calculus (independently developed by Newton and Leibnitz), the atomic bomb, where Oppenheimer and company only just beat the Nazi’s, the theory of evolution, the invention of the thermometer, nylon and so many others. We even see it in evolution, where scavenger birds vultures and condors superficially appear quite similar due to adaptations that allow them to eat carrion, but actually have quite different genetic lineages. Similarly many marsupials look very similar to placental mammals that fill similar ecological niches, but typically evolved independently. Context has a huge impact on innovation, and similar contexts typical create parallel, and often similar innovations. As the world becomes more interconnected, and context becomes more homogenized, we are going to see more and more examples of simultaneous innovation.
Faster and More Competitive Innovation: Today social media, search technology and the web mean that more people know more of the same ‘stuff’ more quickly than before. This near instantaneous and democratized access to the latest knowledge sets the scene and context for a next generation of innovation that is faster and more competitive than we’ve ever seen. More people have access to the pieces of the puzzle far more quickly than ever before; background information that acts as a precursor for the next innovative leap. Eddie had to go and watch Jimmy Paige live and in person to get his inspiration for ‘tapping’. Today he, and a few million others would simply need to go onto YouTube. He therefore discovered Paige’s hammer-on years after Paige started using them. Today it would likely be days. That acceleration of ‘innovation context’ has a couple of major implications:
1. If you think you’ve just come up with something new, it’s more than likely that several other people have too, or will do so very soon. More than ever before you are more than likely in a race from the moment you have an idea! So snooze and you loose. Assume several others are working on the same idea.
2. Regulating Innovation is becoming really, really difficult. I think this is possibly the most profound implication. For example, a very current and somewhat contentious topic today is if and how we should regulate AI. And it’s a pretty big decision. We really don’t know how AI will evolve, but it is certainly moving very quickly, and comes with the potential for earthshaking pros and cons. It is also almost inevitably subject to simultaneous invention. So many people are working on it, and so much adjacent innovation is occurring, that it’s somewhat unlikely that any single group is going to get very far out in front. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and the race is on. The issue for regulation then becomes painfully obvious. Unless we can somehow implement universal regulation, then any regulations simply slow down those who follow the rules. This unfortunately opens the doors to bad actors taking the lead, and controlling potentially devastating technology.
So we are somewhat damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. If we don’t regulate, then we run the risk of potentially dangerous technology getting out of control. But if do regulate, we run the risk of enabling bad actors to own that dangerous technology. We’ve of course been here before. The race for the nuclear bomb between the Allies and the Nazi’s was a great example of simultaneous innovation with potentially catastrophic outcomes. Imagine if we’d decided fission was simply too dangerous, and regulated it’s development to the point where the Nazi’s had got there first. We’d likely be living in a very different world today! Much like AI, it was a tough decision, as without regulation, there was a small but possible scenario where the outcome could have been devastating.
Today we have a raft of rapidly evolving technologies that I’d both love to regulate, but am also profoundly worried about the unintended consequences of doing so. AI of course, but also genetic engineering, gene manipulating medicines, even climate mediation and behavioral science! With respect to the latter, the better we get at nudging behavior, and the more reach we have with those techniques, the more dangerous miss-use becomes.
The core problem underlying all of this is that we are human. Most people try to do the right thing, but there are always bad actors. And even those trying to do the right thing all too often get it wrong. And the more democratized access to cutting edge insight becomes, parallel innovation means the more contenders we have for mistakes and bad bad choices, intentional or unintentional.
(b) Innovation versus Invention: A less dramatic, but I think similarly interesting insight we can draw from Eddie lies in the difference between innovation and invention He certainly wasn’t the first guitarist to use the tapping technique. That goes back centuries! At least as far as classical composer Paganini, and it was a required technique for playing the Chapman stick in the 1970’s, popularized by the great Tony Levin in King Crimson. It was also widely, albeit sparingly (and often obscurely) used by jazz guitarists in the 1950’s and 60’s. But Eddie was the first to feature it, and turn it into a meaningful innovation in of itself. Until him, nobody had packaged the technique in a way that it could be ‘marketed’ and ‘sold’ as a viable product. He found the killer application, made it his own, and made it a ‘thing’. I would therefore argue that he wasn’t the inventor, but he was the ‘innovator’. This points to the value of innovation over invention. If you don’t have the capability or the partners to turn an invention into something useful, its still just an idea. Invention is a critical part of the broader innovation process, but in isolation it’s more curiosity than useful. Innovation is about reduction to practice and communication as well a great ideas
Art & science: I love the arts. I play guitar, paint, and photograph. It’s a lot of fun, and provides a invaluable outlet from the stresses involved in business and innovation. But as I suggested at the beginning, a lot of the boundaries we place between art and science, and by extension business, are artificial and counter-productive. Some of my most productive collaborations as a scientist have been with designers and artists. As a visual scientist, I’ve found that artists often intuitively have a command of attentional insights that our cutting edge science is still trying to understand. It’s a lot of fun to watch Eddie Van Halen, but learning from great artists like him can, via analogy, also be surprisingly insightful and instructive.
Image credits: Unsplash
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
