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Is Innovation the Most Abused Word In Business?
dcblogs writes "Most of what is called innovation today is mere distraction, according to a paper by economist Robert Gordon, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Real innovations involve things like the combustion engine or air conditioning, not the smartphone. The paper includes thought experiments to help you gain more respect for genuine innovations such as indoor plumbing. The Financial Times has posted the complete 25-page paper.(pdf)"
An innovation can be as small as a neat new way of handling some user interaction which nobody has done before or a heuristic which solves a hard problem but at the same time people from buisness or management backgrounds or courses do set an insanely low bar for what they consider "innovation".
If you were to believe buisness grads then "innovation" includes their "ideas" along the lines of "a website like *only better*" or "that thing which everyone is already doing but which I think is my neat new idea"
I'm sure that people understand that innovation isn't a black and white thing, and that some things are more innovative than others. Hence "the best thing since sliced bread" - i.e., something can be innovative but not as innovative as something else.
In the long term, something is innovative if we cannot live our daily lives without it. For example - indoor plumbing, light bulbs. In terms of always available communication the mobile phone was completely innovative. And the smartphone merely enhanced that and merged in myriad other devices into the single unit. A total innovation in itself, and making that conglomeration of functionalities usable in itself is clearly an innovation.
But maybe not as innovative as pre-sliced bread.
(note, I don't actually think that pre-sliced bread is that innovative, but maybe the means by which it can be pre-sliced and then not go solid or stale quickly is.)
Not only in business, also in science: I read that we make so many new discoveries nowadays, but how many of those are fundamental? OK, the exoplanets and elementary particles are important, but most of the "discoveries" I read about are ridiculous.
I agree - there's a difference between innovation and incremental improvements.
Thank you, thank you for this sober speech on the real reason on why our economy is fucked up.
I hate when trivial work is presented, and, you state the obvious, then you get the reply: " Sometimes simple things just work out, look at facebook!!" , this is wrong, people just want to innovate with low effort and risk and with the current technology rhythm you can just give a shot now and then on simple things until one enters the stream.
Innovation is a good contender, though it's got to be "plan". Some of the chaps in my department spout the term but quite frankly they couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag. Hurrah for being a civil servant...
The amount of new business/marketing speak that comes out of the U.S.A. is very innovative.
Reach out to instead of contact is the thing that bugs me right now.
George Carlin had a whole wonderful bit about this - "You will not hear me say: bottom line, game plan, role model, scenario, or hopefully."
http://www.iceboxman.com/carlin/pael.php
It's 'Syngergy', along with maybe 'Wellness'.
And why are salesmen now called 'Sales Executives'?
ARRGGHHHH!!
you're also forgetting that MBA's and Financial People use "Innovation" all the time to take funds from people and transform them into vapor.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"Innovation" is a favorite term of patent trolls and other technovultures to describe nebulous ideas as patentable products that are nothing more than vaporware.
Of course, the list of engineering carrion-feeders is long and distinguished. You can be a Fortune 100 company and still be a patent troll from the standpoint of registering ethereal brain-farts as IP.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Rounded corners FTW!
No sig today...
The most abused word in business has to be the word "invest".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From the end of the 15th page:
> And in 1981, in the most famous of these ill-fated quotes, Bill Gates himself said in defense of the capacity of the first floppy disks, "640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anyone."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_ begs to disagree.
Really, it's an euphemism for "invention", but used to describe things that do not qualify for patents.
What should be said in its place is "improvement", "engineering" and anything done by "knowledge workers".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The iPad is about as innovative as the toaster. You can still read books without an iPad, and you can still toast bread without a toaster.
- wrong from the very first sentence.
The innovation here was not specifically the function of the device, the innovation was the ability of the company to present a new type of product that delivers functionality in a way that people feel is better, that is all.
Innovation does not have to be invention. Those are separate, different words.
Innovation CAN be something simple, it can be simply a better EXECUTION of the same thing as before, but done more efficiently, cheaper, faster, prettier even.
Innovation does not mean 'revolution', it should means 'better' for some purpose.
You can't handle the truth.
in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8
Whether or not the word "innovation" has become the most abused word in the business context, that remains to be seen
On the other hand, "innovation" itself has been abused by the patent trolls
Innovators and inventors nowadays often find themselves in between a rock and a very hard place
On one hand, they can get sued by patent trolls if they put their innovation to good use
On the other hand, many of the innovators' livelihood depends on their ability to invent, to innovate, to create new things
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And the poster even gets it wrong. "Real innovations involve things like the combustion engine or air conditioning, not the smartphone." No these are real inventions (and even the smart phone was an initially an invention)
From dictionary.com first definition of each word
Invent - verb - to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity, experimentation, or contrivance
Innovate - verb - to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.
This analysis smacks of looking back at tech history through a biased lens. Those innovations cited did not appear fully formed but evolved from simpler forms. I think it is quite silly and unimaginative to call a computer you can put in your pocket - and just incidentally make phone calls with - which by itself is more powerful than all the computers in the world just a few decades ago not an innovation.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
When they say: "We're comitted to..... blah blah...."
Have business stopped using the word "Solutions"? If not... I vote for that word. I'd be willing to bet that the only solution ever accurately received from a Solutions Provider has been a cup of sugary coffee.
A rectangular phone/tablet with rounded corners!
The "innovation" word has certainly been abused in business contexts. However, to assert that it is the most abused word is less clear. After all, competition for that accolade (in a manner of speaking) is fairly stiff. There are many words from the MBA lexicon with even greater claim, such as leverage, incentivize, and similar linguistic horrors.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
SYNERGY? =)
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-07-20/
'Passion' is the most abused word. Don't tell people you are passionate - show them!!! I stare wordlessly at people who misuse the word passion for an inappropriate amount of time. Very quickly they realise what they have done wrong. Actually it works for all of the abused words. Innovation, solutions, synergy etc. Try it, it's fun.
The word "cool" constantly reinvents itself and surprisingly has failed to be used up. Cool is what sells. Pretty sure innovation is the same.
So don't try and tell me what cool is.
That's not cool.
Every little engineering detail in software or hardware now is a "technology". A new kind of button is a technology. Inverting the direction of scroll is a technology. Least squares optimization is a technology.
... "INN-O-VATE!"
It's not a good thing.
Proactive must be up there, and it makes me suicidal.
I think the last decade /has/ produced many big work advances. For example in the last couple of months at work I have: attended remote video meetings in Europe, the US and Africa without having travel or cause pollution, and opening up Africans to work on the same projects as us; routinely worked from home over fast broadband, reducing commuting and pollution massively; replaced all my books with Kindle pdfs, which give everyone on the planet access to everything ever written from their homes (which might be far from libraries, eg in Africa again); invested in funds spanning S America, China, Russia, Africa and the Middle East with a few mouse clicks; had purchases recommended to me my supermarket datamining that predicts what I want to buy and optimises its supply chains accordingly to massively reduce waste on shelves and in warehouses; rapid-prototyped my CAD designs; bought stuff made in China and distributed all over the world extremely cheaply and distributed via ebay; used wikipedia and social nets to find incredibly detailed infomration on everything I ever wanted to know, and to make contact with work collaborators for future projects all over the world. It's easy to forget that even in 2000 these were all just fantasies in Wired magazine. See Friendman's "The world is flat" for many more examples of how the IT revolution really has transformed how we work locally and internationally.
... "Success". Next is "successful people". There is an assumption that this is all about money. Of course for a business, it is. But for most people, once they have enough money to live comfortably (which the one percenters want to take from everyone for themselves), then what matters is happiness in life, such as family, and their art of living. Money is merely the means to get there because we have made that so.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Then again I think I agree with John Carmack that many managers and business heads think it means 20 cents.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Air conditioning and Indoor plumbing were both incremental improvements on shelter. The steam engine and internal combustion engine were just incremental improvements in power systems.
Flight was an incremental i improvement in transportation. We can go on forever. Nothing is innovative by this standard. The wheel? Come on. Someone innovated round rocks? Really. Sentient beings were just an incremental improvement over non-sentient beings.
I vote we remove the wold innovate from our vocabulary.
Ugh.
Apple sold multitasking as an innovation... nuff said
It's kind of ironic that the companies that talk about innovating the most are usually the companies that also internally stifle it the most. It is extremely hard to "innovate" with tight and usually colluding deadlines, little room for error and little breathing room from heavy-handed "auditing."
Coming up with new and cool ideas requires time and room for mistakes. These cost money. Bigger companies can't have that.
The rivets in airplanes are only now being partially replaced. This has always been a what the heck for me. The main difference between a jet in Mad Men and now is the smoking. All kinds of little things since 1960's air travel make it mostly safer such as the detection of wind shear but is almost nasty that a jet from 50 years ago could operate today almost unnoticed. There seems to be a cultural rejection of anything that is significantly better. One guy crudely glued a nosecone and tail onto his honda giving it an extremely low air resistance; resulting in something like doubling his mileage but it made my culturally tuned self cringe. How is it that even someone as techno desiring as myself would reject such a great improvement as weirdo? Keep in mind that this was crudely added on; not wind tunnel tested; or done by an artist. There was a huge amount of room for improvement yet no car manufacturer has run with it. Think of the early ugly honda hybrids with the covered rear tires. Again rejected. We should be clapping as these cars go by seeing that they literally improve our lives with less pollution and reliance on fossil fuels. But our sense of what is proper overrides this.
How can we possibly think outside the box when there is such a huge cultural pressure to conform at all costs? Even the people who generally think of themselves as non conformists fit into a few acceptable boxes of non conformity.
One of the solutions should be via money. Science degrees would be subsidized by those getting business degrees. Society could take a leap and say that scientists doing fundamental R&D don't pay income taxes.(Along with other tax benefits to R&D) That would then prove that we value innovation over say bankers and hedge fund managers.
That's right. I would say that the "smartphone" is an innovation. The iPhone 4 is not.
If you really want to see weaseling and lying in action - it's the word "reasonable". ,,, reasonable charges may apply
* Full-time employees and part-time employees may be required to work "reasonable" overtime and thereby qualify for overtime payments
*
* The service provider must provide reasonable levels of support after hours
It's the word for defining an undefined amout, that changes on whom is interpreting it and how they want the situation to pan out.
I honestly thought it was beaten into a bloody pulp and left in the corner to die a slow, painful death, was more accurate. Maybe I should patent, patents.. oh wait I think that was done already.
an economist writing a paper on technology, Innovation is an abused term all around. While the current smartphones might be more pervasive than innovative, they are being utilized and accommodated in more places. So in the end the application gatekeepers allow compatibility and I can do more on my phone than I ever could in the past. So is acceptance and exploitation of a technology, innovation?
-Xen
Cold hard statistics. Half of the average employee poll are of below average intelligence. And lets face it, people still in the central part of that bell curve arent all that great either.
People who are genuinely smart don't call themselves smart. People who genuinely innovate don't say they innovate. People who are experts in a field don't call themselves experts. They let their actions speak for themselves.
Stupid people, the pretenders who need to desperately justify their continued employment, use these words as a smokescreen.
It is a lesson of business. (I happen to be lucky and my management chain is pretty heavily weighted towards the wheat side, but I see chaff all over the place)
innovations involve things like the combustion engine or air conditioning
Pah. Obvious variations on the Carnot heat-engine cycle! As for indoor plumbing - that's just a small aqueduct with a lid and rounded corners!
Seriously, though, I think it's useful to have a word for "did not invent but turned into a practical and useful product". E.g. the first internal-combustion engine cars were not exactly user friendly - others adapted them for the mass-market. That takes the foresight to spot an invention with potential, a ton of cash to invest and a willingness to take risks.
The problem with the patent system is that only really works in a nostalgic fantasy world when an engineer declares "Gosh, I've just made an important discovery about thermodynamics - how do I share that with the scientific community without sacrificing my competitive edge in the steam engine market". It relies on the blunt instrument of the legal system to make tricky, subjective decisions on whether or not ideas are obvious, when even the experts in that field would probably argue.
If you could find a suitable genius polymath capable of making such judgements and prepared to work in a patent office, they'd probably get bored with all the bureaucracy and just sit there daydreaming about riding on the beams of light coming in through the window...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"Vehicles that can fly" is a pretty huge incremental step from "Vehicles that can't fly". It's a big leap like that which we tend to call "innovation". Little steps aren't innovation- even though they're often even more useful. The Wright Brother innovated when they managed to put together the first working aeroplane- but it wasn't all that useful. When someone took their plane and made minor incremental improvements to speed, durability, capacity, etc. they weren't innovating, but they did create something truly valuable. When Boeing made the Jumbo Jet it wasn't an "innovation" (it's just a bigger version of what they already built)- but it was damned clever and useful.
Nice words often gets abused.
Sometimes innovation has an important back-end to make that innovation sustainable/workable. Depositing checks via mobile camera, needs a lot of back-end support. Legacy back ends can be very difficult to innovate around, and that is "invisible" to the user.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Not only is innovation an abused word but so is engineer. I've seen positions for server, network, and desktop engineering. These are not engineering positions, they are implementation and configuration specialist positions. A true computer engineer is the one who designs and builds the microprocessors and motherboards and other associated components. A network engineer doesn't actually "engineer" anything, they implement and configure. These are sad and sorry times when we dilute the meaning of engineer to someone who has passed his or her MCSE, CCNP, etc. What about the masters and college grads with actual degrees in Engineering and have passed Professional Engineering exams? Those are the true engineers. We devalue these terms in the name of making some job look more exciting than it is or giving someone a fancy title instead of paying them the market wage. I have held a Desktop Support Engineer position and I steadfastly refused to call myself an engineer. Nope, I'm just simply Tier III support.
Banning another competitor from the entire market, now that's innovation!
In the words of Ron Burgundy,
"Stay classy, Apple."
Probably not. There are just too many other candidates.
But Apple tells me that a rectangle with round corners is "innovation"
The most abused word is "excitement" All press releases start with "We're excited to..."
I think, therefore you are.
After our recent out-sourced data-mining operation, our world-class Data Research team have concluded that "innovation" is not an overused word, phrase or best-practice.
... Microsoft was one of the worst offenders a decade or so ago. Microsoft used the term "innovation" as a cover-up for their stifling monopolistic-like practices in the PC world. "Innovation" in the 1990's is what got Microsoft where it is today - an aging, bloated, internally-conflicted organization.
Innovative is soooo early 2000s.
Gently reply
bingo!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Did this guy offer a clear definition of his conception of "economic growth"?
Without it, both he and his readers are wasting their time.
making a cell phone sized computer, and then locking it up so tight it barley resembles a computer and the user who pays for it barely owns it is hardly innovation...or is it? Depends on the goal.
I'm not quite seeing where the incremental difference between a horse (or a waterwheel) and a steam engine is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's how you made it fly.
Stick a rocket to the sides of a normal car, start the engine, fly.
Into a cliff, but fly nonetheless.
As my subject line says, Innovation is not the move abused word... however, Consumer, is the most abused word.... or was that the consumer is the most abused...?
Corporations may constantly, insistently and annoyingly claim that their products are innovative when clearly they are not but, for me, the word that is abused the most would also rank up there with most overused as well. I am referring to the word, experience.
During the last number of years, the word 'experience' has been popping every everywhere associating itself with products and corporations. Corporation XyZ no longer talks of quality products at a fair price but offer us an "XyZ experience." Customer service representatives are pleased to give us a great "XyZ experience" instead of courtesy, promptness and (above all) service.
Can the experience. Give me quality and fair prices along with prompt, courteous and effective customer service.
An innovation can be as small as a neat new way of handling some user interaction which nobody has done before or a heuristic which solves a hard problem but at the same time people from buisness or management backgrounds or courses do set an insanely low bar for what they consider "innovation".
If you were to believe buisness grads then "innovation" includes their "ideas" along the lines of "a website like *only better*" or "that thing which everyone is already doing but which I think is my neat new idea"
Or a pda with rounded corners, even if physically identical devices were shown in movies 25 years prior to the device being invented?
What is innovative shouldn't be relative in theory, but in practice it almost always is.
When people use the word innovative to describe something, it is based on their prior knowledge and insight. Joe-average may see some technology or device as innovative and requiring huge intellectual leaps, while Joe-tech may see the same technology as a minor incremental improvement or perhaps obvious.
The difference is that Joe-tech may have domain expertise in areas related to that technology and is aware of similar technologies that others in the field have created. Joe-tech may also see that the intellectual leaps needed to create this technology are really very small steps based on prior art and the fact that joe-tech is also skilled in the art.
This is no different than saying 'We sell the best _____ in the state of _____' . Whether or not the statement is true is impossible to prove, but people like to hear that sort of thing. So when you hear "We make the most innovative ___ because of our __buzzword__ strategy __buzzword___ __buzzword__', you think, wow, these guys must be pros. Abused suggests there's a victim, misuse suggests there's an idiot, which I think is more applicable to this sort of thing...
Buzzwords, the mantras of sinking ships. :(
Sorry for the cynical missive.
Is it the most abused word? Probably not.
But is it an abused word? Yes.
Every single big company claims they do it, but the closest thing we have to such is Apple stealing ideas from companies A and B and putting them together with rounded corners.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I think the point is more that someone didn't wake up one day and invent the steam engine out of thin air. What came to be known as the steam engine evolved slowly (over hundreds of years in the case of the steam engine) with incremental changes, not all at once.
Hollywood innovation: Making the same TV cop show they previously made, but set in another city.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Enron was voted the Most Innovative company several years in a row. Just before it went down the tubes.
I think strategy, strategic and empowerment are the most abused words in businessland.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I actually read the full 25 page paper, thus my late comment that will now be buried at the bottom of the heap. It was a fascinating perspective on the past millenium of human history -- I can't recall the last time I read a 25-page PDF word-for-word in one sitting. But in its stated goal of predicting "per capita output" of the "99%" for 2007-2100, it failed to consider three critical upcoming changes to human society.:
1. The Singularity. Estimates vary of when it will happen, centered on around 2050. Any forecast for 2007-2100 must account for the Singularity.
2. Population. The UN is forecasting "peak population" sometime during the coming century. By not taking into account population, the paper ignores the denominator of its thesis metric! As automation continues to replace human labor, it's possible that in the future, contrary to millenia past, population reduction may result in an increase of GDP per capita.
3. Sex. A combination of increasing wealth disparity and accelerating promiscuity will turn a greater share of the 99% into sex chattel to serve the 1%. The paper goes on and on about the "disgusting" work of shoveling horse excrement a century ago, but fails to consider the possibility that future work will be even more disgusting.
The overall irony here is that in this dystopia that I've painted here, that of human sex chattel and singularity robots serving the 1% with overall reduced population, the ratio GDP/capita might actually still be increasing. The paper author reveals a critical error in thinking when he writes, "By definition, whenever hours per capita decline, then output per capita must grow more slowly than productivity." That is certainly true in the Calculus "infentissimal" sense but ignores the possibility of the Singularity bringing exponential "output" that overwhelms a declining human population.
I just read his article - on a computer! How is that not innovative? Such a feat was all a person needed to get a high-tech job with super duper computer skills back in the late 90's.
.. is the most abused word... as was the word, "leverage" a few years ago.
Tablet, Smartphone, etc.. These are old ideas from sci fi, such as the pads in startrek. Even the touch mechanism was in there and the shape.. are they paying these scifi authors for use of this prior art?
Where's the innovation?
Or was exploding planes enough for someone skilled in the art of making planes enough to determine the need for rounding the corners.
Don't see too many companies bragging about being Industry Followers...
We endeavor to proactively re-engineer the market by innovating new paradigms and leveraging our core competencies.
Innovation is not the most overused term, it is the least achieved.
Perfect timing. Let us reflect on the Apple vs Samsung lawsuit. Are "rounded-corners" on a rectangular device truly "innovative"? Same can be said for certain other trivial "innovations" that a certain corporation with a fruit logo hold patents on.
Selecting the right ideas and integrating them into a single product/system so as to yield commercial/operational success is the tricky part.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
In my field the word "solutions" is by far the most abused word. Just last week I received an email from a supplier that literally used "solutions" 14 times in 12 sentences. It was so damn awkward to read! I counted them and pointed it out to him, but he thought I was just trying to be funny.
Once my boss spoke with another "solutions" abusing supplier on the telephone and began replacing it with "liquids" to see how long it would take to sink in. (Pun intended.) Sometimes when a potential supplier uses the word I ask what sort of viscosity can I expect from their solutions. The confused looks are priceless.
Past:
We sell RF connectors.
Present:
We sell RF connector solutions.
Most of the time the word isn't even necessary and makes more sense once omitted. The suppliers we trust most don't use the word.
why don't they just say "dumb terminal" instead ?
You're missing the big picture.
At the end of the day, the innovative synergy of cloud paradigms thinking outside the box right sizes the alignment to break through the clutter and diversify clear goals by leveraging facetime with generation X and empowering globalization and proactively streamline organic growth to a win-win exit strategy by collaborating on the back-end the convergence of emergent behavior of quantum nano-scale design patterns using real-time scalability using the SaaS cloud framework to create immersion in the workflow of mobile mashup for convergence with web 2.0 using html5 to clickthrough the information superhighway at 4g speeds.
As a philosophy major I have to nominate this word as the most abused word in business.
The fact that it is used in/by business at all is already an atrocity.
Google returns some gems:
"At Coldwell Banker Lunsford, our philosophy is simple. We bring people together. "
"Our Philosophy is that our first priority is to ensure the long-term health, wellbeing and longevity of your beloved pet through our superior and natural nutrition"
I'm not sure what these guys think "our philosophy" means ("our strategy"? "our adverrtising slogan"?) but they're pissing me off.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
In a world...yes...queue James Earl Jones or some other deep voiced character...where doing the "I'm crushing your head" motion on a phone is worth a billion dollars...yes I think that innovation is dead.
The innovation is in getting viewers to watch the same thing over and over again.
"Vehicles that can fly" is a pretty huge incremental step from "Vehicles that can't fly". It's a big leap like that which we tend to call "innovation". Little steps aren't innovation- even though they're often even more useful. The Wright Brother innovated when they managed to put together the first working aeroplane- but it wasn't all that useful. When someone took their plane and made minor incremental improvements to speed, durability, capacity, etc. they weren't innovating, but they did create something truly valuable. When Boeing made the Jumbo Jet it wasn't an "innovation" (it's just a bigger version of what they already built)- but it was damned clever and useful.
I'd have to disagree - the amount of engineering in both construction techniques, material sciences and management that went into the 747 really were 'innovative'. IMHO, a better definition would be that an innovative idea changes the industry (or field of science or whatever). The aforementioned changes in aircraft production for the 747 where innovative (as are the processes and problems that Boeing went through with the 787).
Adding an front camera to a cell phone might be innovative in that it changes how you use the device. Adding a 10 mp back camera (to replace the 8 mp camera) certainly isn't.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
An innovation can be
The summary isn't about the definition of "innovation" it's asking if it's the most-abused word in business, as the title states plainly. And according to the "Law", the answer is of course "no".
My vote is for "Leveraged".
Oh, what's that you say, the summary title isn't related to the article? "posted by samzenpus" Oh gee imagine that.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but I think the devaluation of language is a much bigger problem for a longer time. In my opinion this is the result of the marketing and advertising of the past 20 or so years.
The most abused phrase in business is "bottom line". I have an MBA but even I want to strangle people who focus on nothing but the bottom line thus repeating the phrase ad nauseum.
Any forecast for 2007-2100 must account for the Singularity.
This Singularity sounds more like theology than science/technology to me.
The moderator he marked my post overrated was certainly innovative. I appreciate all the responses. The point I was trying to make is the difference between innovationation and incremental improvement is a matter of perspective. Is indoor plumbing really an innovation versus the outhouse? The water pump moved from outside to inside, not really a BFD.
There was not a leap from the horse and buggy to the automobile. It took decades of small incremental improvements. The same is true for everything that people cite as innovations. The one thing they havei in common is that we are disconnected from the reality of the change. They all happened a long time ago.
If anything the FT piece abuses innovation in ways no MBA could begin to imagine.
The meaning of the word innovation is well defined. The fact that an economist writes as if he doesn't know the definition suggests that the usual definition is contested. I just don't know why he doesn't bring up this controversy, speculatively speaking of course.
This doesn't follow:
"That is certainly true in the Calculus "infentissimal" sense but ignores the possibility of the Singularity bringing exponential "output" that overwhelms a declining human population."
Exponential functions are differentiable.
When the president's daughter does a pie chart, it's innovative.
When some working schmuck figures a way to save the company millions on supplies, processing, and/or distribution - he's just done the job he's paid for. Nothing worth seeing here, just move along folks!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
http://imgur.com/bEokt
"Vehicles that can fly" is a pretty huge incremental step from "Vehicles that can't fly". It's a big leap like that which we tend to call "innovation". Little steps aren't innovation- even though they're often even more useful. The Wright Brother innovated when they managed to put together the first working aeroplane- but it wasn't all that useful. When someone took their plane and made minor incremental improvements to speed, durability, capacity, etc. they weren't innovating, but they did create something truly valuable. When Boeing made the Jumbo Jet it wasn't an "innovation" (it's just a bigger version of what they already built)- but it was damned clever and useful.
You, along with many others here, have confused Innovation with Invention. Invention is about creating something new, while innovation is about taking advantage of inventions. Inventors draw inspiration from the natural world, while innovators draw inspiration from inventors. In a certain sense, innovations are obvious by definition.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
All innovation is small incremental steps. You never go from horses directly to a Tesla Roadster.
When robots start doing work autonomously, output becomes decoupled from "hours per capita".
So "By definition, whenever hours per capita decline, then output per capita must grow more slowly than productivity" is true now, but won't be true once robots act more autonomously than they do now.
Oh, good, somebody else said it. Everything is "green" nowadays. Even college Blue Books are now called "Green Books". And because it's such a nebulous concept, nobody understands it. My boss one time bought a recycling bin and said he got it so we would "be green" and please our clients.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
What is innovative shouldn't be relative in theory, but in practice it almost always is.
When people use the word innovative to describe something, it is based on their prior knowledge and insight. Joe-average may see some technology or device as innovative and requiring huge intellectual leaps, while Joe-tech may see the same technology as a minor incremental improvement or perhaps obvious.
The difference is that Joe-tech may have domain expertise in areas related to that technology and is aware of similar technologies that others in the field have created. Joe-tech may also see that the intellectual leaps needed to create this technology are really very small steps based on prior art and the fact that joe-tech is also skilled in the art.
"I would say that the "smartphone" is an innovation."
Yes, I think the guy is a nutcase. I he thinks the ability to have access to the internet almost anywhere is not an innovation, he's got a screw loose.
Yeah, well I started overusing the word innovation before anybody else, so that makes me the most innovative!
(the most abused word on Slashdot)
Abused term. Anytime I hear someone use it in a meeting, I mentally tick off in my mind "yes this guy is an idiot. you don't have to bother paying to him anymore."
moving forward lets build a straw dog to produce syngistic outcomes using value added productivity using cloud. I murdered myself.
What came to be known as the steam engine evolved slowly (over hundreds of years in the case of the steam engine) with incremental changes, not all at once.
Thousands of years, not hundreds. With a very long period in the middle of little to no development, then a surge of development.
Agreed and even the "surge" spanned generations.
For Example Synergy Is an aspect when people working in a team or a group produce more then the sum of each person.
No, Synergy is a program that lets me run multiple computers with one keyboard & mouse. It's like a KVM switch without the switching -- Just move the mouse to a different screen and start typing (uses the network). With this program my productivity has increased 18% (Average of SLOC improvement and per feature implementation duration improvement). For me it's especially since I do many cross platform projects, so I can have each screen on a different OS instead of a single PC and dual booting rebooting (VMs are nice, but nothing beats bare metal for testing). I can copy something on the Linux screen and paste it into a text box on the Windows7 screen. I move my mouse and travels around the room waking up all my computers before landing on my TV w/ XBMC. The graphical front end for configuring screens is OK for most setups, but editing the single .conf on the server allows you to place the screens in any orientation you like, even non-euclidean (I have two screens above each other, but moving off the side of either jumps diagonally to a side screen).
I know this sounds "spammy", but I don't get paid to use their program, it's free and open source.
Now that I have experienced Synergy, I never want to go back. That other synergy you're talking about? No, that reduces my productivity because it requires more time for brain synchronization, and it's often faster to just do things myself: "In the time it took to make the technical design doc, or explain it to you, I could have implemented the damn thing." Screw that kind of synergy. It's necessary sometimes, but not usually beneficial, and certainly not as useful as the program by the same name. Bouncing ideas off each other for creative stuff like story lines or game mechanic ideas? Yeah that's really awesome, but I'd call that collaboration or brain storming not synergy.
I've been trying to abuse words for decades, yet they remain largely unaffected. My experiments have shown that it's not possible to abuse a word. The existence and wide spread use of buzzwords despite our disdain and hatred of them seems to agree with my findings.
sdfsdfsdf
So what your saying is your ancestors used to be sex slaves for Malthus, got paid jack shit and you're still pissed? No please tell me more.
oh jesus, not this singularity sh*t again!