Innovation and You
What does innovation really look like?
If you believe modern business is an infinite game, you must strive to stay relevant. To stay relevant, every organization, every team, and your most ambitious employees must embrace the idea of innovation. This is the first in a series of posts around innovation at your typical workplace.
What might innovation look like in the modern workplace?
Innovation is typically misconstrued with invention, so let’s start by defining these terms.
Invention vs Innovation
An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process.
If an idea is unique enough either as a stand alone invention or as a significant improvement over the work of others, it can be patented.
Source: Wikipedia
Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services.
innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention and not all innovations require a new invention.
Source: Wikipedia
Which organization has repeatedly topped the charts for decades when it comes to filing patents? According to Wikipedia and Nasdaq, IBM topped the list for 29 consecutive years through to 2021. Did you consider IBM to be the torchbearer for “staying relevant” today? In fact, IBM even announced it had decided to put an end to a deliberate focus on “numeric patent leadership”. To quote the announcement:
Patents are only one measure of a company’s true capacity for innovation.
Inventions don’t help an organization stay relevant.
Bringing ideas to life
A closer look at the academic definition of innovation reveals something very interesting. Note the emphasis on practical implementation in our Wikipedia definition above. An invention might often be a feasible idea, a functional prototype, a potential game changer. Taking it to market, producing at scale, making it affordable and durable, all require significant additional effort, often accounting for many years. This in itself is a massive creative effort, laced with trial and error, and learning from each of them to iteratively improve the final product.
At this point, the engineer in you should go - “Ah, this is what I do for a living!”. Perhaps the act of building these products our businesses offer is innovation personified. The choices we make, what we decide to optimize for, and how quickly we learn, define our outcomes.
Typesetter as a Trend setter
Take the case of the Paige Compositor, which is additionally interesting because it apparently led to Mark Twain going bankrupt. Paige had a head start in automating what was the most time-consuming, manual task in printing back in the day - typesetting.
Paige invented an approach that was modeled on exactly how a human composed pieces of type by hand, arranging them on a composing tray one by one, using a mechanical arm connected to a keyboard. His demonstrations often blew spectators away. Rather tellingly, he chose to work mostly by himself, often building new attempts from scratch rather than iterating, leading to a really complex setup few could understand. The patent application itself was 218 pages long.
While Paige sought the perfect machine, Ottmar Mergenthaler had already started iterating on the Linotype, which aimed to generate a line full of type at a time using 90 characters an operator enters. Instead of moving type and arranging them into a tray, the Linotype assembled a cast for a line, used it as a mold into which molten hot metal was poured. This cooled to form a line’s worth of type called a slug, leaving human operators to simply line up slugs on a tray as opposed to assembling one character at a time. By focusing on the obvious incremental improvement, Mergenthaler and his Linotype ruled the world of printing for close to a century.
Paige was a great inventor. But Mergenthaler was clearly the better innovator. Businesses need more Mergenthalers. You might already be one.
My work is not innovative
If you are like me, you are part of a team building software products and offering them on the Internet. Our resumes say “built from scratch”, but do we really? We run everything on public cloud and PaaS, build on frameworks like ReactJS and Ruby on Rails or Spring Boot, test and deploy using continuous deployment services hosted as SaaS, and monitor our SaaS using even more services someone hosts and manages for us. Software is built, maintained and run on layers of abstraction today. No wonder it sometimes feels like assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
If you boil your business problem down, at the end of the day it is yet another web application, perhaps backed by some batch jobs, a data warehouse and some serverless functions, just because. Is one CRM really that different from another?
And yet, there is something to be learned from the Paige v Mergenthaler episode. If you could build a better app, faster, cheaper, make it more maintainable, flexible, easy to extend, perhaps you stand a better chance of winning? Isn’t that what innovation entails after all?
Intrigued? Continue reading the next post in this series - The Innovative Chef.