Calling B.S. Part 2: Innovation
Who wants to be innovative? Evidently everybody. But parroting the word “innovation” is quite different than actually innovating. Just as every parent wants to think his or her progeny is above average, not everyone can live in Lake Wobegon. Despite the consistent claim of innovation, the spectrum of innovation of course varies across companies—and that’s ok! By its nature, innovation is, to use a term singularly beloved by today’s technocrati, disruptive. If everyone actually innovated equally, the result would not be progress, but chaos.
It is time to separate true innovation from the pseudo-innovation of corporate posers who just want to clamor aboard the cool kid innovation bandwagon. Real innovation does exist. It is the stuff Joseph Schumpeter referred to when he spoke of creative destruction. We are talking new businesses, new industries and new ways of life. However risible, an app that simply says, “yo,” fails to meet this standard.
In today’s world, taking any trivial, everyday activity, from laundry to walking dogs and “putting it in app form” seems to qualify as innovative and worthy of millions, if not billions of dollars worth of investment. As of this writing, there are 500+ separate apps that will simulate a coin toss for those critical times when one can’t rustle up a penny. Some of them charge actual money for their virtual tumbling dollars, euros and rupees. This solution in search of a problem characterizes many such putative innovation claims. An echo boom of the fin de siècle, the current app mania recalls the late 1990s when businesses would take trivial, everyday activities and “put it on the web,” to attract billions of dollars of investment. We know. It’s different this time.
Who can blame those who use the language of innovation when its mere invocation attracts both attention and revenue? The world’s most valuable company shares at least some of the blame for our current religion of innovation. Apple has brought us innovations that have changed the face of the earth. But the breathless, hyperbolic “innovation” language the company employs to announce every change from the quotidian to the profound has reached the point of self-parody. Despite what Sir Jonathan Ive may assert, not every curve on a new Apple product actually is a life-changing innovation even if Tim Cook believes they support “new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist.” In many cases, the wider public is wise to the joke and hence Ive parody videos abound and there’s even a parody Twitter account.
Apple bakes both feigned and real innovation into its business model. Short of actual product failure, the technology juggernaut needs to deposition the capabilities of expiring product lines so that customers covet the innovations contained each new release. But for other businesses, the pursuit of innovation for the sake of innovation is nonsense. Heinz has been making perfectly fine ketchup since 1876. People enjoy Heinz ketchup so much that it enjoys over 50% market share in the US. Not so very long ago, the company decided that this cash cow business was not enough, that plain and regular red Heinz ketchup was boring! What the world needed was innovative green and purple ketchup! Innovative, yes, but also disgusting. Heinz pulled the products and today offers the traditional red stuff to grace billions of burgers.
Although the world doesn’t need more purple ketchup or another coin tossing app, for at least seven years humanity has awaited a mug that would “learn more about us and our consumption habits.” A bit of a mug companion, if you will. That day is almost here. The Vessyl, a Fuseproject design that combines earnestness and uselessness in equal measure has teetered on self-parody from inception. For those of you who have not yet caught wind of this massive breakthrough, the Vessel is a $149 “smart mug,” that will, inter alia, report that the user is in fact drinking water or some other beverage in real time! The company even claims that the lid of this modern marvel is “almost a whole other product in itself,” resulting in an innovation that was not only “spill proof,” but also “easy and delightful.” Sassy satirist Stephen Colbert points out that the Vessyl provides information that was previously “only available to on the can you just poured out of.” Other organizations, such as IKEA and the California Lottery have similarly spoofed the language of innovation—and even innovating innovation—by introducing concepts of a “book, book” with eternal battery life and a “shatterproof,” two-sided lottery ticket to demonstrate their own straight-forward appeal.
It’s impossible to know how long the rhapsodic cult of innovation will continue, but its clear when something is really new and great, folks don’t need to be told it is awesomely innovative; innovation is self-evident. Unfortunately, despite the parodies, too many people are making too much money right now hawking innovation. Until this ends, innovation is going to continue as a largely bankrupt word invoked by everybody but offering and communicating little.
Calling BS Part 1 – Authenticity
Calling BS Part 2 – Innovation
Calling BS Part 3 – Design Thinking
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