[Sigia-l] Not All Innovations Are Equal?

[Steven MacCall]

I haven't been following this thread in any great detail; however, I have
gleaned enough to know that the following may be of interest ;-)

"Not All Innovations Are Equal" from the HBS:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5123&t=strategy&iss=y

slm
--
Steven L. MacCall, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Library and Information Studies
The University of Alabama
Box 870252
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0252
 
205.348.6727
 

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Listera
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 2:46 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Not All Innovations Are Equal?

Pradyot Rai:

> why would you recomend to innovate as a last resort.

Whenever I start a new project, at the first general brainstorming meeting,
there are always a few people who ponder: how can we leapfrog competitor X,
how can we invent a new way, how can we think out of the box, how can we
innovate, etc. And people take off from there and usually ideas come pouring
in. That's all well and good, but often misses the point.

I'm there to lead them not to solve a business problem or a design problem
*specifically* but to develop a business strategy through design. The
difference is subtle but all important.

I can't think of a better example here than the world's most innovative tech
company, Apple. It used to be, in the mid '90s during the miserable Nagel
years, that Apple would come out with innovative products right and left but
get no traction. Having to counter the entire Wintel industry in R&D
expenditure by itself, it was slowly bleeding to death.

Today, Apple is even more innovative but they don't lead by innovation first
and ask the business strategy questions later. It's reversed!

Apple is not seeking novelty of invention/innovation as an end in itself any
longer. Apple, for example, is seen as an innovator in the digital music
sphere. But its "innovation" is not really in any one aspect of hardware or
software, pretty much everything they rely on existed previously. What's
innovative here is putting everything together in a coherent, synergistic
strategy. The iPod's click-wheel interface or iTune's smart playlists are
nothing without the more mundane Amazon one-click buy or the small-amount
credit card aggregation or the enormous load the WebObject backend carries
or the 2MM big-label song library, etc. It's a total business strategy, made
possible by appropriate design choices at every level. In other words,
Aperture is not just about innovation in photography editing workflow, but
also about accelerating the sale of big monitors and hefty machines from
Apple, without which it wouldn't have come to life in the first place.

This is a jarring thought. But let us remember: design is the art and
science of balancing the needs of the client and the user. We can't aim to
delight the latter (innovation) without satisfying the former (business
strategy).

So innovation is the means, not the end; it is subservient to strategy. The
strategy should first harvest available work, thought, energy and, only as a
last resort, turn to innovation because nothing else at that point satisfies
the strategic requirements.

And we owe that nugget of thought to Charles Eames, an innovator himself.

----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."


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