Innovation Ecology

Recently I’ve been thinking about how the environment or the structure of a space impacts the behavior of individuals within that space. Matthew Hurst has a nice little post about creating a space for innovation.

What is innovation? I’ve been chewing on that question for a while, and a recent post from Hal has finally nudged me to write something. Hal’s post, in summary, discusses the nature of ownership in progress and breakthroughs (that was my idea!). The reason that I care about innovation is that I really care about environments that are intentionally set up to deliver innovation. While we might often hear ‘I work in an innovation centre’, or something similar, does that really have any meaning?

At best, innovation is something that we (that is to say, users) recognize, and I think this is key to understanding the nature of innovation processes in the internet space. Innovation is not just the idea (ideas are free!), nor is the implementation (often the hardest part) sufficient – connection with the user and the recognition of the value by the user is key. Thus, I think the key elements to an innovation centre are (at least):

smart people: to generate ideas

engineering excellence: to implement the ideas

connection with users: the people that recognize ultimately determine the innovation

The last part is the hardest as it requires some sort of faith. The reason being that one has to find the right users, a tasks which requires an interesting mixture of skills, perseverance, tenacity and luck.

One can possibly generalize the three components above. So in the case of Hal’s discussion, the issue of how freely one publishes ones research results is part of the mechanism for connecting with users. You may have solved some important problem, but if no-one knows, then there is no impact. Of course, the reason this is more complex than Hal’s post describes is the economic system. Breakthroughs in Google or Microsoft are not socialized in the same way their academic cousins.

Looking back at the environments I’ve worked in, I’ve witnessed situations where we had plenty of 1 (lots of smart people) but the company failed, and situations where the users have been breaking down the doors while we’ve been scrambling to match the smarts with the solution that would satisfy them. In addition, there are plenty of cases where 1 and 2 are clearly not a problem, but where the current behaviour of the users (driven in part by the existing solution paradigms) presents a barrier to connection.

The 3 part innovation system works at many levels. For example, the academic innovation system feeds not only academia and the public good of science and knowledge in general, but also industrial systems. Industrial R&D labs themselves interface often with academia, but also produce internal innovations to product group customers and so on.

via: [data mining]

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