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an
alfrehn
thoughtpaper
#1Innovation
Is
Not
“Best
Practice”
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Taking
Innovation
Seriously
1
Innovation, that perennial favorite, has recently lost some of its luster. While peopleare still keen on pointing out that corporations need to encourage and manageinnovation, there is an increasing amount of evidence that challenges the simpli
fi
edtale that innovation, as it is currently understood, will solve all our problems. Studieson CEOs show that fewer and fewer feel they’re getting value for money frominvestments in innovation, and in several
fi
elds (e.g. biotechnology and advancedmaterials research) we can see that the development of radical new innovations hasnot progressed at the pace we might have expected. Why is this? Has somethinghappened to innovation, and can we do something about it? It is my contention thatsomething has happened, and that it is up to us to re-evaluate our position oninnovation if we want to stay true to its radical nature. In this short “thoughtpaper”,I’ll try to outline some of these points, and suggest that in order to save innovation, wemight need to go beyond the notion of “best practices” and instead bring back innovation to its radically creative roots.One of the truly tricky things about innovation is that it is incredibly di
ffi
cult to really take it seriously. You might not think this if you look at the frankly amazing numberof books and articles that have been written on the subject, but you’d be wrong.
eproblem with innovation is this: Knowledge is about our past, innovation is about ourfuture, and even though we all realize this on some level, the message herein isdi
ffi
cult to keep true to.
e reason why it is di
ffi
cult to take innovation seriously isthat we as humans are conditioned and even neurologically programmed to focus onwhat we know and what we can infer from this. We’ve all gathered a lot of experienceand know-how, and it is the natural tendency of the brain to want to utilize this every time we are posed with a new problem.
is also leads to the fact that when we’reasked to think of innovation, we retreat into those things we already know, our history and our knowledge, and try to imagine a new world as springing out of this, while thepoint of innovation should be about breaking with our old frameworks and ourhistory-laden ways.
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1
This thoughtpaper is inspired by and dedicated to my good friend Howard Adamsky, a deepthinker and a born innovator. The ideas in this paper are in part tak en from and explicated furtherin my forthcoming book
Heretic Creativity.
O
en when we talk of creativity and innovation, we tend to tell “weren’t they silly”-stories.
e classics here is the story of the hapless record executive who said he didn’tsee any future for the Beatles, or the famous (but in all likelihood false) quoteattributed to
omas Watson where he is said to have estimated that the world wouldnever need more than
fi
ve computers.
ese have been repeated so o
en as to havebecome clichés, but there is something interesting to them. We like laughing at thestupidity we can now discern in them, but at the same time we’re not learning fromthem. We could take more modern examples. Did you, dear reader, in the 1980’spredict that China would be the most important economic superpower in the world?If someone would have told you 15 years ago that it would be possible to carry 10.000songs in your pocket, and that this magic box could also carry movies and books anda phone and a GPS (provided you knew what that was) and games and most any program you could think of, would you have believed them? I dare say you mighteven have laughed a little behind their backs. It is a safe bet that you, 15 years ago, dida lot of really bad predictions about the future – I know I did. But today things aredi
ff
erent, right?
is time, this time will be di
ff
erent, right? I doubt it.
e reason why we’re so very bad at predicting the new is because we are bound by our histories, and can only with the greatest di
ffi
culty imagine things beyond thatwhich we already know.
is is why it is so di
ffi
cult to really take innovation seriously,because in order to do so we need to leave part of our rational, reasoned thinkingbehind, as that which we call reason is a product of history and the old. Problem is,our a
ff
ection for history is not just a personal foible, it is something we build into ourstories of the world, our ways of talking about what should be done. And nowhere isthis more evident than in the curious survival of the notion of “best practice”.
The
Problem
With
Best
Practice
e de
fi
nition of “best practice” is “stu
ff
that worked in the past”. In practice (
sic)
, bestpractice is a product of our history, and an attempt on our part to retell our history ina way that makes us seem to be both in control and having progressed to a state of certainty. In this manner, best practices represent the standardization of thinking, andalso the way in which we try to limit it.
e concept of best practice could in this way
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