What is Innovation?

Our blog begins its life with this simple, but hard to answer question. The word innovation is one that gets used in many ways in business and culture. It seems to apply to everything from the latest, greatest handheld, wireless, touch-screen, social networking gizmo to vague corporate initiatives worthy of a case-study. Often inserted breathlessly into product reviews or authoritatively into powerpoint presentations, using it connotes status or uniqueness. Our company’s formal corporate name even employs it as a de facto statement of purpose.

I’m certainly not alone in asking this question – a lot of people are intent on defining what innovation means. Here’s one of the best attempts I’ve read recently from Jason Pontin, Editor of MIT’s Technology Review (Jan/Feb 2008):

“It is best to begin by asserting what innovation is not. Innovation is not invention, and still less is it scientific discovery. An innovation must be valuable, which means it must exist in a market or some more general social context of supply and demand.” Pontin further cites a definition from Richard Lyons, chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs: “fresh thinking that creates value.” (Read Pontin’s whole editorial)

In other words, innovation meets a need or social objective in order to be qualified. In the process, it becomes valuable to those who use it or are affected by it in some way. I like the combination of Pontin and Lyon’s take. It emphasizes why innovation is important and why so many people and businesses aspire to it.

My interpretation of what innovation means has always been associated with process rather than a specific result. It is about getting to a valuable outcome using known methods, resources, ideas, and technologies in new ways. Tierra’s business is about innovation because most everything we do involves this type of process – with our clients and partners, between our team members. Most of the time it’s simply hard work and never as glamorous as the word implies. Often, we don’t realize we’re doing something innovative until we step back. The process can also break down if those involved aren’t committed to resolving problems with an open mind to what is possible.

But the value created in the process can happen at any step along the way – from a new twist on visual design to identifying an audience more accurately to a creative use for a snippet of existing code. A whole product or project may be considered innovative as a result. Or it may be that a simple building block in the process helped resolve a seemingly intractable problem. Figuring out what exactly makes something innovative can be elusive. But the key ingredient to innovation is not: it requires a commitment to a process that asks difficult questions, allows for unexpected answers, and delivers something valuable.

Asking this post’s title question of myself, my team members, our partners, clients, and readers, I hope to infuse our discussion here with a sense of common purpose. Our intent in the Tierra Lab is to open the door to our process. We’ll be talking about issues in web design, products that catch our eye, ideas we agree and disagree with, technology we admire or wonder about. We hope you’ll contribute and engage with us too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 9:40 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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