Before We Go, a Final Note on the Impact of New Ideas
This is my last Innovation column. Not to worry: no bittersweet sentiments or soggy nostalgia here. But this is a final opportunity to discuss what this column tried--and sometimes failed--to do in exploring the business of innovation. Certain themes kept popping up here in different guises, and they need to be discussed before my tenure ends.
Originally, this was supposed to be the “Technology” column. Fortunately, my editors were easily convinced that what really mattered most wasn’t technology itself but the intersection--of business, technology and pop culture in the marketplace. Media guru Marshall McLuhan once noted that “first we shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” and this was the ongoing relationship that I wanted to write about.
The culture of technology was less intriguing than the rise of technology as pop culture. New tools and new media weren’t just about changing what people wanted to have--they were about changing what people wanted to be.
In that respect, innovation isn’t about changes in ideas or changes in technology; innovation is about changes in people. This was never meant to be a column about new ideas; it was meant to be a column about what happens when people and new ideas interact. How people use--or refuse to adopt--an emerging technology or policy initiative seems to be just as compelling and important as the story behind the idea itself.
The diffusion of innovation--how ideas catch hold and spread throughout a subculture, society and the world--is every bit as significant as the moment of creation. Yes, the Internet’s World Wide Web is a nifty package of digital technologies. But the real story is how the technical innovations are co-evolving with markets, entrepreneurs and institutions to transform the Net into “The Next Great Global Mass Medium.”
These trends toward diffusion and democratization of technology seem irresistible--and have been perennial themes of this column. We face the same sort of pervasiveness and proliferation in over-the-counter genetic technologies that we do in digital media. At-home genetic testing is less than a decade away. Urban gardeners will soon be planting genetically engineered seeds to grow plants that keep cockroaches away or yield vitamin-enriched fruits. Families may buy and use custom-tailored bio-remediation microbes to gobble up their garbage tomorrow as readily as they sort their trash and put out their recyclables today.
To be sure, the breakthroughs in genomic science and technology are impressive--but how we adapt, adopt and assimilate those breakthroughs into our lives strikes me as the real challenge of innovation.
The essential point is that we need to pay greater attention to how our innovations evolve than to how they’re born. There are no shortages of good ideas or even brilliant ideas in areas ranging from finance to education to biology to media. There are, however, desperate shortages of time, money, curiosity and the willingness to take a chance. Individuals and their institutions are understandably reluctant to invest too much of themselves in testing a new idea unless the perceived benefits overwhelmingly outweigh the real costs. Unfortunately, too many people are unwilling even to play with a new idea. That--not human ingenuity and ideas--is the real bottleneck to breakthroughs.
In the context of innovation, opportunity is truly the enemy of commitment. Why commit to a good idea now when history convincingly argues that an even better one may be just around the corner? The issue isn’t just the rate of change, it’s the volume of choice. There is a surplus of innovation in the marketplace today. It’s a buyer’s market. So we shouldn’t be surprised that society tends to devalue what there seems to be such an abundance of. Yet the ecology of innovation--that mixture of market forces, pop cultures, new media and old institutions--still matters far more than just the economics of innovation. We need to understand that ecology better.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter is absolutely right: Innovation is less an act of intellect than an act of will. Innovations succeed not because their progenitors are smarter than everybody else but because the originators better grasp that innovation is more social than technological in nature. To generate successful innovations, scientists and technologists have had to become entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs have had to become scientists and technologists. That kind of cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary creativity is tremendously exciting to write about.
Consequently, anybody who writes a column such as this becomes incredibly spoiled. You get to talk to the top people in their fields, people who are excited about what they do and ambitious about defining tomorrow’s innovations. I regret that I didn’t do as good a job as I should have in exploring the interplay between these individuals and their ideas. My bias was to write more about the interplay between the innovative ideas and their possible impact. But the fact is that these ideas were often direct extensions of people’s personalities. That should have been better captured.
Certainly, the weirdest aspect of writing this column has been people’s reaction to it. My ability to judge which columns would evoke certain responses was abysmal. Columns rigorously researched and painstakingly written often got virtually zero feedback while glib musings based on the glimmer of a fun idea generated more than a hundred responses. Go figure; I can’t. It’s rather humbling.
Also humbling is the support of people who have helped edit and improve this column over the past six years. Even when we disagreed--which we did frequently and with great relish--the editors were all concerned about making it better and more accessible to the reader. This column has always been a collaboration--with my sources, my editors and my readers--in the best meaning of the word. I’m grateful for the opportunity and gleefully appreciative of the fact that all innovations--and innovation columns--are eventually superseded by superior innovations. That’s why this field is so much fun.
Michael Schrage becomes a regular contributor to The Times as a member of the Times Board of Advisers in Sunday Business. The Innovation column will continue.
