If you thought that fads were confined to music and clothing, you were dead wrong. You can find trends in every conceivable part of the human experience. The way that we talk, eat, travel, flirt, consume entertainment, wage war, party, and socialize all move in accordance with the trends of the time.
The same thing goes for business. Different preferences fall in and out of vogue, and right now innovation is trendy. Every list, every website, every talking head is hot for innovation, but as Steve Tabak pointed out, that isn’t necessarily a good thing.
New ideas
According to one document published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, we are more interested in seeking protection for our ideas than ever – presumably because we’re coming up with so many more ideas. In fact, since the early 90s, the number of patent applications has increased nearly every year, with the count coming in at over 280,000 during 2013. This contrasts with the thirty years preceding the increase when the number of applications stayed relatively constant and rarely exceeded 70,000.
Clearly, we’ve got lots of new ideas. Whether the increase of patent applications has caused the increased attention on innovation, or the other way around, is not evident, but one thing is: people are innovating.
Or, at least they are in one sense.
The meaning of the word
In his article, Tabak laments that the dictionary definition of innovation simply describes it as the introduction of something new, without regard to the usefulness or value of that new thing. Here at Alphidia, we agree with Mr. Tabak.
Proper innovation is not the arbitrary creation of some useless good without value or utility. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Innovation solves problems. Those problems may be inefficiencies, gaps in the market, or something else entirely, but they cannot be fixed with the type of innovation that does things “just because.”
Fixing problems with problems
That sort of lackluster commitment to problem-solving doesn’t create meaningful solutions. It creates “those high-tech corkscrews…that come in a wooden box and you have to read the instructions to figure out how it works.” It creates a garlic crusher that requires you to “peel the garlic, put it in this little gadget, then squeeze really tightly so it squirts out the little holes.” What happened to a metal spiral attached to a piece of wood? What happened to the broad side of a knife? Those are sufficient solutions to problems that didn’t need fixing.
Now, what you have are extra expenses (batteries), reduced storage space, and added frustration for products that jam, sputter, and fail. Sure, it might be cool for a second to try a new gizmo, but in the end, it’s sort of like a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s momentarily awesome, full of potential problems, and serves no real purpose.
That’s not how innovation is supposed to be, and until the ebb and flow of trendy business ideas moves somewhere else, we may not see it in its proper form for some time.
[Image by KMJ at the German language Wikipedia [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons.]