Ingrained notions of innovation

One of the problems with our discussions over innovation is how ingrained the techno-centric, linear model is in our psyche. That this rather innocuous statement:

It is somewhat mystifying, and maybe even a little discouraging, that several decades into the age of information we still talk constantly about the urgent need for innovation, yet managers struggle mightily to move good ideas from the lab bench to the marketplace. That's not to say innovating can't be done -- the last I checked, IBM had racked up about 38,000 patents over the past 15 years, and Big Blue continues to stake out and commercialize intellectual properties with formidable speed and aggression.

What is wrong with that statement? Plenty.
1) "innovation" means moving ideas out of lab -- i.e. innovation is something that happens in labs
2) the measure of innovation is patents.
Those two assumptions help define the linear model of innovation. (For more on the linear model of innovation, see my earlier posting.)

Let's modify the statement slightly to read as follows:

It is somewhat mystifying, and maybe even a little discouraging, that several decades into the age of information we still talk constantly about the urgent need for innovation, yet managers struggle mightily to move good ideas from the lab bench to get new ideas into the marketplace. That's not to say innovating can't be done -- the last I checked, IBM had racked up about 38,000 patents over the past 15 years, and Big Blue continues to stake out and commercialize intellectual properties continues to introduce new products and services and refine old ones with formidable speed and aggression.

This may be a subtle change in words, but it carries a big change in underlying assumptions. In the rewording, innovation is about new ideas from many sources and about new products and services.

Keynes said, "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." In this case, we are still slaves to a defunct idea of innovation left over from the industrial age.