Future Here Now: The Spluttering Innovation Machine

Selection

enough people are talking about: our urgent needs for creating new solutions. Not just for software or AI, but for everything in our lives, our teams and our communities. And we’re talking about where the most important innovations come from (hint: probably not where you thought).

This month is also the re-launch of Everybody Innovates Here, my book that explains why so many of our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems fail to move the needle for our communities, and what we have to do to make them work the way they should. You’ll see posts and videos about Everybody Innovates Here across your socials this month. And Change Maker (paid) subscribers to Future Here Now will receive a code for a hefty discount on the book and on workshops!

This book never got the daylight it deserved thanks to COVID, and I’m thrilled to be able to share it. If you are not a Change Maker subscription, you can get that discount code too – all you have to do is sign up before July 18! And to sweeten the deal, I’ll give you 25% off that subscription – but don’t delay, or this will be gone!

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This is a selection from Everybody Innovates Here. Available wherever you get books.

The Sputtering Innovation Machine

From a technology standpoint, writers often argue that the pace of innovation is accelerating exponentially, a la Moore’s Law and its insistence that information processing technology will follow that growth curve. At the same time, however, writers in the business sphere, following the thread of Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation, assert that innovation, or at least the incremental value of innovations, is declining. In making that case, manypoint to long-term declining numbers of patents. Others argue that, while worrisome, those trends are at best very rough proxies for the full scope of innovation.

It’s as much a definition problem as anything.

Increasing information technology, we would think, should inherently provide value (and thus qualify as Innovation), but if no one is ready to use that value yet, is it actually Innovative? If a patent is granted, but it’s for a slight tweak to a device that makes a small improvement to its existing function, is that actually innovation, or just twiddling at the edges?

Even if we admit that the answer to this question depends on your filter and your definitions, there doesseem to be a general sense that innovation and entrepreneurship need improvement - or at least a decent goosing. For all of the years that the concept of Innovation as a business book category or a nonprofit mantra has been floating around, to the point where not a few of you probably have an innovation-fatigue reaction every time you read that word, it seems like

it’s not happening. At least not happening enough.

As Johann Wong of the innovation consulting firm JouleWatt says, “there are good things happening, but they’re not happening or growing fast enough.” And in speaking to innovators ranging from investment firms to corporate products to public policy, you get the same sense: something is blocking us from achieving what we’re truly capable of -- of truly capitalizing on

all those new information processors and communication systems and all the work that’s been

invested from all sectors in the name of increasing Innovation.

So what’s blocking us?

The Paradigm Shift

During one of my summers in college I worked for an office temp agency, on a series of stints that mostly involved using my magical capability to use WordPerfect to type up handwritten letters and the like (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, ask someone really old). I was bored out of my head and literally read anything I could get. Through this process, a Secondary Education major with a concentration in English found Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that introduced the concept of a paradigm shift.

I wouldn’t have known it then, but trying to stay awake those afternoons waiting for the next internal memo started me on a quest I couldn’t have imagined: How to get around one’s own mental blind spots.

You may have read that book, but it’s probably been a long time. So here’s the synopsis: in examining how key scientific discoveries had developed through history, Kuhn noted that the most significant breakthroughs came about when someone who was not embedded in the prevailing thinking system was able to see (in some cases, literally) things that others could

not. It wasn’t any magic gift on the part of the innovator -- no x-ray glasses or abnormal intelligence or anything.

The innovator was able to innovate because the existing assumptions and expectations around the topic blocked the prevailing “experts” from being able to see the new interpretation or new solution. Sometimes those blockages came from straightforward articles of faith, sometimes they were unwritten and unspoken assumptions, and sometimes they were simply doubts or inklings that the experts avoided looking at because speaking what they thought they had seen would cost them their prestige, their livelihood, maybe more.

In all of the cases that Kuhn examined, evidence pointing to the new discovery had been around beforethe paradigm-breaker came on the scene. It had just been discounted, avoided, overlooked, misinterpreted, sometimes suppressed. The paradigm-breaker didn’t

see something no one else had ever seen. He or she saw something about it that no one else had seen.

In my own professional life, I have moved between a wider range of sectors than a lot of people. I’ve worked with large and small businesses, nonprofits, governments, lone wolf innovators, corporate lifers, you name it. And because I’ve done that, I’ve had to confront fundamentally different paradigms over and over again. That doesn’t mean that I do a better job of getting myself out of my own way when I am on the inside of the paradigm, but it does mean that I’ve at

least gotten accustomed to the idea that different paradigms lead to different world views and different assumptions about how to solve problems.

When you are the one who comes in from outside, you realize pretty quickly that the “we've Always done it that way, why would you even think of doing anything else?” assertion in one place is the unimagined, totally novel idea in another. Sometimes you look like the

genius, or the psycho, just because you brought in an idea that’s become the normal mode of operation somewhere else.

I think the great challenge facing innovators and thosev who want to accelerate innovation -in any space or industry or sector lies in understanding, taking apart and rebuilding the paradigms in which we are trying to create meaningful innovation. We have to get ourselves out of our own way, and since the paradigms that I think are causing most of our problems are so pervasive, we have few easy opportunities to bring in someone who can truly see what’s outside of the box we have trapped ourselves in.

At least, within our current paradigm, it’s hard to find those people. But that’s a trap of our paradigm in itself. More on that later.