The Meanings of Innovation

There has been a discussion going on about a universal definition for innovation among some members of the Transforming Transformation on-line group at transforming@googlegroups.com.   I found myself annoyed to read a couple of posts claiming it as a matter of fact that innovation is about business differentiation and economic value; that's an operational definition not the definition of innovation, seems to me.

I like definitions to see people clashing over the meanings of words; its good fun and valuable too. I think a lot about definitions in my work as an ethnographer design researcher in innovation groups; I think they are extremely important.  I often witness communication difficulties between collaborators when people use the same word in very different ways or in ways that everyone knows don't quite fit. The word Portal for example. In 2000 we borrowed that word to talk about what we now understand to be on-line portals, places to go to access personalized on-line access to information, services and tools. But at first, we just didn't know what portals were going to become and only later were able to give the word portal this operational definition. Looking deep into this phenomenon as an ethnographic "finding" is something that I've been doing for some time and I mention this because I see it as deeply significant to innovation discovery.  

#1:  If you don't know the word and can't find the word that fits what you witness or create then this is a good thing.  Just like when an experienced miner is mining for gold or for oil with a pick in a tunnel and sees indications that a vein is near, the same thing is true when seeing multiple word meanings at play and people arguing and having difficulty letting go of their perspective; you know you are close to witnessing or discovering innovation opportunity or on the down side, missing it altogether.  

#2:  When perspectives from one discipline are shared and applied in another this can lead to breakthrough innovation.  So exploring word meanings from disciplinary perspectives can be a useful tool. This is just what Mark Weiser did when he invented ubiquitous computing in the early 1990's.  He was having deep discussions with his colleagues anthropologists Lucy Suchman, Gitti Jordan and others in the Work Practice Group at Xerox PARC.   In an interview that I did with him back then he described to me how he took their perspective on designing for the way people work in the real world and applied it to his own thinking about the future of computing.  The bringing together of the anthropological and computer science perspectives was a struggle but through that struggle the vision that got  computers off the desktop and into the environment came to be and the mobile and embedded computing industries were born.   

What might be the universal understanding of importance to Innovation work just might be that words and concepts take on meanings that are nuanced by experience, goals and contexts. You really have to wonder if there is such a thing as a universal definition for a word. What does that even mean?  How could it be achieved?  The best one can hope for is an operational definition that people find appropriate and useful to their purpose.