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The FOUNDATIONS of INNOVATION, TRANSFORMATION and CHANGE
By John Barker, et al
Introduction
© 2008 John ED Barker, Science Dynamics
Added to this bewilderment, Google returns about 40 million results on a search for a definition of the word "innovation". The range of definitions that I found through Google reminded me of the story of the blind men who were asked to describe an elephant. To refresh my memory on the details of the story, I hit Google again—this time only 117 hits—at least it was not the Tower of Babel that I had found with the word "innovation"! But, to my dismay, I found that each story was different, although each claimed to be a translation from the original Buddhist story. Each had a different number of blind men touching and describing a different number of different parts of the elephant—and each story had a different spin on the moral. Indeed, "innovation" was more like the elephant than I had imagined!
If this deluge of definitions presents a problem to you, then it also presents an opportunity to me to provide you with an accessible, understandable, comprehensive and—above all—useful account of innovation. It would be presumptuous to say that my account will supplant the need to look at any of the other millions of stories already told, or even to add your own. Many of these stories have valuable insights, anecdotes and analyses of innovative situations, and some of them use parts of the same methodologies used in this book. Many of them are repetitious or derivative and some are just downright misleading, by any reasonable criteria of veracity and quality. But very few, if any, try to get to the heart of the matter, and then construct a coherent framework that can be used to manage innovation more effectively and efficiently—that is, to innovate with precision and a minimum of effort. That is my aim: To develop the basic foundations and framework for innovation, transformation and change so that good ideas can become good realities.
The title of this book is actually a tautology, as the words innovation and change can be interchanged. Although most people (maybe 40 million of them) would consider the instances of innovation as a subset of the instances of change, this book will show that they are identical—that is innovation = deliberate change, and vice versa. Note that this precludes change that occurs through non-deliberate action—such as accidents, acts of fate/god etc (we will not explore theology in this book). Many deliberate changes are often not considered as innovations because they are considered to not lead to an improvement in the state of the system that has been changed. But who is doing the considering, and when? For example, the adjustments made to a machine by its operator may turn out to degrade its performance, when the intention was to improve its performance according to the operator's criteria for improvement. Nonetheless the operator's intentions were explicit, even if they were not fulfilled by his actions ie, it was an unsuccessful. To use another contemporary, but extreme example, a suicide-bombing in a restaurant certainly changes the restaurant and its customers, but is not usually thought of as an innovation, particularly by the unfortunate owner and injured customers. But the terrorist group that organised the bombing would see it as a successful innovation that fulfills their purposes. This broader, non-subjective, definition opens up a wider range of activities to analysis—so long as the actions leading to change are purposeful. As we shall see, purpose ("deliberately thought-through goal-directedness", according to Wikipedia[1]) is a key ingredient in the analysis of all deliberately changed situations.
This book is also somewhat paradoxical, as it is both very abstract and very concrete. It is abstract, in that it uses symbols and diagrams that are not direct representations of reality, rather like what is found in books based on mathematics and physics. Readers without a mathematics background should not be deterred, as the symbols and diagrams are really quite simple, and their language can be mastered with a little persistence. I assert this after many hundreds of experiences of walking a wide range of people through the basic ideas used here. The reward for this persistence is the development of a mental framework that can be used to sort out (analyse) a wide range of changing situations. And manage them towards desired outcomes. At each stage of development of the ideas in this book, concrete examples are used to fix the meaning of the symbols and diagrams.
The framework developed in this book relies on two basic ideas. One of them—General Systems Theory (GST)—is used to create a snapshot of a situation. But a snapshot by itself only gives limited information about what is changing. A series of snapshots viewed in quick succession becomes a movie, but the movie is only credible if the story that it tells rings true. The story's credibility is provided by the second idea—Life Cycle Theory (LCT). This story is basically easy to grasp, as we can relate to it directly through our own lives and through the lives of people we know and other living beings that we have encountered. So together, GST and LCT will enable us to answer all the basic questions regarding innovation and change: Where are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? What do we need to get there? How will we know that we have arrived? Of course, no-one can provide precise answers to these questions, but the framework presented in this book will enable you to ask better questions about the details of your particular innovative situation, and enable you to assess the likely worth of the answers. Ultimately, there is no substitute for commonsense and on-the-ground knowledge, but often, as Murphy's Law would have it, the essential details are lacking when we most need them. In these cases, we need to go back to basic principles to get a best-guess. That is what this book aims to provide.
Contents |
So what is Innovation?
- 'I don't know what you mean by "glory"', Alice said.
- Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
- 'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument"', Alice objected.
- 'When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less'.
- 'The question is', said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things'.
- 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master—that's all'.
- —Lewis Carroll[1] "Alice in Wonderland"
As philosopher John Locke pointed out three centuries ago, the achievement of human knowledge is often hampered by the use of words without fixed signification Ref?).
Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea. The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification.[1]
Definitions—the ultimate party-stopper
Why is it usually a conversation-stopper when someone starts quoting formal definitions and meanings? We've all been in a group—at a party, a dinner or standing around at the pub—locked in earnest discussion about an issue that has somehow divided the group into pros and cons. The usual dynamics of group discussions are prevailing—loud voices, offended tones, claims to relevant experiences, half-baked logic strings, and so on. A good time is being had by all, sorting out social pecking orders, settling scores or sizing up that interesting-looking guy/gal for a possible date—when, in chimes "well, it all depends on which definition of X you are using…" The crowd hushes as developing relationships grind to a halt. Perhaps we feel that the informal rules of social debate have been broken by this appeal to a higher authority, such as the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Wikipedia or some world-renowned college professor who is an expert on this matter. There is a general feeling that such an appeal to authority is like parents coming into the playground, or a Monopoly player wanting to use real money. Invoking definitions seems to turn games into real life. Who cares what the definition of X really is? Maybe we want to play more interesting games than who can recount the most precise definition.
But nonetheless, many of us are grateful for this contribution. Often it is a circuit breaker to an impasse. There are groans and sighs and calls of "Oh! I thought you meant Y! Well in that case, we really are in close agreement". Or words to that effect. We find a shared understanding of the words that we are using, and we can then build on that shared understanding—we discuss consequences and corollaries of the agreed facts and definitions. Progress in relationships is made until the next impasse occurs – probably due to missing data or disagreements on definitions—or assumptions of shared meaning that are later shown to be unfounded.
All this is common stuff—the stuff that everyday life is made of. It is also the stuff that science is made of. Cambridge theoretical physicist John Ziman expressed it most concisely: "science is public knowledge".[1] That is, science is commonly-agreed facts and the commonly-agreed relationships between those facts. A commonly-agreed systematic observation of reality. A German word is often used to describe this agreement and consistency: Weltanschauung—a common world-view. This sounds very sensible—almost trivial—but it turns out to be quite profound with many subtle implications as we shall see. In this book we shall also look at the flip-side of public knowledge—that is, private knowledge, or tacit knowledge—knowledge that, for any one of a range of reasons, we cannot or do not share.[ Of course, we need to be wary that our common world-view is viable: it is no good everybody agreeing that the world is flat, or…. If (? Quote from the Wisdom of Crowds?)]
So we generally agree that agreement is generally desirable, and sometimes we agree to disagree, because we choose to not share the same basic facts. By X, I mean this, and you mean that. But at least we are clear about what we mean.
Sometimes we can't reach a consensus, because there is no single definition of word. Take the word "technology" for example. A colleague of mine devoted the first 60 pages of his doctoral thesis to an examination of the various definitions of the word. It really turned out that, although the word has been in use for several hundred years, it still hasn't "settled down" to a single agreed definition as John Locke indicates in the quote above. Further, in the nineteen-eighties the phrase "high technology" became popular. In broad terms it meant all that new electronics and computer stuff coming out of Silicon Valley, but it also included the relatively new areas of biotechnology and advanced materials. We don ' t hear the words "high technology" used so much now, as the word "technology" is generally used to describe all the technologies developed in recent years, including the "high technologies". Unfortunately this leaves us with the problem of finding a word to describe the hammers and chisels and cogs and other artefacts and tools that were developed yesteryear.
The attainment of some agreement on these definitions of technology was important for more than just general social harmony. During the ' eighties, governments around the world were encouraging industry and the universities to develop "high technologies", as they were believed to be the way to future prosperity for troubled economies. Research and development (R&D) grants, often amounting to millions of dollars, were allocated to inventors on the basis of the sales potential of their inventions. But the inventions had to be "high technology"—buggy whip makers and iron foundries need not apply. But how high was high enough? If an invention was considered to be below the bar, it might mean losing out on tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars of Government handouts. Needless to say, there were many conference keynote speeches, coffee-break conversations and late-night red-wine debates over the minimum acceptable height of high technology. More recently, software development was excluded from consideration for R&D grants because it was not considered to be "invented" (software was mainly protected by copyright, like new literature, rather than patents, like new devices). Although these particular issues have mainly gone away, they have been replaced by others, the distinctions between which are just as important—distinctions that turn on the definitions used.
On the other hand, we can get too precious about definitions and sometimes we need to relax our standards for practical purposes. In the late-eighties and early 'nineties I developed a directory of companies, government agencies and university groups that were doing R&D. It turned out to be pretty useful for a range of purposes—investors, suppliers, job-searchers, conference lists, just to name a few. When I started the project, I declared that this would be a model for such directories, and I would apply all my scientific and librarian skills to classifying and categorizing the entries—including those that met the definitions and criteria and excluding those that didn't—using the best keywords to describe each class and category. But the final result was rather different from my early ideal—the reality was that real-world activities often didn't fit into the standard categories and definitions of the OECD's Frascati Manual[1] in a way that was useful to real-world users. Sometimes the words used to describe the local R&D activity were too novel or particular to be included in the slow—moving international manual. In other cases the R&D process didn't involve "science" as it is generally accepted. But in all cases the activity was about the development of new products and/or processes that were of economic, social or scientific interest—they were "innovative" in some way. So, we used less-than-ideal, broad definitions and categories and over the years many people used the directory to great benefit.
The challenge of definitions is far from new. Much of Socrates' (and his scribe Plato's) discourses and conversations are about definitions—definitions of all kinds of things—about objects, morality, ethics, beauty, virtue etc. Behind these discussions was the "theory of forms", which proposed, in essence, that there is an absolute, perfect, or ideal "form" of any concept, even though its earthly expressions fell short of perfection. The theory of forms covers a range of notions—some of which we will revisit in this book. They include definitions, standards of measurement and appraisal, immutable things, timeless truths, intellectual knowledge, conceptual certainties and ontology of forms. Not surprisingly, Google points to a huge literature on this subject, and it is not the point of this book to add one more direct contribution to the millions that more than adequately cover the topic. Philosophers have been trying to untangle Socrates/Plato for more than 2000 years, and much of the way that we think and discuss subjects follows the principles of discourse that they developed. All of this is to say that the issue of definitions is neither new nor trivial.
If we are to take two important notions from Socrates and Plato, it would be these: First, that definitions are important and that we have a fairly common language about the world that we share—without it, all is chaos. Secondly, these forms are akin to ideas—idealised mental states about things. We will say much more about ideas in the next section.
Approaching a definition of Innovation
Before introducing our models, we shall start with a general description and discussion of innovation, using the language of the literature. Although most readers will be familiar with at least some of this language, they are likely to have only an incomplete picture, or one that is not useful in that it does not provide a strong basis for future action.
First, some short definitions of "innovation", courtesy of Wikipedia[1]:
The classic definitions of innovation include:
- the process of making improvements by introducing something new
- the act of introducing something new: something newly introduced (The American Heritage Dictionary).
- the introduction of something new. (Merriam-Webster Online)
- a new idea, method or device. (Merriam-Webster Online)
- the successful exploitation of new ideas (Dept of Trade and Industry, UK).
- change that creates a new dimension of performance Peter Drucker (Hesselbein, 2002)
...and some longer definitions:
- Innovation is the process that transfers ideas through business activity into saleable goods, processes and services. Here we look at the concept of innovation, the different types of innovation and how innovation exists within a system.[1]
- Innovation can be defined as the application of knowledge to create additional value and wealth. Innovation involves using knowledge to find new ways to create and bring about change for the better. This definition of innovation has implications for the types of activities within businesses that can be considered innovative. Second, innovation is not invention. Innovation may not even require the creation of new knowledge—be it to the world or to the firm. What it does require is the inspired application of knowledge (old or new) to create additional value. Given this, it is problematic to equate business innovation with business expenditure.[1]
- A scan of the literature did not provide a satisfactory definition of innovation in teaching and learning for VET and so we adapted a working model based on Williams (1999) and West (in King & Anderson 2002). Williams defines innovation as:…the implementation of new and improved knowledge, ideas, methods, processes, tools, equipment and machinery, which leads to new and better products, services, and processes …….. the word innovation is derived from the Latin innovatio (renewal or renovation), based on novus (new) as in novelty. Note that innovation is about the implementation of not just new ideas and knowledge, but also of improved ideas and knowledge. Hence, many of the case studies and vignettes in the report are about the renewal or renovation or improvement of an existing educational service.[1]
- We define innovation as the successful exploitation of new ideas to increase customer value or create wealth for a company. As such, innovation can be applied by any company in any industry to new products, processes, business models and even strategic positioning. Innovation need not have a technological aspect, of course, but often the right combination of technology and business application can amplify the value-creation for the organisation.[1]
- We use the term innovation to mean the process that transforms ideas into commercial value. (Italics added) The distinction between "invention" and "innovation" is that invention is the creation of a new idea or concept, and innovation is turning the new concept into commercial success or widespread use. We view Innovation to be primarily an economic and social, rather than exclusively a technological term. "Technological innovation" is an innovation with a significant performance content (as opposed to a fashion).[1]
- We use the term "innovation system" to refer to the set of distinct institutions which contribute to the development and diffusion of new technologies in a region. As such, it is a set of interconnected institutions which form a system whose performance is determined both by the individual performance of each institution, but also by how they interact with each other as elements of a collective system.[1]
- IAN MACFARLANE: We see innovation as everything from R and D (research and development) through to commercialisation and the adoption of new business practices and processes and organisational change.
- So we see innovation very broadly, as I think do the BCA.[1]
These definitions share all or some of the concepts of "novelty", new", idea", "invention", "commercial value", "customer value", "change", "transformation", and so on. While many definitions of innovation refer to commerce, we know that many innovations do not refer to commerce. They are all at least a little different from each other. None of them seems to be wrong, but none of them seem to be quite right, or at least, none of them seems to be much "better" than any other in that we could say that it encompassed the others completely, or was "more basic". It is this notion of "basic" or "the essence" that Plato and Socrates talked about so much. Can we come up with an "ideal" definition?
What should this "ideal" definition look like? We can take our lead from a principle that has been used in science for many years called "Ockham's Razor[1]". This 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham took the view that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. Originally stated in Latin, his principle, or "razor" states:
- entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
And when there are a number of competing theories with equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Ockam's razor is usually understood.[1]
So, can we bring together a succinct statement that covers all the basic ground? How's this?:
- Innovation is the process of transforming a (new?) idea into something useful.
Let's work through these few words one-by-one to see whether they withstand the rigours of Ockam's Razor while preserving the essence of the Platonic Ideal.
First, we are asserting that innovation, in this context, is a process—an abstract noun. So innovation is both the process and the outcome. The outcome of the process of innovation is an innovation—a concrete noun. By process we mean (following Wikipedia[1]) a designed sequence of changes of properties/attributes of a system/object. In engineering perspective, process refers to operations or events, possibly taking up time, space, expertise or other resources, which produces some outcome. A process may be identified by the changes it creates in the properties of one or more objects under its influence.
The word process seems to also encompass the word transform, so Ockham would probably suggest that we apply his razor again:
Innovation is the transformation of an idea into something useful.
Let's live with that for a moment and look at the next key word in the definition—idea. Not surprisingly, most of the famous philosophers from the time of Plato to modern times have had a go at defining the word idea. As with the word innovation, there is a degree of similarity between the definitions, with the differences reflecting the different topics being addressed by the authors. Stout and Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, define "idea" as
"the reproduction (in the mind) with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually present to the senses."[1]
An idea, in their view, is a conscious activity of the mind, which is amenable to being described. The thinker of the idea may not necessarily communicate the idea to anyone else, choosing to keep it as a secret, while undertaking its transformation into something that is manifested. This definition implies that an idea is a mind-picture, as compared with a sound, such as a word or a musical note. We will not divert too far from our main discourse with this possibility.
Some might argue that the word "new" should precede the word "idea", as the root of the word "innovation"—novus (?), implies that we are talking about something new. This is a reasonable suggestion, but the newness of the idea is often relative—it may be the first time that it has been thought by that particular person, but may also have been thought by many others, unbeknown to the thinker. The test of the novelty of the idea is whether the thinker can claim any intellectual property rights over it in the form of a patent or copyright. To me, and I think to Ockham, the word "new" is redundant, as it is implied.
But this creates a bit of a problem with Stout and Baldwin's definition, as they make no distinction between a new reproduction (or should it be production?) of an image in the mind, and a (re)production that is not new, ie a memory, or the image may be simply a translation of words that have been just heard or read. Humpty Dumpty might accept all of these mental activities as "ideas", but any short survey of the way that people use the word "idea" would suggest that they are referring to original mental images. We shall go with the crowd.
Stout and Baldwin's more or less adequate image suggests that ideas don't necessarily have high definition when they are first formed. And often we assert that the image is clear in our minds, but we have difficulty describing it. This is common with dreams. So part of innovation becomes the clarification of an idea. I would suggest that their definition could usefully be modified to be
- An idea is the reproduction (in the mind) with a more or less adequate image, of something that does not actually exist.
An idea, then, is an invention. I would like to use these words interchangeably, although many people consider "invention" to be interchangeable with "innovation". To me, to invent something is to describe the (new) idea, not to actually make it. This view is also the one taken by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).[1] As well, the idea does not have to be original in its entirety. Strictly speaking, something that even slightly different from something that already exists could be considered as a new thing. The degree of novelty of an idea becomes a particularly important issue when intellectual property rights are being asserted, and ultimately it becomes a judgement of people who are "practised in the art" relevant to that class of ideas, as to whether the idea is sufficiently different from existing recorded ideas to qualify as "original". We will return to this issue in a later chapter.
The next word to look at in our definition is "something". That "thing" may be concrete or abstract—tangible of intangible. It may be an object, as Stout and Baldwin suggest, or it may be a process, or "course of action", or "way". As we will see in subsequent chapters, both concrete and abstract entities can be treated in the same way—as "systems". When we have fully explained what a system is (in Chapter 2), we will be able to use an even more concise definition of innovation.
We now come to the last word of our definition: "useful". Usefulness is often very subjective—what may be considered useful to me may be considered useless to you. Our context for usefulness is a bit different: by useful we mean "something with a use", and by that, we mean that the intention of transforming our idea is to have something that can be applied to something else for an intended effect—it is "used for a purpose". This becomes the nub of our innovation process—our idea is about having something new that can be used for a pre-conceived purpose. Hence the saying "necessity is the mother of invention"—we perceive a need—because something is not the way that we would like it to be—and we want to change it for whatever reason. The things that we have at hand are not adequate to make the change that we want, so something new is required. Aha! I have an idea! I conceive of a "thing"—a tangible product or an intangible process—that could be "used" to make that change. But, initially, it is only an idea, which, while it only exists in my head, cannot be used—that idea must be transformed into something outside of me—an artefact or a recipe, or a combination of both—that does the job. That job, or purpose may be to beat an egg, to move a heavy stone from here to there, or to fly to the moon and back. So my idea may be an egg-beater, a wheel, or the procedures for using a Saturn rocket. It may be trivial or profound. It may, in the view of the users and observers, be radically different from anything that they have seen or known before, or it may be only a shade different, with only a marginally better performance than what already existed.
So the idea may have many new parts and or new ways of putting parts together, or it may have as few as one new part. The challenge is to make that part for the very first time and to get it to fit in with what already exists and to make all of that do something that we want done. It may be something that other people may want to buy, or it may be something for which there is no commercial market—it may be something that, once others have seen it, can be copied readily so it is pointless to try to patent it or sell it. (A good example was the discovery that house dust mite accumulate in bed linen and cause or exacerbate asthma. The idea was to get asthmatics to wash their bed linen more frequently—at least once a week. Once that process was known, then anyone could use it without paying for the advice—which was the intention of this public health innovation—for everyone with asthma to use this process for this purpose.)
Importantly, in most cases the transformation process is not simply gathering the components and putting them together. Most likely, we will need to try different components with different connections and sequences with other components to achieve the use that was the basis of our idea. We experiment. We conduct research and development. Sometimes our experiments are based on conscious reason and calculation and sometimes it is just "cut-and-try" as we don't know how to make the calculations. We often make a number of "prototypes"—attempts to make the product that fall short of being as useful as we want it to be. But in both cases we have an idea as to what we want to achieve—although sometimes we need to modify our expectations as to what our invention can achieve. This is innovation: The transformation of an idea into something useful.
In Summary
The above may seem like a long journey to a nearby destination: We have used many words to explain the meaning of a few, and we are left with the feeling that the process of definition is circular –we finish up using the same words in the definition as the words that we are trying to define. But as students of philosophy would know, that as natural language such as English contains a finite number of words, any definition must either be circular or leave some terms undefined. The best we can do is arrive at a definition that everyone feels is agreeable—it is as concise as we can make it (Ockham is satisfied) and it is common knowledge—everyone can use it with consistent results. Read the quote from Locke at the beginning of this chapter again.
In the following chapters we will show one way to improve on the use of words to provide explanations—we will use pictures—pictures that can be connected together to get a consistent understanding—a language in pictures if you like. The language of General Systems theory.
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