Book:So what is Innovation/Definitions

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The FOUNDATIONS of INNOVATION, TRANSFORMATION and CHANGE
Chapter 01: So what is Innovation?
Definitions—the ultimate party-stopper

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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.

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