What is an innovation? Is it doing something new, or is it a new way to do something familiar? Or is it both?
Recently Mary Tripsas of the Harvard Business School wrote an article that appeared in The New York Times. The article “It’s Brand New, but Make It Sound Familiar” suggests that it’s more the latter, and that because of that, when people introduce the new way of “how” we do something, for it to catch on, people need to associate it with the other way of doing it.
Tripsas takes us back to the introduction of the automobile and says that people didn’t at first understand why they would want a car, until someone came up with the phrase “horseless carriage” as a way to explain what the car was displacing. I guess it was a lot easier for people to see the value of air travel since there are no equivalently outdated expressions for that.
When I write about innovation, I describe it as coming up with a new way to do something in a way that doesn’t resemble the way it was done before. In other words, you can change how something is accomplished, but if it’s still pretty much the same “how” it’s done, then it’s just a change, it’s not an innovation. Checking in for flights using the internet as opposed to face-to-face with an airline employee at the airport meets that definition of innovation, as does renting movies through the internet versus going to a store location.
What’s the dichotomy? You want to showcase this innovation, but in order for people to make the connection about why they care, you have to link it to the old, boring (current) way it’s done.
Renting videos over the internet instead of going to the store is a pretty good example of simply finding a much better “how” to accomplish “what” the customer wants, which is to rent a movie. An innovation in the simplest sense. The car on the other hand is in a more complex category of innovation (and there are many others like it but I will stick with it for continuity) where the innovation did in fact do what the carriage could do, but it also enabled things that were impossible, even unimaginable in carriage days. Carriages were comparatively slow and as a consequence, people could only accomplish a limited amount of travel in a given day. Even with early models of cars, people were able to not only be more efficient with their time, they became able to make trips they wouldn’t have imagined making with carriages. On a typical day I will take my son to school (5 miles) ,drive to work (20 miles), work at my office for six hours, go back to the school (20 miles), go to a grocery store (5 miles), drive to have dinner friends (7 miles) and be home by 8:00 and that’s not even a hectic day. Unless we lived in a small town, which we do not, nothing like that was possible with a carriage, and it gets into our heads when we think about planning our day – our notion of what is possible is radically different from carriage days.
I think it’s uncontroversial to say that e-mail (and to an extent instant messages) is a similar type of innovation where it did in fact replace some forms of communication such as memoranda, but it has also grown into so much more than that in a way that we can stay in constant touch with the people we want to.
I say this often, but I happen to think social networking is going to fall into this same category. Facebook and Twitter have already had a transformational effect on how some groups connect and communicate, but my expectation is that it’s going to continue to evolve, in good ways and in bad in ways most of us can’t even imagine yet. Can you imagine trying to explain a fax to someone who doesn’t know what a phone is – there’s nothing familiar to get them there? I think that’s where we will be with social networking in ten years. Today we are the ones who don’t know what a phone is.
-Ric
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