The easiest way to tell that this isn’t me on the cover of the latest Men’s Health magazine is that I have gray hair.
But that’s not what this post is about.
This post is about some thing that you can barely read on the cover and I can barely read when it is blown up to close to actual size (over on the right). The person in the picture is evidently one of the actors in the new hit movie Twilight: Eclipse, and in this photo he’s wearing Calvin Klein Jeans.
Well this cover was the subject of this article by Joseph Plambeck talking about the fact that it’s unusual to give credit to clothing manufacturers on the cover of a magazine like that. The clothing credit is usually mentioned on the inside, and Men’s Health has apparently been doing this for some time even though they say they don’t get anything back from the clothing manufacturer for this. As the editor in chief of Men’s Health put it, it’s “an innovation” – a service to readers.
No it’s not.
The fact that Plambeck put the word innovation in quotes makes me think he feels the same way I do.
I think Roberta Garfinkle from TargetCast TCM (quoted in Plambeck’s piece) feels the same way – she said:
“They’re pushing the envelope here,” she said. “Are they tearing it? I don’t think so.”
This is a minor change, it’s not an innovation. Whether you agree with my definition of innovation (which I will get to shortly), this is a very minor change, especially given how tiny the print is. It seems like it’s every day I hear people throw the word innovation around and what they are talking about isn’t much more than a mild change, and there’s a good reason the word change is different from the word innovation. The basic dictionary definition of innovate is “to introduce as or as if new.” This is taking a piece of information and putting it in a different place. There’s nothing new there. The “what” they were doing was giving the credit (and “whats” tend to be pretty durable and not change a lot), “how” they did it changed a little bit in terms of the location of the giving of the credit.
Innovation to me means that a “how” you do something is so different that it doesn’t resemble “how” you did it before. Some examples:
1) Get cash. The ATM was an innovative way for us to get cash initially, but especially when they showed up in places that weren’t even banks
2) Watch movie. Stores like Blockbuster were innovative ways for us to get movies by renting them, and then along came Redbox (like the ATM put the video rental in another store location at an incredibly low price), and Netflix which allowed people to rent movies using the internet and mail (and now streaming video). Netflix also innovated in the areas of payment in the sense that people simply pay a flat monthly fee.
3) Buy goods. Alice.com is a company I talk about a lot because they sell consumer packaged goods over the internet at cost with free shipping. Their innovation is sharing age, gender, and ZIP code data with their advertisers (about who responds to ads and coupons) and that’s where they get all of their profits.
4) Send message. Obviously e-mail was a very different way of sending a message. No postage, but you still need an address (the e-mail address). Facebook and LinkedIn have both created a situation where you don’t even need that – as long as you know the name of the person you can send them a message even if you don’t know their e-mail address, which is really powerful.
So those are some of my examples.
Having the conversation in an organization about where innovation is needed, or where it’s the necessary response to a particular problem or opportunity is something that needs to go on, but if you have a flimsy definition of innovation, the results you get may also be pretty flimsy. So please define innovation before you start to use the word, and when you do, make sure you really are doing something new and also define it in the context of how you define other levels of change (minor change, medium change, major change, and innovation make up a good spectrum for describing the level of change). Once you have a spectrum like that, then you can get into more concrete cost/benefit discussions about what’s best for the organization.
Rethinking work is a lot easier and more successful if you have clear definitions like that.
I really couldn’t care less about the magazine or the credit (or the movie), but when I read about it in the paper, it turned out to be a decent example of an innovation that isn’t an innovation, so I decided to blow the whistle on them.
-Ric
Ric,
Great points. Anytime a word becomes a buzz word, it’s original meaning starts to expand, blur, and grey. I’ve seen innovation used to describe projects that complete something. It’s as if the completion of the project implies that someone innovated to get it done.
Innovation to me is about breaking from a previous way of thinking and delivering results in an unexpected way. Everybody wants it, but few achieve it.
Bob
Yes, and the blurring has already started with the term “cloud”
Or is it that people are still just a little bit foggy about the subject?