You only need to spend a few short minutes in any educational or workplace environment, before you'll hear promotions promising 'cutting edge' and innovative learning environments producing in demand and innovative graduates.
If a workplace or organisation doesn't have marketing in play suggesting they only employ innovative and forward thinking employees to produce their world leading innovative and one of a kind service and products, I'll eat my hat.
Innovation has become a bit misunderstood.
Maybe Post-Innovation-ism is more innovative?
What is innovation?
Is it concrete? Is it subjective? Is it open to interpretation in different industries?
The Innovation Bandwagon is crammed full of New! Ideas! Creativity! Invention! One of a Kind! and with the abundant popularity of Orange is the New Black.....Cutting Edge!!!!!!
It's like the false hope buzzword fast train to hell. There's not much innovation when you get there, it's usually grey carpet, beige walls, a few desks on fire, and a smattering of employees, once 'cutting edge' graduates, now drowning fast in the lava of burnout while arguing over the actual existence of innovation (Give yourself 10 bonus points if you know what 'cutting edge' refers to without using Google, and then ask the marketing department for their version. Did they have to use Google? Has the term already been used in their marketing? I'm 99% certain the responses to those last two questions are Yes and Yes, so then, what exactly is the innovation they refer to?)
I consider innovation as a muti-layered, interdisciplinary concept, not really defined by one (ironic) idea. How do you deliver an idea, ideas, services, products, concepts, something new, theories, approaches, inventions, something different?
Consider all of the following: ideas generation and activation, creative thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, curiosity, asking questions, experimentation, adapting an existing success, streamlining an existing approach, trial and error, deconstructing complexity, reconstructing simplicity, look for a problem to solve, create a problem to solve, listen to what people complain about, collaborate, what global issues need critical intervention, how can technology offer new solutions???
All of these skills can be commonly found in neurodivergent thinking styles where critical, creative, divergent and convergent thought is dominant.
The same skills can be found in artists and scientists, who also have high neurodivergent populations, and play in both the shallow and deep ends of innovative thought and consideration by default. Try nominating a neurodivergent leader in a group collaboration task and frame the topic or challenge central to innovating, creating, and problem solving.
Innovation or the development of something innovative is often not about 'the next new thing', a 'viral trend', or a popular 'must have' fad. I gave some thought to what I considered some of the best innovations and innovative companies (before Googling)
In my first list, I had 7 from the 10 listed below (all listed in multiple top innovations of all time lists after Googling)
Language
Money
Insurance
Planes
Cars
Electricity
Antibiotics
Wheel
Clocks
Calendars
While companies large and small, globally, are mostly in business to stay in business, the attempts at innovation for 'cutting edge' (🥁🥁🐍) products and services are immeasurable. Yet, the list above doesn't have anything considered new.
This list is mostly about solving problems in communication, transportation, and health.
The invention of the light bulb (followed by a generator) by Thomas Edison revolutionised modern society, and the light bulb remains a symbol of ideas and innovation💡
Personally, as much I dislike money and the associated greed, global issues, and inequity caused by currency, I'd rate it as one of the most ingenious (and insidious) innovations of all time, followed closely by insurance. Both of these innovations are basically entirely conceptual. Essentially, you pay money on money to earn money and to spend money. It costs money to have money, and often more money than the money is worth.
It can also be completely invisible, existing only in a conversation with the bank, or as numbers on a screen. Smoke and Mirrors Level 1000. You then pay more money for insurance, to assure yourself, you wont lose too much money from any (cue fear) disaster, impending doom, or alternatively, overhyped perfectly normal and easily fixed for free, problem.
If you take the extended time required to read through any product disclosure statements, you'll find the insurance you're spending invisible but expensive money on is basically an erroneous conceptual narrative eliminating the majority of claimable incidents. This results in roughly the same odds as winning the lottery of you having an insurance company own full liability for your claim leading to you being paid anything at all.
Genius. Absolute Genie-in-a-Bottle stuff. Invisible and expensive.
Clocks and calendars will remind you to get up to go to work, to earn money to spend money, and so you don't forget which day of the working week it is when you realise you haven't seen sunlight in at least 3 solar rotations. Also handy for raising excitement levels exponentially on Saturday so you spend more money on entertainment, and for plummeting those excitement levels into the dungeon on Sunday, so you spend more money on responsibilities and requirements for the onslaught of the following working week.
Existence is Suffering - Buddah, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sideshow Bob.
My second list was simply major technology, which dominates any current top innovation list:
Computers
Telecommunications
Internet
Wi-Fi
Software
And the most innovative companies I had were:
Apple
Bic (Still winning with unchanged designs in pens and lighters)
Both of these companies solve a problem and keep it simple.
One is clever enough to invent the problem and the solution.
After Googling, I added:
Microsoft (Also proudly innovating problems and solutions)
Amazon
Tesla
The majority of the top innovative companies are still central to communication, technology, transportation, and electricity.
On the flipside of innovation I would add Japanese Chindogu.
Chindogu, again, is broadly conceptual as its own area of innovation resulting in tangible products. Chindogu roughly translates to 'Unusual Innovative Inventions' (Chin Curious/Strange & Dougu Tool/Device). Here you will find all manner of useless usefulness and problem solving creativity, packaged in weird, wired, and whack, plastic.
Who doesn't need a roll of toilet paper on a headband to blow their nose in transit, or a square watermelon to stop them rolling away🍉, or a pair of popsticks (chopsticks attached to either side of a peg resembling a mouse-trap inspired pair of tongs) very obviously re-purposed for westerners lacking inter-cultural culinary competency. Simple brilliance solving a problem for less than $1.
Please take a few minutes to Google Chindogu, if you don't laugh, check your pulse. I'm certain you will find a Chindogu multi-purpose thermometer pulse checker on Amazon for 50 cents plus $125 shipping. While checking to see if you have a Covid flavoured temperature, you can also conveniently check if you're actually dead.
Is innovation now more about 'reinventing the wheel' than new breakthrough discoveries? (Watermelons²) Apparently there is nothing new under the sun?
This module highlights innovation as conceptual, it asks more questions than I have answers to, it demonstrates that solving a problem or at least offering a temporary solution, even if it's as absurd as Chindogu, is more prevalent in innovation than just inventing something new. The latest viral TikTok dance trend didn't rate, neither did the Salted Cinnamon Latte Shampoo. Why? I thought on this for awhile.
While both are popular (social media and the illusion of decadent choice) both target consumer groupthink and gullibility with little purpose. Neither solve a problem.
Asking questions and being curious leads to innovation.
Collaboration and ideas generation and combination are also central.
Execution is the beast! Persistence, tenacity, and an ability to present complexity simplistically all matter. This blog has highlighted innovation through the lens of conceptual creativity and curiosity and explored why 'The Innovation Bandwagon' often completely misses the point, the purpose, and the destination.
#innovation #bandwagon #cuttingedge #thinkagain #chindogu #creative #creativewriting #reinventthewheel #content #copywriting
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