After 25 Years Studying Innovation, Here Is What I Have Learned

That word is wantrepreneur. IIRC Mark Cuban used it and I've heard it before because there are a lot of Gold Rush types who flock to Silicon Valley who talk a lot but don't walk-the-walk of hack or hustle very much. I like to see that people are serious: coding or working all night, after their day job, quit to work with a coworker, or deploying a new feature while at airport layover between flights.. not just BSing at a bar or coffeeshop about their great "idea" they haven't tried to make or sell in the real world. The world doesn't need anymore "idea guys/gals," it needs more people trying things and being unreasonably motivated and unsatisfied with the world as-is... and comfortable with discomfort to keep learning from mistakes.

It, and most bizword mission statements, boil down to honesty of effort and self-description labels. And I'm not a "hacker" and I'm not an "entrepreneur," because those are too bold and too easy to claim without widely-known genuine, unforgeable signals.

You are putting the word “innovation” on a pedestal. There is no clearly defined threshold above which a new application of a product, process, or idea must pass before it can be called “innovative”, and how innovative something is depends strongly on context. What seems like a triviality to one person might well be an innovation to someone else.

There are many places and contexts where people are doing incredibly stupid or inefficient things, and the application of simple centuries-old or apparently obvious ideas might well qualify as “innovation”.

For example, consistently using paper checklists in a hospital has a huge impact. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

Frankly, I've become very wary of "real" innovation, the kind of "disruptive" innovation that the VCs chase after. All too often, that kind of innovation involves my data being winkled out of me and sold to the highest bidder. It involves some schlub working for minimum wage with no benefits and no job security. It involves a diverse and competitive industry being obliterated by one or two dot-com behemoths. It involves one thing becoming more efficient, at the expense of thousands of lives becoming less autonomous.

Innovation has always had externalities and unexpected downsides, but never in my lifetime has it felt so overtly predatory. It seems like the robber barons of the 19th century have returned, only this time they wear branded hoodies and give TED talks. One of those robber barons literally argues that monopolies are good for society.

> Is there a term for words that only really make sense retrospectively or maybe should be prefixed by "trying to" in the present tense?

“Aspirational” comes to mind

Affectation.

>But maybe that's overly paranoid, because it looks like they also have an Innovation Kitchen[2].

our BigCo has Innovation everything and everywhere. Recently we were trained on the process of creating and managing innovation - looks like a bastard chimeric child of Agile/Scrum and Six Sigma (no innovation here though :). And it seems like our marketing&sales is on verge of starting to sell pure innovation to customers who are already primed up by the current high-tech innovation hype-mania.

Why? I think it's a beautiful thing to try and focus on helping other people.

I grew up Mormon, and Clayton Christensen was always regarded as one of the examples of "look, Mormon doing things in the real world!" next to Steve Young, Mitt Romney, the Osmonds, and others.

As a Mormon my view was that god comes before self. God, really, comes before everything. I think that is still the case with most Mormons.

Eh, I think focusing on helping others over prestige and external acclaim is a healthy way to approach the world, no matter how you come to that conclusion.

Why would you say that?

Even as someone who is not religious I think he makes quite an interesting argument for the metric used by many to measure success.

Thank you for saving me my time.

For 25+ years, he got a lot of fame and fortune from some sophomoric, simplistic observations.

His thinking is so simplistic that he fails to see how simplistic it is.

Then on "confused", well, he is simplistic and, in particular, concludes that the world is as simplistic as his observations, concludes that the universe and God are nearly that simplistic, so is willing to believe his stuff about God.

E.g., his description of the roles of data are absurdly simplistic. Look, Clayton guy, you have not even started even to scratch the surface of the nature, role, power, value, importance of data.

Also Clayton, your view of innovation is too simplistic and fails to cover all the more important cases of innovation funded since 1940 by the US DoD, NSF, NIH, NASA, DoE, and more and the work of, say, Viterbi at QUALCOMM, and the rest of the STEM fields.

If the concept of God offends you, replace it with "truth" or with "any entity / program / algorithm that can accurately measure the contributions I make".

When we acclaim someone we're praising them because of their contributions. Because our minds are finite, we use heuristics / proxies to measure those contributions. And those heuristics can be arbitrarily poor.

To put it in words you might like better, I think what he's saying here is that if he were going to write an algorithm that measures his success, he would have it measure how much he helped each person. Because the supercomputer running the algorithm is better at details than we are, it could bypass the often-misleading heuristics / proxies and measure his contributions directly.

When we're looking at our own lives, we have more detail available than when we look at others lives. So why not try to skip the proxies and optimize on the core concept?

I'm an atheist and my default reaction to any talk of knowing what God wants normally makes me bristle. I also believe that intentions matter and in this case they are good.

Here's a wonderful short piece by Andy Weir (who wrote The Martian) that I am in love with and resonates with the very bit that you disliked. It's worth 2 minutes of your time:

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

> cliche-ridden

hmmm. have you read his book "The Innovator’s Dilemma" ? I was shocked that it's already 25 years old. I think it maybe be the seminal book on disruptive innovation. Low-end disruption, new-market disruption, "job to be done" AFAIK - those are all Christensen.

If there's cliches there - I suspect they came about in the shadow of his body of work over the years.

I somehow had no problem with the usage of God and found it pretty effective, infact, maybe the other alternative you suggest seem a little obscure.

haha. There's a name for that. "Innovation theater". Happens in many large companies.

Christensen's Harvard colleague Rebecca Henderson has done some research how the organizational structure of big companies gets in the way and prevents them from re-organizing around innovations. Tim Harford has an interesting article on the subject: http://timharford.com/2018/10/why-big-companies-squander-bri...

I think I know what you're getting at; I'd like to read a much better comment than this one explaining what you see as the core truth of what the author is saying.