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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

These articles are easy to write (and upvote) but such conclusions are pretty meaningless till you have a definition of what counts as innovation. That's a very interesting question, and yet just about everyone who talks about this topic ducks it and goes instead for the easy score.

Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things that fly through the air are innovative, and invisible software isn't) is mistaken. But what would a good measure be?

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The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts. When someone tells you about the snapchat/instagram clone they are building at a startup event, you are socially obligated to smile and say something nice about it. But on the inside you wonder at an economic system that puts people through two decades of training so that they can apply their talents to such activities. Meanwhile, companies doing big things find it tough to hire as they are competing with seed funding for your own cat pictures startup.

When I moved out to Silicon Valley it was right before the Groupon IPO and hundreds of man-years were being spent on Groupon clones. Of course nobody remembers them now.

Perhaps thats part of the issue. Next time someone tells you about their Instagram clone, laugh at them. An alternative to government intervention is a cultural shift, a change in what society holds in high regards. If we all start laughing at clones, people might stop making them.

I'm not sure that's really an improvement. One of the nice things about Silicon Valley is that ideas that are laughed at elsewhere are taken seriously here. And a lot of the time, the people doing the laughing end up eating their words later.

Remember that the search engine market was crowded and considered a commodity backwater when Google entered it; all the smart money was betting on portals. The cloud storage market was crowded and considered a commodity backwater when DropBox entered it. The PC market was crowded and full of hobbyists and also-rans when Apple entered it. In each case, they did things enough better than everyone else that everyone forgot that there'd ever been competitors.

Except this time people are laughing because everyone else is doing it instead of what most of the rest of the world does, which is laugh at you because they think it's impossible or not worth trying because it's so risky.

Apple is an exception and had a clear idea of how they were going to do things differently. If you were to come up to me and say you were starting a smart phone company without a concrete idea (and the previous experience or intelligence to back it up) of how you were going to do things differently or how you were going to make an affordable phone without the scale of Apple or Motorola, I think I would laugh.

I'm talking about Apple in 1977, not Apple in 2007. At the time, most of the innovations that made them popular (Woz's wizardry with color displays, the floppy disk controller, the strategy of selling for large discounts to schools, and certainly the Xerox PARC visit) were way off in the future.

Google and DropBox were also laughed at because it was what a number of other companies were doing, not because what they were attempting was technologically impossible. Most outsiders had no idea that what Google was doing was technologically impossible, because, well, they heard "search engine" and thought "AltaVista".

It's the nature of innovation that you figure things out as you go along. If you have all the answers when you start, you're not innovating. And that implies that you have to start somewhere, usually where a bunch of other people are starting, and so of course things will be crowded when you're just a startup. It's all the stuff that happens in-between being an Instagram clone and going public with a wildly different product that matters.

The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts.

That is exactly the problem. Nothing is less the product of systematic analysis than what you call an "unspoken thought." "Speak our unspoken thoughts" is a nicer way of saying "appeal to our unexamined prejudices."

They may be prejudices, but I don't think that they're unexamined.

I like Yvon Chouinard's definition of innovation, which I'll paraphrase as: Invention is the creation of new things, and innovation is the application of inventions to solve problems for lots of people.

I like this definition because I think it accomodates the fact that a lot of products that are obviously inventive, fail to succeed in the marketplace or change many people's lives. Examples include Google Wave, the Apple Newton, etc. It also accomodates companies like Apple today, which do succeed in the marketplace and change many people's lives, despite inventing very few things themselves.

So when we look at the state of Silicon Valley today we can see that there are companies like Apple and Facebook that are innovative despite not being inventive. And then there are initiatives like Google's glasses and self-driving car that, while incredibly inventive, can't really be considered innovative (at least not yet).

"But what would a good measure be?"

I think it's important to realize in answering that question a few things.

a) The answer to the question isn't digital (black and white) it's analog. It's a matter of degree and relative to the thing being considered. Curing cancer - say, up near 100. Cat photo app, say, down near 0. And everything in between. (Numbers arbitrary to make a point.)

b) Most people could probably have an easier time (like identifying porn) with what isn't innovation than defining what is innovation.

c) Daniel Markham's points regarding sometimes meaningless things lead to important things.

Lastly, none of this matters. If you are in high school it's a sure bet you will attract women and attention (at that age) as the high school quarterback even if you have average looks. People arguing that the system should change and the guy with glasses who will be a much better catch down the road won't get anyone anywhere. Things are the way they are for a reason.

I suspect that YC invests in the best situations they can find given a pool of applicants applying your patterns etc and knowledge of the past. Questions posed by this article (and some of the comments here) assume that markets operate together in collusion for the common good. They don't. If they did it would be relatively easy to get food companies to stop pushing valueless tasty food on the public as well.

> Cat photo app, say, down near 0.

Even this is obscuring the truth somewhat. Last year (?) an IT person in charge of xvideos.com (porn site) noted that they had deployed a technology stack further than it had been done before. This increased confidence in said stack for others, which could have all sorts of ripple effects that eventually lead to making an amazing innovation.

But the issue isn't that people are doing these incremental things. The issue is that they claim to be doing more than that, and they aren't. They're claiming to cure cancer by buying knick-knacks in Hungary which are taxed and the money used to pay for the electric grid powering the hospital where a patient with cancer is staying and occasionally gets visited by his son who happens to be researching a cure for cancer.

At some point, you can't take credit any more. Take a page out of other industries' books. Just shut up about innovation and focus on quality.

Likewise these articles are easy to dismiss if you're too far into the SV bubble. Maybe you can qualify why this article is meaningless and answer its points instead of waiving it off? Otherwise you seem to have an unexamined prejudice against criticisms of the venture capital community's funding choices.

By the very nature of innovation you can't define what it is just like you can't ever say for certain whether some abstract piece of pure mathematics will ever contribute to engineering or science (as it very often has). However, like mathematicians we can make educated guesses on what IS NOT relevant or innovative, and by extension will never be relevant or innovative. And of course we will be wrong some times.

The very fact that you think there is a "right way" to "measure" innovation makes me think this article is pretty spot on. Innovation isn't a business, it's not a product or a user base, it's not a stock ticker. More often than not, innovation is the result of thousands, if not millions, of man-hours of passionate and extremely intelligent people who care about their work and want to ACHIEVE something that is currently impossible, impractical, or even undesirable. You can't measure or predict this, all you can do is find those passionate, intelligent people (here's where the measurement part sort of comes in) and give them the resources and support to do something great.

The point of the article is that last part is not happening. There are so many passionate and intelligent people in the Valley but almost no one is giving them the chance to do something great.

I think new economies is a good proxy. The computer invented an entirely new economy. So did the automobile, computer networking, television, radio, the telegraph, electricity, air travel, moving pictures, recorded audio, the light bulb, washing machine, dishwasher, etc. All of these things created not just the immediate industry, but an entire ecosystem of products and services related to the industry.

You could probably also measure it in terms of essential inventions: we can't live without the internet, but if Instagram or Facebook went away tomorrow, we'd have lots of alternatives for sharing photos and talking to our friends. Instagram and Facebook make those things nicer, but don't allow us to do anything we weren't doing before. The internet (or, I guess, the web) allowed for entirely new forms of communication and commerce.

From my perspective, we haven't seen a new economy emerge in the last decade, at least. The internet (maybe molecular biology) was the last invention to really create a new industry, and that was the mid-90s. Maybe robotics is the next one, but it's hard to tell prospectively.

By that standard, surely Airbnb is a "new economy". And Google certainly qualifies, given the number of firms dedicated to nothing but optimizing AdWords.

I don't know about AirBnB. People have been renting rooms for as long as they've been traveling, and vacation rentals existed long before AirBnB existed -- but they certainly make things more efficient than the way they used to be. That said, if I'm counting "washing machines", then perhaps AirBnB should count, too (or anything that increases efficiency of a thing we already do by an order of magnitude; it's an interesting debate, and I'm not sure which side I'm on).

I agree with you on AdWords, though. That was really the first time advertising was made quantifiable on a large scale (the innovation), and it resulted in a new industry.

1) Life expectancy.

2) 10-year moving average of the duration of subsistence living expenses that can be funded from a fixed weight of gold.

Both of these are very high level measures that fold in a lot of underlying technological progress. (1) is weighted towards computation and biotech, (2) against mining and expansion into space (would have to be weighted somehow there to be useful much past the next 20 years), but both encompass far more than that.

Both incorporate advantages provided by fluff technologies such as networking tools, but so many levels removed that we don't have to stop arguing over whether they should be dropped in a well or not. This may or may not be a benefit from your point of view.

Why gold? Gold is a highly volatile commodity and not particularly correlated to inflation.

I like Clay Christensen's model for innovation [1]. He has a top level categorization of sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.

Sustaining innovations are about making products in existing markets better and are further broken down into continuous innovation and discontinuous or radical innovations. The metrics here are about if the new innovation is improving performance within an existing market and by existing value metrics, and by how much. Continuous innovations are small improvements, radical innovations are large improvements.

Disruptive innovations are also broken down into two categories. There is the low end disruption whereby a product is competing in the same space as existing ones, but comes in from below. These are often cheaper and worse to start with, but then move up market as technology improves. There are many examples here (eg Arm coming in under x86). The other disruptive innovation is the new market innovation. In Christensen's terminology, these products compete against non-competition. There is a need, but no products fullfils that need until the disruption comes along. These products are tricky for several reasons. For one, there is no existing market and therefore traditional market research doesn't work. Instead, the execution plan needs to be focused on learning what the market is and what the customer needs are.

1] The series of books starting with the Innovator's Dilemma are a good read on innovation. The wikipedia article is a pretty good overview as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

PG - I recently read a great article on measuring innovation from CIO. I've linked below to share:

http://www.cio.com/article/628054/How_Do_You_Measure_Innovat...

I want to call out how they discuss innovation: Ultimately, innovation is a means to an end — a competence for generating profitable growth opportunities and improving the organization's competitiveness. A holistic measurement system needs to have three perspectives: performance, strength of the competence, and strategic application of the competence. The performance perspectives report out the "returns" or "results" of an organization's innovation program(s) while the competence perspectives report out the ability to envision and implement innovative opportunities. The strategy perspective outlines the criticality and impact of innovation in the organization's strategic direction.

Hopefully we can get some good discussion going on this topic as in my day-to-day work, we frequently discuss with large enterprise customers how they handle change management. Frequently we discuss it in the context of IPM (innovation process management) and how to create organizations that benefit from managing innovation; and more broadly speaking, what types of software or tools they need to successfully handle this change.

It's true. But also somewhat reminiscent of the "What is a startup?" discussion a few months back which was inconclusive. It seems "everyone knows what it is but no one can explain it" But to take a stab at it I'd say the level of innovation is directly tied to the amount of economic improvement and/or life improvement that results. Internet = huge change in economic efficiencies and life improvement. ("Life improvement" would have to be related to time free'ed up to spend on other goals) Mobile the same.

I used to view innovation as: making it possible to do something that wasn't possible before (going from 0 to 1). But under that definition alone, SpaceX would not be very innovative. It's just sometimes when you go from 1 to N but the N is so large (like SpaceX case) it's probably a different kind of innovation. And by making the N that large, it's starts to look a lot like 0-1 and new opportunities arise, like the chance of getting to Mars (which is definitely 0-1)

There are certain fields where everything is pretty much 0 to 1.

Designing a nuclear reactor or an orbital rocket is an incredible feat of engineering, even if you have half a century or more of work to fall back on.

Like all attempts to objectify the subjective, the analysis usually fall short and can be easily gamed. For example, large tech firms such as SAP say they are more innovative because the amount of R&D money they spend. I don't think it's worth putting the term 'innovation' on a measuring stick.

I would say that delta on how people live their daily lives (maybe in time-affected or some other similar metric) is probably close.

For an answer here, see

     http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5353799

For a more direct answer:

Pick a problem that needs solving. For the solution, use 'innovation'.

Then want the 'innovation' to be ideas, essentially applied research, that can be presented and evaluated usually just on paper. So, as in peer-reviewed published papers, the ideas should be "new, correct, and significant", and, for innovation in business, powerful and valuable for solving the problem. Moreover, we should be able to check these criteria mostly just on paper.

Then we measure the innovation by the ROI of the solution it provides.

Is that the only way to make money? No.

But this approach to innovation has one heck of a good track record for delivering terrific solutions for challenging problems via the US DoD since the start of WWII, and there the batting average is much higher than for information technology venture capital.

Moreover, and definitely should not be lost, and for 70 years has been understood with great clarity by both the US DoD and Congress, the real foundations of such innovation are pure and applied research as in our top two dozen or so US research universities (where about 60% of the annual budget comes from NSF and NIH for US national security and health care) with more in Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (the FFRDCs) and then more at Raytheon, United Technologies, GE, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Hughes Electronics, etc. In total, Congress authorizes big bucks for all that work, and Congress 'gets it'. However, Silicon Valley wants to laugh at research and then turn and run away afraid of it.

US information technology (IT) venture capital has had a 'business model': Wait for 'traction' to be significant and growing rapidly but, still, for some reason or other, the company still not very profitable, and hope that then the founders will need money for the 'big build out', hiring bizdev and marketing people, setting up the sales force in the 'channels', etc. for the 'execution', or be so eager for "cash now" for 'the good life' that they will sign a bad business deal. Alas, as reported at AVC.COM recently, the ROI has been lower than an index fund.

Also there is an incongruity: A small information technology startup with traction significant and growing rapidly is in a much better position than millions of US Main Street entrepreneurs who make it without an expensive 'build-out' with bizdev, marketing, channel people, business expertise from former management consultants, etc.

For venture partners able to evaluate innovation, i.e., applied research, just on paper, YC is exceptionally good. Then there's Wegner at Union Square, Morgan at First Round, Metcalf at Polaris, Bayless at Sevin-Rosen, and a few more. There are, what, all together in all of the US, 20?

And then there is the list of venture partners who prefer to invest in college dropouts.

In college, at universities, at several laboratories, at GE, IBM, JHU/APL, and more, I have worked with many people good at doing and evaluating applied research. Alas in US venture capital, that list of 20 is about all I can find that is comparable.

With the ROI south of the index funds, it looks like there will be some changes that Darwin would understand.

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