Speed of Innovation
If you take a look around you, you will probably find all means of technological devices that were not available 20 years ago. For example, the cell phone in your pocket, the laptop sitting somewhere near you, or that sleek LCD screen you’ve got sitting on your desk. Even more mundane, what about 1000 songs in your pocket? Was that possible 20 years ago? What about the plasma TV you’ve either got sitting in your living room right now or sitting somewhere at Best Buy’s just waiting for you to buy it?
Technology moves fast. We are finding more and better ways of staying digital, staying connected. But is that really innovation? How do you define “innovation”, and do you find it to be inherantly different from “technology”? In my opinion, innovation is something that is decoupled from technology and, relatively speaking, innovation moves slower than its more tangible counterpart.
Better. Thinner. Faster. Prettier. These are characteristics of technology. Technology makes available all sorts of possibilities to our world. As a result, we have so many more ways of doing the same thing. We’re able to make our computers run faster, make our monitors sleeker, make our batteries last longer, and make our world spin just a bit more hectically. We can now carry gigabytes in small capsules rather than megabytes. We’ve got GPUs outdoing one another almost monthly. When it comes to technology, there is no such thing as pace. Humankind is on a tear and we cannot stop ourselves from outdoing our current status with bigger numbers, smaller delays, and better devices.
But that does not mean we are innovating. All the characteristics of technology are orthogonal to the characteristic of innovation: Difference. Surprisingly though, as the pace of technology picks up, the pace of innovation is more or less unaffected. I like to attribute this to simple reasons, the most obvious of which is that cultures simply cannot adjust to a fast rate of innovation turnover. Instead, we as humans are more comfortable with incremental changes that, in the overall picture of things, lead to an annuity of innovative income. Fortunately, we are usually open to innovation as we are generally happy to embrace change when it is beneficial. However, the way I see it, innovation is not at a premium in our society. Sometimes we’re just stuck in a rut trying to make it faster, thinner, or smaller that we forget to make it different.
It’s hard to qualify in words exactly what we look for when we search for innovation - all we know is that when we see it, we say, “Wow, that will change the way I live.” If not to that extreme, innovation will general open some channels in your mind when you encounter it. With the pace of technology setting such a open canvas, here’s to hoping we’ll begin to see the artists of innovation pick up a brush.