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So there’s an article in Fast Company with a super provocative angle: “Just Say No To Innovation.” And I like provocative stuff, so of course I was drawn to it. But the problem is this: the definition of innovation presented (and argued against) here is the definition of the empty buzz word of the past few years, not the definition of innovation as a practice. So if you already agree that “innovation” is empty and holds no power, there’s nothing to argue against.

It devalues the real strength of industrial design by forcing an analytical structure over the process of developing a non-analytical design. Similarly, it makes engineering play design, while over-selling its value in defining the “right design”.

So rather than set the record straight about what innovation actually means (or could mean) in practice, homeboy simply suggests that we should stop innovating. Maybe I’m getting bogged down in semantics here, but innovation as I understand it is not an analytical process but a highly intuitive learn-by-doing one that requires creative folks to push forward in the dark in the hope of finding something of real value. So to tell designers to stop doing the the very thing they’re good at seems staunch the progress of commercially creative pursuits. And that’s no good for any of us.

Too be fair, the author finishes the piece by saying that more value should be given to intuition and less to innovation. Hells yes! And to go further, I’d say that intuition and innovation are similar beasts. That innovation doesn’t actually happen without intuition. The sooner you get your your clients to realize that they’ve bought not a process but a rare group of people who have the courage, creativity, humility, and perseverence to begin making a thing without knowing what it will be and who have the intuition to suddenly see it when they’ve stumbled across it, your services become way more valuable and way less common than some guaranteed proprietary process.

03/30/09 by josh kamler

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 9:22 am and is filed under Candy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.