Whither Innovation?
Innovation, it seems, is all the rage. The final Digital Britain report refers to it no less than 76 times (compared to 5 mentions of the word ‘museum’) - although to be fair this compares pretty favourably to the 91 mentions of ‘users’ and 80 of ‘value’.
Reading through the report, it is clear that whatever the unique selling point of UK Plc may be, much of it rests on our ability to innovate - to generate new ideas, techniques, products and business models. The real economics of the Digital Economy are opaque at best, but they certainly seem to depend on monetising both our ability to generate new Intellectual Property and our first-mover advantage (such as it may be) in fields from gaming to infrastructure and possibly even culture.
This is, itself, no bad thing. The UK has a long heritage of boffinry and invention and our contribution to the global advancement both of technology and humanity (give or take some expansionist Colonial behaviour) has consistently outpaced our size and the scale of our public investment.
But there is also a risk in placing too much emphasis on innovation. Innovation is fluid, heterogenous and dependent on momentum. It leaves the humdrum work of generating real, stable services to those who trail in its wake. It doesn’t have to think about sustainability and user-support because it is a locomotive driven by the relentless force of progress.
The reason I have been thinking about this lately is that I have been involved in the assessment process for a Government funding programme. Among the many criteria for the programme was that the proposals should demonstrate ‘innovation’.
But what does innovation look like? Here were almost 200 proposals setting out ambitious programmes of work using social media, mashups, interoperable data, computer console interfaces and the like. All of them were good projects. Not one of them did anything which hadn’t been done before, broke new technological ground or significantly advanced the collective fund of knowledge. All of them, without exception, claimed to be ‘innovative’.
I happened to be discussing this with a senior academic specialising in the frontiers of interface design. He spoke of haptics which use temperature to refine the sensation of virtual objects, of smart gels and new ways of using social media to generate more telling forms of evaluation. Here was true innovation, but none of it is ready to be applied to the current generation of real-world services.
It seems to me that in pursuing innovation, we are doing a disservice to the process which takes these new ideas and turns them into something usable, stable and profitable (in every sense of the word). Perhaps we should be thinking about funding programmes which prize not innovation, but stability and the use of technologies which, despite being 2-3 years old, are accessible and familiar to a critical mass of real-world audiences?
