Unquiet

[This Salon blog post on innovation][1], especially the diagram of the “innovation process model” at the top, struck me as a perfect illustration of why big enterprise often just doesn’t get innovation and creativity.

[1]:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/10/04.html#a1293

The axiom goes: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Steve Jobs said “[Stay hungry. Stay foolish.][2]” to Stanford grads this year, also urging them:

>Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

[2]: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

How does this mesh with the corporate culture that __loves__ boxes and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one? How does this fit in with an environment designed to maximize profits not by continual innovation but by risk management?

When you start to see innovation as a process model, you’ve abstracted it too far. Creativity and necessity are the sole true drivers of real innovation. What comes out of user focus sessions and shareholder wisdom and ‘think ahead’ meetings is pie-in-the-sky ‘wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if’ enhancements that don’t really mean much for _real world use_.

I’m currently working on several personal projects that I’m passionate about, that I really believe will provide valuable services to my peers. But if I were a part of a large company, would they pay for this work? I doubt it; by the time they fleshed out a full business model for these projects, most of the creativity would have been replaced with dollar signs. But I’m not held accountable to anyone but myself for this work; the investment, for me, will certainly pay off more than I pay in.

Innovation and creativity find the most freedom in environments where they are not constrained by initial limits; we’re seeing a number of hobbyists, generalists and small companies churning out great little ideas (and sometimes big ones too!) for tiny amounts of initial outlay. In these environments, ideas come fast and furious.

But you can’t force the process. What that diagram shows is not innovation or creativity, but a process for incremental product evolution. That’s good too. But it’s not going to _save the world._