how new should new be?
Posted on | September 17, 2009 | 1 Comment
At a time of unprecedented change, economic challenge and technology shifts, everything is new and innovation seems to be the solution to many of our challenges.
But can the new thrive without the old? How much new can people take at once?
Once the first adopters of an innovation have latched on to something, can the rest of the world catch on without some form of help? Or as Geoffrey Moore in his excellent book, Crossing the Chasm might ask, “How can we move from Early Adopters of an innovation to the Early Majority?”
This is an interesting problem for innovation: most marketers would agree that something completely new is a difficult sell…even though marketing is all about selling something new.
In other words, innovation needs to be new, without feeling too new.
Do we need a bridge from the old way of doing things to a new way of doing things? If so, what is that bridge and how do we build it?
Let’s look at one area of innovation growth: the Internet innovation attracting the most attention these days is the explosive growth of social media networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Helium, Craigslist and Wikipedia…new Internet environments that allow people to connect and collaborate in ways never thought possible before. The book of the moment by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff describes all these social technologies as a Groundswell. This stuff is so ubiquitous, so easy-to-use and so inexpensive that more people are engaging with it at an exponential pace every day. It has become so mainstream, that many people credit these networking tools for changing the very nature of advertising, job hunting, education and the US political process.
One potential reason for why these innovative ideas became mainstream so quickly is that they aren’t really that new.
Each of these tools are in some way based upon systems that already exist, that people are already comfortable with, that are entirely familiar. Address books, bulletin boards, diaries, episodic storytelling, videos and networking have been a part of every one’s life for generations. Although these technologies are transforming our work and our lives, none of these innovations explicitly ask users to change what they are doing – instead they seem to be a simple augmentation of activities that are familiar and commonplace. And successful users of these technologies have to combine them with some sort of actual connection in the real world. A business person may keep their address book in LinkedIn, but they still call someone up to get to know them better, or share a cup of coffee with them between Twitter posts.
Another example comes from the beginning of the World Wide Web in the 1990’s, when everyone extolled the power of virtual businesses. Someday, it was assumed, there would be no more “bricks and mortar” stores – everything would be virtual. Perhaps that future is possible – but it hasn’t happened yet. Instead, there has been a gradual redefinition of retail to a hybrid that combines both the Internet and actual visits to stores. Old style retailers ranging from J.Crew to Sears, to Barnes & Noble and Best Buy discovered the power of the Internet to expand sales and communicate directly to their customers. Customers of the stores became customers on the Internet, because they found everything to be just like going to a store – even a “shopping cart” was provided.
And why am I typing this blog post with a QWERTY keyboard…
designed to help slow down a typist’s speed so that a mechanical typewriter wouldn’t jam quite so often?
As we pursue the new, it is well advised for innovators and change agents to take full advantage of the old. Innovation needs to be old as well as new, familiar as well as novel if it is to be adopted.
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September 17th, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
It all makes sense and i agree. in the art and architecture world the greatest innovators are actually admirers of the old masters and they reinterpret and reinvent ideas, subjects, techiques by recontextualizing in order to express new concepts or adapt old ones to new realities. This is all part of the importance of cultural patrimony, inheritance and history which are at the base of our knowledge. Without this patrimony we could not create and innovate.