Innovation
“Designers shouldn’t accept false suggestions from the market. The market never suggests anything good.” — Michele De Lucchi
What is innovation?
It seems that everyday new products and services are being touted as innovative, but are they really?
I would like to propose a framework to understand and recognize innovation.
Innovation should be:
Useful
It solves a real problem.
Cultural
It needs to change the prevailing culture, allowing people to adopt a new set of behaviors.
One way
Once you have used the innovation you cannot imagine going back to the way things were.
The Washing machine.
The first washing machine was invented around 1800, and 1858 saw the introduction of the rotary-powered washing machine. It has changed the lives of millions maybe even billions of people by taking something that was incredibly laborious and making it relatively easy. Yet the innovation of this product did not stop there. It had a tremendous cultural impact; by reducing the extraordinary time and labor of keeping clothing clean (time and labor almost always belonging to women) the washing machine enabled more women to enter the paid labor force, and by doing so was part of constructing the culture we live in today. (See Ha-Joon Chang’s book for more.) The humble washing machine had effects way beyond its function and has in some ways completely changed the world.
This collection of articles critically looks at our current culture of innovation.
The Army of Technological Slaves
That is Benedikt’s call, cited above: take advantage of the machines, they are made for this! And that means: also creative professionals, mind workers, editors, journalists, should think like hackers. Hacker for me is a neutral to positive term. Hacker make use of technology as completely as possible. Like the famous investigative journalists, they don’t let themselves hold up by arbitrary rules which are supposed to tell us, how we should use information.
Source : Slow media
iOS app success is a lottery: 60% (or more) of developers don’t break even
“The App Store is very much like the lottery, and very few companies are topping the charts,” Kafasis told Ars. “It’s a hit-based business. Much like music or book sales, there are a few huge winners, a bigger handful of minor successes, and a whole lot of failures.”
Source : Ars Technica
The One Thing CEOs Need to Learn from Apple
Jobs said in an interview with Betsy Morris in 2008, “People think focus means saying ‘yes’ to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”
Source : HBR
When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End?
Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”
Source : HBR
Redefining Development through Innovative Governance
by referendum — of a new Constitution that approaches development not as an end, but as a means of achieving a collective state of “Buen Vivir” (Good Living), or “Sumak Kausay” in Kichwa. The concept is rooted in aboriginal philosophy, emphasizing environmental conservation and social organization based on mutual solidarity. It is evident in Ecuador’s constitutional support for human rights and nature’s “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate.”
Source : Polis
