Book review: The Myths of Innovation

Some books let you leaf back and forth and keep finding new sources of inspiration. The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun is exactly that kind of book. Its main subject is innovation and the myths around it. Any of us can innovate, in the sense of making significant positive changes, and this book will convince you of that by dismantling ten of the biggest myths. I'd recommend it if your work is even a little creative or if you feel stuck in a rut.

Divine inspiration

Many people believe that brilliant ideas, inventions or whatever you prefer to call them come from divine inspiration. An example is close at hand. How would you answer if I asked how Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity? Most of us have had the story of an apple falling on his head fixed in our minds since school. Then there are the other twenty years of work Newton spent studying the stars and observing the planets and nature in general. The apple story satisfies the romantics in us, but it's hard to call it the main event that led to the discovery of gravity. The Egyptians were already looking into gravity, by the way. If innovations have anything in common, it's that they never come from divine inspiration. Expect endless hours of hard work, mistakes and small successes instead of romance.

Nearly every major innovation of the 20th century took place without claims of epiphany. The World Wide Web, the web browser, the computer mouse, and the search engine — four pivotal developments in the history of business and technology — all involved long sequences of innovation, experimentation, and discovery.

We understand the history of innovation

The myth here is that everything looks clear when you look back at history. Take the arrival of cars with internal combustion engines. From today's perspective, the car seems like the natural next step in the technological revolution. Innovation never follows the straight line we see in hindsight. Its course is unpredictable and depends on economic factors as well as technical ones.

There’s a guaranteed way to innovate

The myth of methodology, in short form, is the belief that a playbook exists for innovation and it removes risk from the process of finding new ideas

There is no guaranteed method. There are only different things that can set innovation in motion.

• Necessity — Someone needed something specific that wasn't available. The innovator was driven by their own needs. McDonald's is a good example… The founders of McDonald’s developed a system for fast food production to simplify the management of their local homespun hamburger stand.
• Money and wealth — The founders of many great companies initially planned to sell their ideas and designs to larger corporations but, unable to sell, reluctantly chose to go it alone. Google tried to sell to Yahoo! and AltaVista, Apple to HP and Atari, and Carslon (photocopier inventor) to nearly every corporation he could found.
• A side effect — Percy Spencer, who invented the microwave oven, was working on radar. Something odd happened while he was working on it. A bar in his pocket melted. Curious as he was, he couldn't leave it alone and started experimenting. First he tried putting coffee beans near the radar to see what would happen. When he found they had roasted, he started looking into the cause and later experimented with microwave radiation. It took another two years for the first microwave oven to be introduced.
• Curiosity or a hobby — Linux is an example. Curiosity Many innovations begin with bright minds following their personal interests. The ambition is to pass time, learn something new, or have fun.

People love new ideas

The love of new ideas is a myth: we prefer ideas only after others have tested them. We confuse truly new ideas with good ideas that have already been proven, which just happen to be new to us.

The more radical an idea is, the harder it is to get people to adopt it. People dislike change unless they have a good reason for it. That's smart of us. Nobody wants to be a guinea pig. That's why we read reviews and look online for accounts of people's experiences and recommendations.

We reuse ideas and opinions all the time, rarely committing to the truly new. But we should be proud; it’s smart. Why not recycle good ideas and information? Why not take advantage of the conclusions other people have made to efficiently separate what’s good and safe from what’s bad and dangerous? Innovation is expensive: no one wants to pay the price for ideas that turn out to be not quite ready for prime time.

Overcoming the fear of change is one thing innovators have to contend with. It makes no difference whether they're trying to address famine in Africa or improve your development process.

How much effort is required to transition from the current thing to the innovation? If this cost is greater than the relative advantage, most people won’t try the innovation. These costs include people’s value systems, finances, habits, or personal beliefs. Rogers describes a Peruvian village that rejected the innovation of boiling water because of cultural beliefs that hot foods were only for sick people. You could argue all you wanted about the great benefits of boiling water, but if a religious or cultural belief forbids it, you’re wasting your breath. Technological compatibility is only part of what makes an innovation spread: the innovation has to be compatible with habits, beliefs, values, and lifestyles.

The lone inventor

The picture of an inventor living on salt and crusts in a dark room littered with papers, making a great discovery alone, is more romantic than realistic. All innovations today build on innovations that already exist. We often associate an innovation with one person, product or company even though the innovation or product had existed for a long time. You've probably taken part in at least one learned debate over whether Android or iPhone is better, who stole whose ideas and who came first. In reality, probably neither was first. We tend to associate everything with them because they became dominant. The mobile phone and the personal computer arose from many innovations that came before them.

Good ideas are hard to find

People are creative by nature. Unfortunately the system we live in tends to suppress creativity. The myth is that good ideas are hard to find. They aren't. The problem is that most of the time we do nothing to find them. For most people, creativity goes no further than assembling IKEA furniture.

…advance of civilization, creativity may have moved, for many, to the sidelines. Idea reuse is so easy — in the form of products, machines, websites, and services — that people are enabled to go for years without finding ideas on their own. Modern businesses thrive on selling prepackaged meals, clothes, holidays, entertainments, and experiences, tempting people to buy convenience rather than make things themselves. I don’t believe everyone should make everything themselves, or even most things. But I do believe everyone has the capacity to enjoy creating something, and the temptation for convenience inhibits many people from discovering what it is they’d like to make. Passive consumption of television and the Web has absorbed time we could be using for active hobbies and pastimes, age-old places for nurturing our creative selves.

Einstein said, “ Imagination is more important than knowledge,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find schools or corporations that invest in people with those priorities. The systems of education and professional life, similar by design, push the idea-finding habits of fun and play to the corners of our minds, training us out of our creativity. We reward conformance of mind, not independent thought, in our systems — from school to college to the workplace to the home — yet we wonder why so few are willing to take creative risks. The truth is that we all have innate skills for solving problems and finding ideas: we’ve just lost our way.

Your boss knows more about innovation

The book gives a good example. Do you think a great innovator would do as well if they had to work in your environment? Imagine Steve Wozniak trying to wade through your company's bureaucracy. If you think his innovations would be doomed there, what chance do you have? In general, command and control makes for a poor environment for innovation.

Despite how progressive some modern management programs are, their roots are in a tradition most unkind to innovation. Management as a discipline is steeped in an old-school command and control attitude that is alive and well in the Internet Age.

What caught my attention in the description of a creative environment was that the author arrived at much the same conclusions I read in Team Geek (see my review). So I'll just recap the points: learn from mistakes, put the team together, protect it and support ideas.

The best idea wins

In the history of innovation, you can find plenty of cases where the best idea didn't win. What wins is the idea, or more precisely its implementation, that best fits the cultural, economic and political circumstances at the time.

The goodness or newness of an idea is only part of the system that determines which ideas win or lose. When we bemoan our favorite restaurant going out of business (“But they make the best cannelloni!”) or why our favorite band can’t sell albums (“They have the best lyrics!”), we’re focusing on a small part of the picture that affects us personally, which is only one factor in the circumstances determining its fate. These environmental, or secondary, factors have as much influence as the quality of the idea, talent, or innovation itself.

Problems and solutions

I'm not sure how much of a myth this is, but in this chapter the author deals with the difference between a problem and a solution. Perhaps the myth is the assumption that innovators spend most of their time solving the problem, when in fact they spend a great deal of it studying and defining it. I often see the opposite approach, where we solve a problem that doesn't exist or is the consequence of another problem. That usually leads to disappointment. If we can define the problem, we can look for ways to solve it.

Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions. There are many ways to look at any problem, and realizing a problem is often the first step toward a creative solution.

Innovation is always good

When the Wright brothers made their first flight in a machine heavier than air, they could hardly have guessed what effect their invention would have on armed conflicts and indirectly on the killing of people. Innovations always benefit somebody, and who benefits often changes over time. Every innovation has a downside. Personal computers are a thoroughly useful invention, but once discarded they can contribute to serious pollution.

This is an essential paradox of innovation: no one knows, not even the inventors, how their creations will impact the world until they are used.

Conclusion

For me, the book's greatest value is that it opened my eyes. Innovation and creativity aren't reserved for a chosen few. Everybody can innovate and solve problems creatively. It's up to each of us whether we use that gift. The history of innovation proves it.