Is Your Innovation Really Unnovation?

Umair Haque apresenta um novo ponto de vista interessante de como os EUA está agindo com relação a Inovação.

Innovation, today, is the most vital and impor — brrrring!!!! We interrupt this hackneyed old cliche to bring you an announcement.

Here's a different suggestion for how — and how not — to innovate.

Boardrooms today have an insatiable appetite for innovation. Yet, few can get it right once in a blue moon, let alone master it. Why the disconnect?

Most innovation, well, isn't: it is "unnovation," or innovation that fails to create authentic, meaningful value. The biggest stumbling block to innovation is unnovation: most companies are too busy unnovating to ever learn how to truly innovate.

In the race to innovate, most organizations forget a simple but fundamental economic truth. A new process, product, service, business design, or strategy can only be described as an innovation if it results in (or is the result of) authentic, durable economic gains.

Unfortunately, much of what our economy produces today isn't innovative — it's unnovative. The evidence is hard to dispute: we merely need to note how deep the global decline is, how consistently 20th Century business fails to do stuff that matters — or just how many industries are caught simultaneously in deep crisis.

Here are some examples of unnovation.

The Hummer was a product unnovation, which destroyed value for both society and Detroit.

CDOs were a financial unnovation, that crippled the financial system, and have cost everyone hundreds of billions.

Integrating into auto finance was a business design unnovation for Detroit — one which diluted and sapped the incentives to make authentically innovative cars.

Hedge funds are (probably) a management unnovation. Industry structure, fee structure, and well, the giant financial meltdown of 2009 all suggest that hedge funds create little value, and are simply capturing it instead.

Windows was, many years ago, an innovation. Today, it's an especially toxic unnovation — one which is actively stifling the development of an operating system that's not the software equivalent of an Edsel.

Those are different facets of the zombieconomy. What do they suggest?

Innovation today demands more substance, and less hype. A bigger SUV with even worse mileage or a razor with yet another blade are only innovative if wearing my socks inside out is too. All three create roughly the same amount of economic value. The unnovation explosion says: It's time to be much more circumspect and demanding of what innovation is — and isn't.

To rediscover the art of innovation, you've got to kick the unnovation habit first.

So here's my challenge: are you innovating — or unnovating? How many of your new products, services, or businesses are authentic innovations — and how many are unnovations?

I have a feeling you'll be surprised by the answer — fire away in the comments and let us know your answer.

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