Google tells me I’ve been beaten to the
coinage of the word unnovation. Umair Haque used it in the Harvard Business
Review in 2009, referring to an “innovation that fails to create authentic,
meaningful value”. There was also a TV show named Unnovations way back in 2001
- a parody of a shopping channel, with dumb products for sale like “the
Mortgage Vest which was just a plain vest which would take as long as a real
mortgage to pay off so that customers could have all the fun of owing a real
mortgage”.
To truly innovate, you need to do more than
something new. You have to deliver value as well. So it’s easy to distinguish
between true and false innovations when it comes to novelties. But I’m interested in another possible
meaning of unnovation. This happens when someone chooses or creates something
new when they don’t have to. For example, they might just believe that new is
always better.
Unnovation is one of the reasons that
standards are sometimes overlooked. Standards already exist, so they’re not
new! If you think innovation is all about novelty, standards won’t appear on
your radar.
But not if you consider that “new to us”
may be the appropriate level of novelty for this innovation. In other words,
it’s possible to innovate by copying, importing, and adopting. Innovation
doesn’t have to start with a clean sheet. Every organization, every endeavor of any
worth, is a cumulative effort. We build on our successes, learn our lessons. We
take inspiration from our environment, our customers, our competitors.
Being distracted by novelty for its own sake can
lead to the most dangerous form of unnovation - the non-obvious unnovation that
nobody questions. The Mortgage Vest is obviously ridiculous. The homebrewed
data standard won’t attract the same abuse. Yet unnecessary local standards
suck up resources, close off organizational options, create islands of critical
but rare skills and knowledge, deter business partners and - yes - stifle real
business innovation. HBR
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