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Preparing for an upcoming presentation, I decide to start with a quote from famed philosopher George Santayana:
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
The lesson of this quote is this: The perception of what innovation is and how we view it in our organizations has a lot to do with what we've believed about how it was done in the past.
Unfortunately, our view of the past is colored by the way history has been presented to us. The Myths of Innovation is a great read describing the facts behind the lone inventor/innovator myth (i.e., Thomas Edison with the light bulb and the Wright Brothers with the airplane).
History is easier to remember when we compartmentalize inventions and innovations as being this "eureka!" moment attributed to a single person or group. The truth is harder to swallow when you consider the timeline of innovations before and after the one person who gets the credit in the history books. Advances in aviation and light bulbs continue to this day.
So why is studying the incremental innovation histories of these inventions so important going forward? If we believe the "Cliff's Notes" versions of these famous inventions, we can become biased toward thinking that we or our organization can never be that creative or innovative. In fact, our reality may be totally based on a flawed historical view.
Taking this forward to a current example, there are those that would credit Steve Jobs as the creator of the iPod and iPhone. He may be an awesome visionary and creative leader, but he's backed by thousands of creative staff to turn that vision into reality.
As humans, we like a straight line problem and solution and a person to whom we can give credit to, but reality in the world of innovation is failure cycles with twists and turns in ideas that are difficult to predict. They involve many individual sparks of innovation across individuals, companies and countries which are all dependent on the availability and affordability of the needed technology to pull it off.
A study of past companies and the path they took to get to where they are can be an encouraging exercise, because it shows you that those who have innovated before you have gone through the same struggles and failures that you're experiencing - and that they have ultimately succeeded. |
