It’s a term that’s been thrown around a lot over the past couple of years, at times being more popular than at others. Now seems to be one of those times when “innovation” is the hot word—but what the heck does it even mean?
I was at a Business of Innovation conference last week—there’s “innovation” right there in the title!—and defining “innovation” was a portion of several presentations.
The dictionary says that innovation is simply “the introduction of something new.” But for people looking to make money from innovation, it’s got to be more than that. “Something new” comes along all of the time, but does that mean it’s innovative?
One of the presenters said that a renewed interest in “innovation” is a result of the recession. He went on to say that 18 months or two years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find a conference on innovation, and now they’re everywhere. Since companies have laid off as many people as they could and cut expenses back as much as possible as a means to surviving the downturn, now they must concentrate on growth in order to survive. And how does that happen? Innovation. And apparently history shows that recessions are a pretty good time to introduce and sustain innovation.
One definition of business innovation was the “successful outcome of bringing a novel product, service, or customer services to market in a way that creates significant new customer value.” And many innovations fitting that description have been introduced in recessions, including:
- Light bulbs (1876)
- Scotch tape (1930)
- Fluorescent lamps (1938)
- Disposable diapers (1961)
- Post-its (1974)
- World wide web (1991)
- iPod (2001)
These innovations weren’t just about novel products, or about the R&D behind them (there does not seem to be a correlation between R&D and innovation), their patents, the creativity of the team, or product improvements. These were about establishing positions of “ownable distinction”—things like their market positioning, being first-movers, branding, and the totality of their intellectual property rights (IPR).
Over at the Innovators Network, our Entrepreneurs in Residence have written about the role of intellectual property in economic downturns. Andre Carter wrote about how “Times like this support and encourage new ideas, methods, and channels; in turn, this makes the likelihood of increased small business activity, especially IP-based, high” and looking at the full scope of your intellectual property rights to find new opportunities. IP attorney Rob Cogan gave us this chart to help distinguish and define those various assets that comprise the totality of your IPR.
Thinking about all of these things combined has me sort of excited. Since most economists say that the recession is ending, that should mean that we’re also just about due for some ground-breaking, disruptive innovation. I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve wondering if Santa’s going to come and, if so, what’s he going to BRING?? (Somebody at the conference suggested that the big innovation to come out of this recession is going to be LED lighting. I suppose that’s cool, but doesn’t seem life-changing. Unless, of course, all hotels and stores change from their horrid florescent lighting to the more flattering LED. In that case, I’m on board.)