Occasional Writer
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

The problem with the Innovation industrial complex.

There are loads of thought leaders online. Some of them post the blandest of content garner thousands of likes, simply through the power of their personal. brand. Supposedly intelligent people seem scared to go against these emerging orthodoxies and so a new mainstream is created, just as rigid and unself-critical as that it replaced and with its own prophets.

This is the problem with innovation. It’s now an industry with its own rules and processes. Banks will invest if you tick the right boxes behaviourally and consultancies emerge with their previous experts suddenly branded as leaders in the new. Self appointed prophets and gurus emerge who’s words are hung on by all before them but who simply know how to play to the crowds.

At a micro level, inside it, this still feels like innovation but step back to the macro level and you can see it’s just another rigid culture that has emerged. We already have chief innovation officers, companies who solely exist to facilitate workshops using a particular methodology and bosses who create innovation departments. We can see this in Silicon Valley and how rigid it’s processes have become. The parting on the left is now the parting in the right.

Over the summer I’ve talked to a number of people about innovation and most had little idea what they want. They know they actually don’t want radical change but they can’t quantify what they do want. Talk to them and they will switch off when confronted with the truly different. As a result their businesses don’t really innovate, they simply change and grow but wearing fancy clothes.

So how should we tackle innovation? Well the point of innovation for me is that it should be incremental and behaviourally led. Look at people who truly innovate like artists and musicians , who aim forwards on a continual basis, talk to them and rapidly you discover they challenge their own base assumptions on a continual basis, each day refining their approach and this is one of the keys to their progress and development. They rarely try to challenge the larger systems, as a whole, but do it on a personal level. Sometimes they will change their approach in a large way but generally it’s micro changes. Businesses often think that change is larger and louder. They tackle the macro not the micro. But all of us should aim to challenge ourselves at least once a day.

Once you have enough people behaving like this then a genuine new culture will emerge and what’s more it will be rooted in it’s time and place and is ready able to exploit every opportunity this brings. We see it in the arts all the time, the zeitgeist emerges in precisely this way, not by being top down. An Elon Musk appears as a product of his culture , not as a messiah descending from the clouds. Culture simply doesn’t stick if it’s forced downwards, it has to be grown by each individual, look at fascist/communist art as an example of the ultimate sterility this creates.

So why not create the foundations by getting people ready to do something small but new each day? Get them to challenge one base assumption and listen to them, right up the chain?

I’m not a guru, no one listens to me, I couldn’t be fashionable if I tried, but I do practice this every day and if you look, I’ve enjoyed a terrifically interesting career and been engaged in some fantastic things with people I’ve helped now doing amazing things, changing the world in a human sized way.