In praise of “boring innovation”
How dull can change the world
Since late last year, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have captured the public imagination. They have an uncanny ability to handle tasks previously thought to be beyond the talents of machines, like poetry, art or seeking romantic relationships with humans.
In a world where it is suddenly possible to have a half-decent conversation with a computer, it is not surprising that AI is the darling innovation of the moment. It took ChatGPT only five days to reach one million users while Facebook took ten months to do the same. Octopus Energy provides just one example of the ways that companies are adapting — they say that 44% of their customer e-mails are now answered by AI.
Technological progress has become synonymous with innovation in recent years. Advances in knowledge that improve people’s lives are closely associated with shiny new gadgets like rockets or robots. Yet the truth of it is that many of history’s most important and impactful innovations have been rather boring — and this has important implications today for those innovating for social good.
Boring innovations that shaped our society
Take the S-bend in toilets (and later, the U-bend). The device is simple: a curved piece of pipe. But this one tweak to plumbing made indoor flushing toilets a whole lot more attractive. The bend allows water to settle after flushing, creating a seal that stops sewer odours wafting back.
Invented by Alexander Cummings in 1775, the innovation was still seen as a novelty decades later when a flushing toilet featured in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Even today many people do not have access to hygienic toilet facilities: according to UNICEF, 616 million people in the world in 2020 had “unimproved sanitation”, meaning no flushing toilets. Proper sanitation has saved countless lives, for which at least some credit can go to a rather mundane change to pipework.
Another field in which unsexy innovation has had a big impact is accountancy. Take double entry booking keeping, which was first documented in its modern form in 1494 by Italian mathematician (and collaborator with Leonardo De Vinci) Luca Pacioli. The technique records all transactions in accounts as both debits and credits rather than just one or the other, substantially reducing the risk of error or fraud. Despite its stuffy reputation, novel approaches to finance can have important economic benefits that improve people’s lives.
Shipping containers offer a further example of a less eye-catching innovation that changed the world but which received limited regard outside of the logistics industry for decades. Brought to the wider world’s attention in Marc Levinson’s comprehensive 2006 book The Box, containerisation has revolutionised trade.
Previously products were brought to and from ships in kegs, sacks and crates then individually loaded in a labour-intensive, time-consuming manner that made theft easy. Shipping containers changed all that. First introduced in the 1950s by US entrepreneur Malcolm McLean, containerisation offers an intermodal approach to transportation, meaning that the same container could be used across ships, trucks and trains — saving time and money.
Innovation doesn’t get much more tedious than a checklist of which the airline industry was an early adopter. Checklists can improve the safety of flights not only by ensuring nothing is forgotten but also by reducing the imbalance of power between staff of different seniority, providing more junior crew with a framework within which to flag poor judgement by their superiors. Box ticking can change the world.
The value of checklists isn’t limited to flying. Healthcare has taken inspiration from aviation. As US surgeon Atul Gawande describes in his 2011 book The Checklist Manifesto, this seemingly prosaic tool can literally save lives. For instance they help surgical staff to keep track of their instruments so that none end up being left inside the patient. A 2017 systematic review of the impact of checklists on safety outcomes (admittedly of only a small number of studies) reported significant reductions in postoperative complications alongside benefits in other areas of medicine.
Everyday innovation for social good
Boring innovations can tackle pressing social problems. Yet unsurprisingly, our attention is often drawn to the exciting rather than the everyday. Far more effort seems to go into frontier technologies such as AI and synthetic biology than innovation in so-called foundational sectors like social care. Part of the reason might be a perception that it’s harder to make money from less exciting ideas — and this might be true in some instances, though the S-bend was patented. Topics that are considered ‘boring’ might in fact turn out to be more fertile ground for innovation than areas that already receive considerable funding and attention.
Of course another approach is to apply sexy technology in ‘boring’ ways, to ‘boring’ challenges. Much of the AI brought to bear by the tech giants is currently being used to help us solve problems like finding the next TV series to binge or where to get the best deal on airpods. But there is nothing to stop similar tools from being adapted for less showy social issues too. The tech for good movement is starting to show what is possible — for example with the use of robots to sort waste.
When innovating for social good, what should matter most is the impact on people’s lives. While this can, and will, involve glittering new tech, that won’t always be the case. Achieving outsized impact is likely to require outsized innovation but that needn’t mean shiny new technology — it can just mean thinking about problems differently. As an innovation agency for social good, this perspective applies to Nesta’s work too: achieving our missions might require improving what appears mundane but is in fact important.
The world is always changing, and as our innovations evolve so do the problems that we want them to fix. From climate change to ageing populations, innovation will continue to play a crucial role in making lives better.
In short, innovation can be cool, but it doesn’t have to be to change the world.
