Innovation

An idea in use. Schumpeter drew the line first, separating the invention from its introduction, and the Oslo Manual made it a criterion: it counts once it has been brought into use, not when it was thought of or built. A prototype is not an innovation. A patent is not an innovation. The thing running in an operation is. New to whom is the second question, and the answer is narrower than the word suggests. In the measured definition it means new to the unit adopting it, not new to the world. An operator on legacy infrastructure who changes how the work runs has innovated, whatever the sector did ten years earlier.

What the act consists of is recombination. Castells defines it as the capacity to combine the elements affecting productivity into something more efficient, or into higher added value in the process or the product, and he names the current form of capitalism as one that depends on innovation as its source of productivity growth. That is why the word carries the weight it does now, and why capital sits behind it rather than in front.

It carries that weight because it wins by breaking existing structural relations. It holds until it becomes the new structure of relations, or until the structure repels it. Anything that changes those relations only as far as the structure will tolerate is a modification, and most of what carries the name is a modification.

Innovation always attacks the existing structure, and the larger the structure, the harder it is to overcome. Every relation in it has someone whose position depends on it holding, so ten broken relations get noticed by ten people and a thousand never get tested at all: the change is negotiated down to whatever the structure will absorb on the way through. The same idea is an innovation in a small firm and a modification in a large one.

The label also only works backwards. Innovations that failed to break anything get filed as oddities, mistakes and dead ends, and that is the great majority of them. The ones absorbed get called innovation afterwards, by the structure that absorbed them. Looking forward there is no innovation, only a modification and a bet, which is what empties the innovative company claim: it is a verdict the market issues later, not a property a business can hold in advance.

Castells also places innovation inside the structure rather than outside it. In the informational production model it is a position, alongside the role that packages and targets it and the role that manages the relations between decisions, innovations, projects and execution. Permanently staffed, in other words. That is not a contradiction of the attack but the other side of it. A structure with no position for innovation has to be broken to take one, and the network enterprise builds the absorption in, so the same act registers as routine.

Innovation is expensive and usually fails. When money can be made without taking that risk, the risk stops being taken, and what gets announced instead is the next version of the same product. The word survives on the announcements. That is why “innovation” means nothing in ordinary business use.

Forms in use: innovation, innovate, innovator. Innovative is the dead one, a claim carrying no information, used almost exclusively as a self-description.