Innovation

The term “innovation” has its origins in the Latin word “innovare,” meaning “to renew or change”, and has over time come to be used interchangeably with Creativity and narrowly presumed to represent conscious, methodical improvement efforts.

A different way to look at it, is that Innovation is an endgame, an outcome in the form of widespread implementation, that arises from the process of people adopting a different way of doing things.

As such, innovation is in a constant battle against the status quo: Humans resist change, skeptics — posing as “realists” — question the unfamiliar, and mental models often blind us to new possibilities.

According to written history and a linear timeline, observations about such change-resistance behavioral patterns can be traced back to ancient days. From a Eurocentric perspective, (where “virtually all philosophy descends from Plato”), the observations can especially be found in the Allegory of the Cave. This allegory concerns a thought experiment that can be summarized as follows:

Imagine prisoners existing their whole lives in a cave, chained from birth, and facing a wall. Behind them, a fire casts shadows of objects onto the wall. The prisoners believe these shadows to be living beings. Then one prisoner escapes, sees the reality outside the cave, and realizes the shadows are mere optical illusions. The escaped prisoner discovers a world far beyond the limited perspective of the cave. Outside the cave, the prisoner sees the sun. He encounters the vibrant and diverse natural world, including plants, animals, landscapes, and free humans.  He returns and tries to liberate his fellow prisoners, knowing now how much more of the world exists outside the cave. However, the conclusion is that the other prisoners would likely kill those who try to free them, as they would not want to leave the safety and comfort of their known world.

This pattern could be labeled the birth cycle and “origin story” of innovation – so to speak.  Except that, in our given context, innovation requires a breakthrough where a new way to do things spreads and is implemented by many.

The allegory of the cave, as presented in this context, merely highlights the challenges of innovation. Plato uses the cave as a symbolic representation of existential blindness, contrasting the interpretation of reality with reality itself.  In the context of G5’s framework, the prisoners represent those entrenched in the status quo, while the escaped prisoner symbolizes the innovator.

In summary: Innovation is often conflated with creativity but concerns more than the mere generation of new ideas. Innovation can be viewed as the result of the fact that some part of the world has been shaped or at least tweaked by a “new” way of doing things, and that this method, technique, concept, or process, is widely adopted — until the next change.