Innovation is always fun to talk about; everything seems so new. It can drive business. It can create revenue. It can cause consternation. It can be protected. It can have a short or a long lifespan, depending on what the innovation is (and in what circumstances it is deployed).
I like to browse sites that seem interesting on the search listings, and in one of these virtual peregrinations I was rewarded with a two-sentence definition of innovation that totally merges with my own learnings about it, and explains it elegantly and completely:
“Innovation is defined as the process of bringing about new ideas, methods, products, services, or solutions that have a significant positive impact and value. It involves transforming creative concepts into tangible outcomes that improve efficiency, and effectiveness, or address unmet needs.”
This is according to Ideascale (www.ideascale.com).
My favorite phrases in this paragraph are: “…that have a significant positive impact and value,” and “…tangible outcomes…”. This clearly and definitively separates innovation from “good ideas,” which may or may not have anything tangible about them at all, or perhaps they have no significant positive impact.
Can all ideas lead to innovation? If I have had it up to here with injuries incurred by circus clowns juggling meat cleavers while riding a unicycle, I can try to think of an innovative solution. I might offer up a system that uses two hunks of pig iron, one at either end of a bar that traverses the unicycle laterally, effecting an improved balance for the juggling clown. But is it innovation? No, wire-walkers have balanced with lateral bars for many years. Even if that were not true, how much significant positive impact exists, or value? An example of a true innovation would be to create an inexpensive way to burn coal cleanly.
However, innovation does begin with an idea or ideas. The innovation which springs from an idea must create value, and it must have a tangible outcome. To me, this means that something must be made, built, or some process must be changed in a unique and effective way. This, you may note, says nothing about taking care of the innovator; the situation may be somewhat like the one spoken by Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, based on that written work by Ayn Rand. Cooper is in court and says this of an innovator:
“Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brethren to light.”
The movie was from 1949, the United States was positively foamy with good ideas, innovations, and postwar energy. In 2024, there is still a lot of energy, some of it quite positive.
Of course, things are much more complicated today. In particular, AI will make it more difficult to determine the origin of ideas—although to this point, my very active but probably amateurish experiments with generative AI (in my case, OpenAI and DALL-E, the latter being a graphics/art extension of AI).
These explorations have made me recognize some things about working on ideas with a generative AI system:
- It can be a good background information source. I found I could keep asking “Why?” like a four-year-old and OpenAI didn’t care. However, there were parts of the conversation where I had a good idea where OpenAI got the information it shared.
- OpenAI will try to keep things in its bailiwick. Of a question I asked, OpenAI replied, “That’s an interesting thought experiment,” and did not answer the question as asked.
- Balancing the second point, it will never fill in a blank that is unknown—the way we humans sometimes do.
In terms of innovation, can AI be involved? To what extent? I sometimes consult OpenAI when I am researching a topic, but I do not let OpenAI write my articles for publication. Assuming OpenAI becomes more intelligent as we all use it, and it follows AI principles of learning, as well as develops intuition and deduction, there may be a time when OpenAI could innovate. Not in my lifetime, but certainly in my grandchildren’s lifetime.
Finally, what’s different about today’s innovation is that we go through great lengths to protect the interests of corporations and individuals via patents and all types of intellectual property law and activities. It’s the way of the world now. (A note from history: Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, did not patent it, saying that it belonged to the world.)
This is such an important point that Fifth Wave Manufacturing is developing videos and e-book content aimed directly at fabricators. We are working with Brooklyn-based Jones IP, a law firm dedicated to intellectual property matters, and well experienced in patent law. Please watch our LinkedIn page and messages for more information in the upcoming weeks, and we will direct you to the video and e-book products when they are released. Until then, please let us know if there is anything you’d like to see on our site, in the newsletter, or on social media. My email is dave@fifthwavemfg.com.