People are fond of telling me that the pace of innovation today
is faster than it has ever been. If your yardstick of innovation is the pace of
change in smartphone design, then this is what it must feel like. I believe
that really deep innovation, in common with many other creative human arts, has
not improved. As the Canadian writer Robert Bringhurst once said about
typography; ‘…like all the arts it is basically immune to progress, though it
is not immune to change’.
Innovation and tradition are equally vital aspects of human social life. They have existed as intertwined facets of human history for millenia. Edward Shils (1910 - 1995), was an American academic
sociologist, who spent decades researching tradition. From one of his earlier
papers, he says this:
All existing things have a past. Nothing which happens
escapes completely from the grip of the past; some events scarcely escape at
all from its grip. Much of what exists is a persistence or reproduction of what
existed earlier.
Tradition is an idea we use to explain generally how things
continue as they are. How things endure. Within our social setting, one of
inertia and habitual behaviours, it is interesting to think about innovation –
about human activity that leads to non-traditional action. And the process of change that allows a new
action to take hold, to become a new form of tradition. Shils goes on to
explain: "All novelty is a modification of what has existed
previously; it occurs and reproduces itself as novelty in a more persistent
context".
One of the consequences of the way that humans change
artefacts through history, is that nothing we create can be completely new.
Every idea or object we conjure up is built upon what we have already learned
socially. We can never go back to an imagined state of ignorance before we
begin to innovate.
HERE is an excellent, well researched and written, article that takes
apart the "theory" of disruptive innovation. It is a superb antidote to
the concept that disruption = innovation = progress.
