Attended a talk on innovation and creativity yesterday, at work. I didn’t find the speaker particularly inspiring (sorry Boss!), but some of what he had to say was interesting. I have to confess that I confessed that I had no idea what people meant when they talked about their organisation being innovative, or about being a part of an innovative organisation or business. It’s a bit pathetic of me, given that I work for an organisation that’s used the word ‘innovation’ in its name for advertising and publicity campaigns. You’d think that I would have at least gone and tried to find out what was meant in this instance. Maybe I was asleep at the time. Or, more likely, I reacted the way I often do to a big media campaign about any product/brand/service – I am immediately very cynical about it and disinterested in what I perceive to be mere spin. After a while chronic indifference sets in, which very quickly translates into me completely ignoring the perceived hype and just getting on with the job at hand. Life goes on, thank you very much, pithy slogan or no pithy slogan. (Is this just me?)
Still, after yesterday’s talk I think I have a bit of a better idea what’s meant by innovation:
- Practical and possibly inventive solutions to problems
- Constant improvement of existing services or procedures. Can we do this better?
- Looking for opportunities in problems (colleague JW’s contribution; she does embody an attitude of seeing potential in problems. I admire this ability – we’ll all be sitting around moaning about The Way Things Are, while JW observes, and then she’ll come up with something that summarises the problem and suggests some solutions. Always refreshing when you’re bogged down in a hellish meeting.)
- Ignore your inner critic when you or someone else thinks of or suggests a new way of approaching a problem. Give yourself time to listen and consider where the other person is coming from, hear them out, where might this work?
The speaker also talked about types of innovation, and the difference between:
- Radical or disruptive innovation. Often these are brand new inventions that many people might instinctly recoil against because they have been completely unthought of, and hence challenging or even frightening. Aeroplanes. Television. ATMs. The Internet.
- Gradual or continuous innovation. Continuous improvement of what we do or offer. Cars in any colour. Mobile phones.
I like the example of mobile phones. The mobile phone is a definite innovation, an improvement on the traditional land line. The portability and convenience aspects are good. Still, I personally think some mobile phones these days are terrible. Many of their features actually worsen the experience of using a mobile phone. The top ‘issue’ I have with mobile phones is poor battery life. Other problems – tiny keypads, clunky interface/software, bad displays, too many unnecessary features (which again drain the battery). Even if I wanted a phone that has a fancy colour display, lets me play games, listen to music, check my email, take a photo, and show off in public – and I couldn’t care less about all of these features, actually – it is immensely irritating when all you want to do is make a simple phone call or send an SMS message, and the battery has been drained by all these supposed innovations. Maybe all we need is to innovate in the area of phone batteries. Ceej says this far more eloquently than I have.
And (now that I’ve gotten that rant off my chest), for those of us in libraries, the message is that we can and need to keep looking at what we do to see how and where we can improve. (Interesting to read this list in the light of my new understanding on innovation. Also, what’s mere hype, and what’s going to be useful for library users?) How are we going to remain relevant to our users? What will our libraries look like in five, ten, fifty years from now? What about librarianship as a profession? Our profession is changing whether we like it or not.
Categories: innovation, technology, librarianship