Experts and anointed authorities of various kinds, both academic and commercial, have been the front lines of resistance to innovation for centuries, up to the present. They are the firewall keeping what they consider to be rogue ideas outside the protected environments they oversee, protecting them from bad influences that their naïve but innocent charges might inadvertently adopt. It’s a good thing they’re on the job – otherwise things would be chaos and nothing would get done!
This pattern is raised to a new level when the subject isn’t some specific business domain like healthcare, but the process of innovation itself. As you may have noticed, many organizations now have the expensive modern equivalent of “suggestion boxes,” departments devoted to fostering innovation in the organization, led by a Chief Innovation Officer. Government officials have gotten into the game, establishing centers for innovation, and “incubators” for startups. Eager not to be left behind, academia has jumped into the game, with august professors doing what they do best: pronouncing truths and activities designed to promulgate them.
There was a time in my relatively innocent past when I was willing to give the experts a pass. Hey, how can you know everything? I know I don’t! They’re probably just trying to keep their organizations from being taken down by harebrained ideas, and sometimes they fail to recognize a true innovation when it appears! I no longer believe that pleasant, forgiving fiction. They’re also not evil geniuses immediately recognizing a juicy innovation when it sniffs around the door, and stamping it out before it can start making changes. The truth is far worse: the vast, vast majority of them wouldn’t know a practical, effective innovation if it came up to them and slapped them in the face! See this and this for more.
The bulk of front-line experts act this way to “protect” their organizations against scary change. They go to great lengths on multiple dimensions to assure that nothing upsets the status quo. Here is detail about the measures they take to prevent innovation, and simple methods to overcome the measures – which the experts are universally ignoring.
But the elite of the experts are experts in entrepreneurship – people who are “expert” in enabling people who want to create and lead innovation to make it happen. These experts on innovation are like experts on being expert. We are definitely still in the middle of an “innovation” bubble, with everyone acting like it’s a new thing. In fact, it’s looking like less of a bubble these days, and looking more like something that’s going to stick around. Here’s some information about the bubble and how we got here.
I’ve seen so much of this over so many years, and been so disgusted with the useless wisdom of experts, that I’ve put together some preliminary thoughts, drawn from experience and observation, about how innovation happens. See this.
Imagine my surprise when I read an article about entrepreneurs that actually made sense! I'd never heard of the guy, Carl Schramm. It appears from the article that he knows a bunch of stuff about entrepreneurs and innovation that matches up pretty well with my observations, but is actually backed by … real data! OMG! One of my initial shocks was learning that he was a real professor at a real university, even with a PhD, but that … he had worked as an entrepreneur! How is that possible? How did he manage to slip by the super-strict requirements that prevent anyone who actually knows something from experience becoming a Professor?? Maybe it helped that he had been the head of the Kaufman Foundation, the largest foundation devoted to the study of entrepreneurs and innovation, and that instead of just doling out grants, he did real studies to gather real data. What an idea. You think maybe the people who run Departments of Computer Science could get inspired? Sorry, forgive me, you caught me dreaming the impossible dream there...
I’m not finished reading the book yet, but here it is:
As you might guess from the title, he talks a lot in the beginning about that near-universal requirement for getting innovation funded, the dread business plan. He trashes it. Vigorously and effectively. No, he doesn’t trash this or that business plan, he trashes the very idea that business plans are both essential and good. He’s right! For exactly the same reason (he doesn’t say this, I’m saying it) that project management in software development is not just brain-dead, but a positive impediment to getting good software done!
If you are ready to learn about a different and better way to be an entrepreneur, check out this book.
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