Does Innovation Theater + Innovation Choir = Innovation Compounding ? Often.
For almost 25yrs, a simple seminal study tied innovation ( and in it’s loosest definition ) to the capacity that in order to increase the acceptance of what was considered ” breakthrough ” when future backward consistent group coordination was at play, the reality became that this is innovation compounding. And, when it’s executed as a group multiple ecosystem effort where this can signal a dilution often it becomes a further concentration of said breakthrough / collapse of value chains thus very closely mirroring the exact definition of innovation. Most of the time.
In Competition, Innovation And Increasing Returns we see the underpinnings of the reality that ( and from many other past articles about similar topics ) that the idea of consortia, vertical ( and known ) where specific functional user groups that share a collective need and also acceptance of risk in the face of future specific 3, 5, 10+ year time frames, mean category-defining transformational capabilities have a tendency to become real world applicability much sooner than expected. With Futures Design tools and foreseen futures that codify the barely define into future functionality that is buildable ( if not fully usable ) today the process feeds upon itself if and only if end users see ” the inevitable ” that is on the way, eg. connected computing, wireless communications, neural networks, non von Neumann computing architectures, leading in no short form to synthetic biological computing.
Where this has been referred to as Skunkworks Singularity efforts, it is the capability and necessity to broaden and codify the unknown into the shortly doable ( even in it’s most rudimentary forms ) that allows a choir of similar voices ( and which can easily be competitors ) to push acceptable use into broader awareness. What become particularly interesting is how organizations ( internally as in the capability of intrapreneurship ) also past a certain size become, themselves ( due to their reach across multiple and diverse areas of industrial reach ) become a choir of their own coordinated capability.
In the case of Amendola, Gaffard and Musso’s findings we see that this can not only be something that takes place inside one organization but sometimes across multiple organizations and even when incrementalism is lauded as breakthrough but only when ( seemingly ) these innovations are consistent. Consistency itself becomes a form of innovation realization., What can be ( and is often the case ) ignored are how these ” breakthroughs ” are a function of acceptable ( in relation to Physics ) doable output that can be tricked out as if a golden path were already laid. Examples of this can not only be seen in the evolution and adoption ( in the sense of the long tail model that is investigation and discovery ) of neuromorphic computing ( a completely different form of the current, silicon based, von Neumann computing architectures ) and, clearly, the use of standard silicon based computing architectures. Where Neuromorphic computing diverges from the standard paradigm a new future, a wholly, self contained 3rd self operating system ( and the hardware to support it ) is just one example of the compounding that that is present and evolving as we speak.