Innovation is more than combination

New technological breakthroughs are often a clever mix of old ones. But they also mark a leap named Progress.

Scott Berkun worked on the team that built Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. His new book, The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly UK, £17.50) is a cut above the usual techie tome.

Uniquely, each of its 10 chapters is a breezy polemic. Innovation involves lone inventors and a Eureka moment? Rather, Berkun contends that it’s a collective enterprise, and that the magic moment only happens in the sense that you’re fitting the final piece of a lengthy jigsaw puzzle.

Moreover, key innovations such as the web, the mouse and the search engine each came out of a chaotic “tangle of events”, and cannot be given a single date: Mosaic for Windows first made browsers popular in 1993, only to be succeeded first by the Netscape vs Microsoft browser wars of 1995 to 1997, then by the release of Mozilla Firefox in 2005.

It’s a mistake, Berkun rightly argues, to believe that systematising innovation around a single method can rid it of risk. He’s also right that you should never underestimate the forces of resistance to innovation. “We tried that already” has stopped many innovations in their tracks.

My problem with Myths is the modest targets. Most people would agree that innovations build on the past and progress doesn’t happen in a straight line. Many would also concur with Berkun’s hero, Peter Drucker, that successful entrepreneurs “do not look for the ‘biggie’”.

But this misses the point. Berkun is wrong to say that mobile phones and PCs are no better than smoke signals or cave paintings. That relativises innovation, and allows employers to get away with a Druckeresque, purely incremental attitude toward it.

Mobile internet is a massive leap from the fixed sort. Indeed, Berkun himself argues that to be an innovator is to be Magellan: it is to explore, which is dangerous. So to triumph over resistance is not just to complete a jigsaw and become an entrepreneur because of your frustration with the status quo. When there is a step forward, as Berkun notes, there is often “simultaneous invention”: other dedicated people, working hard, independently, on the problem.

So though Berkun denies it, the time must be right. Moreover, in the diffusion of innovations, technology “prowess” and “goodness” in the eyes of experts matter as much as culture. And when VisiCalc was released for the Apple II in 1978, it wasn’t just the world’s first spreadsheet, nor its first killer application. As Berkun says, it was “the software that legitimised personal computers”.

Yes, VisiCalc rested on paper spreadsheets and on the calculator. But it also represented that oft-derided thing: progress.