All innovation is driven by…

David & I know the quote is a provocation, but dude & That's beyond ludicrous! Why do people like to make such blanket statements about 'innovation?' Read McLuhan from 1964 & he wrote about everything that's happening today 50 years ago, He wrote about 'disruptive innovation' and tossed the phrase like it was a well-accepted notion THEN. Why do we have to reinvent innovation as if we invented it?

I say this because we deploy 'innovation' to create meanings without defining what we mean. There are a few commonly accepted meanings of innovation, but none that I know that would restrict breakthrough inventions to fear, death and sex. These are perhaps indicative of our current economies. Did the Wright Brothers conceive of the warplane? (They were bicycle makers.) It took 30 years before cars were used in battle. The VHS-Beta example is about adoption, not innovation & videotape had been used since the 60's, and recording just became smaller and cheaper.

And my favorite example of innovation & is that Solon's Athenian democracy was invented to solve debt slavery, to make a better world after the ruination of Draco's Athens. In today's world we need innovators like Solon again.

and fear & what about the fear?

So I've been thinking a little more about this link between technology innovation and war/porn/gambling. I think really all it illustrates is that innovation happens best in environments which (a) are well funded and (b) have a high risk profile. Which makes sense really, because you have enough money to enable you to experiment and completely fuck up (and also to come up with the breakthrough) and you have the openness to new ideas that allows the ideas to be realised. Why these three industries?

War -> defence budgets go through the roof, and everyone's looking for the weapon that will give them the edge.
Porn/gambling -> both massive industries worldwide, where just about the only competitive advantage you have is coming up with something new all the time to keep people interested.

See imho one of the problems with traditional market competition is that you get these massive incumbents (I wouldn't be talking about a certain telco here, would I?!), who have large amount of money, but who then become massively risk adverse, which is the totally wrong environment for innovation to occur.

Interestingly, this macworld post (<a href="http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/02/...) " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/02/pornhd/in...)" target="_blank">http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/02/pornhd/in...) hypothesises that VHS won over Beta because of the porn industry&#39;s support, and that the same will happen for Blu-ray over HD-DVD.

I have no specific recollection of that event.

I blame Oxley for buying drinks.

Etc.

Dave, I await your next big innovation with, um, some trepidation.