Doing Innovation

BLUF:  This blog is for people who “do” innovation; the practitioners, managers, leaders, investors, and organizations that make innovation happen.  The task of this blog is to track down, understand, and translate the global academic research focused on innovation.  The purpose of this blog is to make sense of that research, occurring in many different disciplines and in many different environments, and to help the people who “do” innovation get even better at doing it. 

There are many popular business and technology books focused on innovation and many of those contain bold assertions and universal pronouncements.  All too often, many of those assertions are not based on research but rather draw from an instance or unique circumstance that is in no way universal.  Popular literature frequently doesn’t take advantage of the rich and growing body of academic research focused on the human phenomenon called “innovation”.  This is not surprising, academic literature is usually written in arcane disciplinary jargon, and it is intended for other academics who speak that same language. 

The basic and applied research that exists is meant to benefit everyone, but because the research literature focuses on communicating with other scholars, it is often not focused on communicating with practitioners.  Academic research is intended to report on the development and testing of hypotheses and explaining in detail how it came to some conclusion.  This is great for scholars but there is clearly a disconnect between the multi-disciplinary research community and the individuals and groups outside that community trying to innovate.  There are reasons, and incentives, responsible for that disconnect, and while we intend to explore those reasons in future posts, our real goal is to get that information out into the ecosystem of innovation.

This blog then is a deep dive into the nature of innovation, how innovation is organized, performed, and managed, and then how innovation is measured and how that translates into investments, new products, processes, and models.  This blog focuses on quantitative and qualitative research findings, the implication of those findings, and what that means for practitioners. 

What does archaeology have to do with innovation? In part, archaeology is a metaphor to describe and explain innovations as human phenomena by examining texts, artifacts, and sites. In part, archaeology is a well-established academic discipline that is tied to the humanities, the physical, behavioral, and social sciences, and technology. Archaeology is populated by multi-disciplinary researchers and practitioners employing many different research methods to understand how humans have changed, adapted, and evolved over time, often as the result of creating something innovative and then sharing those creations and know-how with other people. So please join us as we explore the phenomena of innovation and share our findings.