A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a former professor of mine about innovation. He characterized innovation not only as something original, but also as a novel juxtaposition. Its an interesting point and it got me thinking…
Proust said “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” (thanks to charukesi over at MindSpace for pointing this quote out (I love being able to quote Proust, Balzac or Zola, it make me feel smarter–plus their names sound funny)).
In The Discipline of Innovation Peter Drucker tells a story about how “a shift in viewpoint, not technology, totally changed the economics of ocean shipping and turned it into one of the major growth industries of the last 20 to 30 years.”
Then there’s modern print media. Sure Linotype was the technologically original innovation the helped make it possible. But it was really modern advertising as innovated by Pulitzer and Hearst that gave us the print media we are familiar with today. They re-imagined how printed information could be monetized. This reshuffled old constraints and opportunities into new and highly successful juxtapositions.
Picasso’s cubism would be an original; Duchamp’s readymade would be juxtaposition. While Descartes gave us original thought, Aquinas gave us exegesis. Portishead’s album Dummy is original; DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album is juxtaposition.
And this last example really struck a cord with me. The Beatles made the White Album. Jay-Z made the Black Album. But Danger Mouse mashed them together and created something nether the Beatles nor Jay-Z nor anyone else had thought of.
DJs take other people’s music and mix it, scratch it, mash it, invert it, juxtapose it, to create new experiences for their audiences. In the same way a lot of new product innovation (especially online products) these days seems to come from mashing up other online products and ideas. I’m sure everyone is aware of the craigslist-and-google-maps find-a-rental mashup.
This kind of innovation strikes me as much easier to catalyze than entirely original innovations, because they are less about raw genius (happy birthday Mozart) and more about an accretion of alternate perspectives–something the net commoditizing incredibly efficiently. And these innovations-though-juxtaposition can often provide just as much value as their purely original cousins.
The drawback of innovations-through-juxtaposition is that they really only thrive in open and tolerant environments (perhaps this is part of what’s behind Richard Florida’s theories that tolerance can be causally connected to positive economic production). Meanwhile entirely original, raw genius innovations are like mushrooms and grow best left alone in dark basements.