At the beginning of the 20th century, aesthetic taste was no longer satisfied with mere quality and demanded novelty, especially in the form of transgression. By the end of the same century, a technological product, in addition to efficiently fulfilling its function, had to do so with originality. Excellence, in both art and technology, could only be innovative.
Books like The Innovator's DilemmaClayton Christensen (1997), elaborating on this idea, differentiated between sustained innovation (which improves the performance of a product; for example, the landline telephone) and disruptive innovation (which generates new needs by offering an unexpected and irresistible product, such as the mobile phone). Christensen insisted that sustained innovation can lead to a company's bankruptcy. If you want to have a future, you must understand that disruption is an urgent strategic objective for companies.
In a short time, the idea that the world is changing so rapidly that it will no longer be the biggest who eats the smallest, but the fastest who devours the slowest, became dogmatic: either you change quickly or you'll be left behind. A quote attributed to Henry Ford soon became popular: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Ford opted for disruptive innovation and offered the automobile.
The idea of disruptive innovation was accepted blindly and uncritically by a number of educators who found in Catalonia the most fertile breeding ground for disruption, assuming that what worked for telephony or transportation must also work for education. The fervor was such that it was difficult to decide whether schools needed a new kind of education or whether the belief in innovation needed a new kind of school.
We return to Ford. This quote is catchy, but it sounds clever. There's no proof that Henry Ford said it, but in the early 21st century, we identify with it so strongly that it's often used to dismiss user research: "Users don't know what they want. We don't bother talking to them."
However, excellence cannot be achieved without considering the user. Aristotle already questioned who should decide on the excellence of a house: the designer or the person who lives in it. He opted for common sense: ultimately, it is the user who lives with the product. Now, if the user chooses, they do so according to their own criteria, which are sometimes far from innovative. They have chosen, for example, to revive vinyl records or continue relying on BIC pens or safety pins, while rejecting Laserdiscs, Betamax, cherry Coke, yogurt makers, non-alcoholic wine, and so on.
In conclusion, innovation can only be sustained if the past loses its authority, if tradition exists only to be surpassed, if historical memory is a dilapidated relic, if the particularities that link us to a culture are less valuable than universalist generalities. Implicit in the entrance to the Eden of innovation is this warning: enjoy it with all your senses, except your sense of the past. I don't know what role the future holds for those who believe that writing after Proust doesn't make us better writers.
The past can only be a burden for those who believe that nothing in it is unhistorical and therefore surmountable. Innovation has no roots or borders. And it probably has no alternatives either. If the goal of innovation is innovation, the race to tame the future rests on the morality of prioritizing the possible and immediate over the real. If everything is possible, all truth is provisional. The current economy thrives on this morality, and that is why its objective is to shorten the distance between consumers and consumer products. I am afraid to think of a time when this distance will be eliminated.
Innovation, in and of itself, guarantees neither excellence nor success. Around 50% of innovative products fail, either partially or completely. Nicholas Negroponte, a seemingly infallible innovation guru, asserted in 2010 that the printed book had no more than five years left. Yet there it is, watching time go by. Failures are obvious, but business literature prefers to tell us stories of innovations with a positive impact. "Bad" innovation is only explored in science fiction. There is an undeniable pro-innovation bias because innovation is dominated by short-term market logic. Only recently have we begun to talk about Dark Innovation (title of a book by Ryan T. MacNeil, from 2024). The current war is a dramatic example.
