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- 1/15/2019 Opinion | End the Innovation Obsession - The New York Times
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opinion/sunday/end-the-innovation-obsession.html 1/3
- Some of our best ideas are in the rearview mirror.
- By David Sax
- Mr. Sax is an author.
- Dec. 7, 2018
- TORONTO — A year ago I stepped into the Samcheong Park Library in Seoul, South Korea, and
- saw the future. The simple building in a forested park had a nice selection of books, a cafe at its
- center and a small patio. Classical music played while patrons read, reclining on extra-deep
- window benches that had cushions to sit on and tables that slid over their laps so that they could
- sip coffee and eat cheesecake while gazing at the leaves changing colors outside. Seoul is one of
- the most modern cities in the world, a place suffused with the latest inescapable technology. This
- library was specifically designed as an antidote to that.
- “What’s so innovative about that?” a friend who works for the library here in Toronto asked when
- I showed her pictures. Innovation to her meant digital technology, from drones and movie-
- streaming services and 3D printers, which the library was constantly showing off.
- “Why couldn’t they both be innovative?” I asked.
- We are told that innovation is the most important force in our economy, the one thing we must get
- right or be left behind. But that fear of missing out has led us to foolishly embrace the false
- trappings of innovation over truly innovative ideas that may be simpler and ultimately more
- effective. This mind-set equates innovation exclusively with invention and implies that if you just
- buy the new thing, voilà! You have innovated! Each year businesses, institutions and individuals
- run around like broken toy robots, trying to figure out their strategy for the latest buzzword
- promising salvation.
- What’s your company’s plan to onboard wearables? How’s our Google Glass program coming?
- Where do you stand on Big Data? A.I.? Machine learning? How soon can we pivot to video? How
- many tablets should we buy? What’s your child’s school’s V.R. budget? Are you all in on
- Instagram? Snapchat? Do you even know what cryptocurrency is? Yeah, me neither. How much
- can we afford?
- At best, this is a waste of time and money. Gadgets are procured, deployed and discarded.
- Resources are squandered as the technology’s actual capabilities fall short of its promise. People
- are forced to work at treadmills. Then everyone moves on. The drones stay grounded. The V.R.
- headset languishes in the box. Iced tea goes back to being iced tea and not some wildly
- speculative cryptocurrency mining scheme.
- But at its worst, this approach to innovation can truly be destructive. Schools that hastily
- purchased tablets for students cut drama, music and sports programs to pay for devices with few
- proven benefits. Districts that adopted untested computerized voting machines have seen
- elections compromised. Companies that integrated artificial intelligence into the hiring process
- have actually reinforced gender and racial stereotypes. Publications that increased their focus on
- video content while slashing reporters, all in response to Facebook’s viewership numbers, later
- learned that these figures — the entire basis of their new business models — had been fudged.
- Silicon Valley firms are not immune to this, even while deploying the fear of missing innovation
- as a sales tactic. They too need to please investors, customers and the media, which hangs on
- every news release, and so they traffic in their own illusions of innovation. They produce cool
- videos about blimps and solar planes sending Wi-Fi to remote villages in Africa (always Africa).
- They offer cryptic hints about flying cars, pizza drones and a variety of Facebook products no one
- cares about, from a video chat device that looks no different from a tablet running Skype (but
- with added data harvesting) to a version of the social network’s Messenger app built for children.
- The latter is among the most ill-considered, ill-timed ideas of our era.
- True innovation isn’t just some magic carnival of invention, like a Steve Jobs keynote with a
- pretty toy at the end. It is a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment that
- every institution and business experiences in some way. Often that actually means adopting ideas
- and tools that already exist but make sense in a new context, or even returning to methods that
- worked in the past. Adapted to the challenges of today, these rearview innovations have proved to
- be as transformative as novel technologies.
- Look no farther than the streets of New York, which have been radically redesigned over the past
- decade to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians with bike lanes and car-free zones. These ideas
- aren’t new. They were espoused by city planners and activists more than half a century ago, when
- Robert Moses was crisscrossing the city with expressways, bulldozing neighborhoods in the
- name of the car’s transformational technology. At the time Jane Jacobs and other advocates of
- slower, friendlier streets were dismissed as Luddites. It took more than 50 years of evidence,
- accidents and political courage to realize what a colossal mistake the Moses approach was and to
- begin to undo that with proven ideas in people-centric urban planning that aim to bring cities
- back to those who live in them.
- When you look at those cities, you’ll also find some of the most innovative solutions to the way we
- conduct commerce. Not one-hour delivery or meal kits on demand, but the boom in a parallel
- retail model that is decidedly social and human focused. The past decade has seen impressive
- nationwide growth in farmers markets, flea markets and independent bookstores, despite all the
- competition from larger, more efficient organizations online and offline. Even though these places
- are based on a model that harks back to the roots of human commerce, they are innovative
- precisely because they propose a valuable community alternative solution to the supermarket or
- shopping mall that dominates retail. This model has been so effective that Amazon is opening
- more bookstores and Walmart just announced concept stores that will include food halls, farmers
- markets, bike rentals and parks — the very things the company siphoned away from American
- towns.
- Perhaps the best examples of rearward innovation are edible. The culinary story of the past
- several decades is dominated not by the scientific improvements we were promised, but by a
- return to food and drink’s more delicious past. Traditional cooking, craft beer, heirloom vegetables
- and grass-fed beef have brought food forward by turning back. We take this as gospel today, but
- during the 1980s, when pioneering artisan bakers like Nancy Silverton and Jim Lahey were
- trying to get the world to abandon Wonder bread for traditional sourdough, their ideas were
- radical and innovative, and ultimately changed the way many of us cook, shop and eat.
- This type of reflective innovation requires courage, because it calls into question the assumption
- that newer is necessarily better. But increasingly, as our worship of Silicon Valley gives way to a
- growing sense of unease, we are asking those questions and innovating appropriately. Countless
- schools have restricted technology use to foster better learning. Elections officials in Virginia
- recently traded computerized voting machines for more secure paper ballots. And while e-reader
- sales have been tanking, Penguin just announced it would publish tiny printed books, meant to be
- read on the go. Small books, which have been around since Gutenberg set up his press, are an
- ideal solution for a market that demands both convenience and physicality.
- These innovations aren’t mired in the past. They are solutions firmly focused on the future — not
- some technocentric version of it, where we invent our way to utopia, but a human-centric future
- that reflects where we’ve been, what we’ve learned and how we actually want to live. If that
- means we build more libraries in parks, then we are moving in the right direction.
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