« Winding down from SXSW | Main | Campaigns, technology, and people » "Innovation" and "Sustainability"Cross-posted from the Polycot blog. At Worldchanging, Sarah Rich writes about Design for Social Innovation, noting a Business Week "backlash" piece that "discussing the possibility that the term 'innovation' has really passed a tipping point of overuse and lost some of its poignancy." ... the article points out that there is a distinction between throwing the word around and achieving real, measurable improvement through forward-thinking design. It's not so much that consumers don't want innovation in their products as they don't want to be told something is "innovative" when it's really just retooled or modified for a change in user perception. Sarah expresses concern that the word "sustainability" is also losing it's meaning, as it "is now so commonly splattered across pages and screens in the public's view that it's hard to know if anybody sees the words 'sustain' and 'ability' inside the buzzword." No doubt we use both innovation and sustainability all day long at Worldchanging, but hopefully that key distinction is there. It's possible to hold a buzzword to the integrity which initially brought it into common usage, but the more it becomes a tool for selling product and roping in followers, the more caution must be employed. You can't coin a new term every time a useful word starts to lose its meaning. While plenty of jargon exists in the green sphere, the reality is that we are looking for ways to keep ourselves going, to empower ourselves and each other, and to find inventive ways to create conditions that foster longevity for the planet. There's an inherent problem, I think, in trying to make concepts seem new, contemporary, and sexy so that they'll sell. "Innovation" means new, but saying that something is innovative=new it doesn't necessarily imply that it's effective. If you want to use Web 2.0 technology, for instance, because it's "innovative," you could be overlooking more effective technologies that lack the Web 2.0 buzz. At Polycot, we focus on clear requirements and best technologies. We use innovative technologies (such as Ruby on Rails), not because they're new, but because they're more efficient and effective given the requirements for the site. For many "sustainability" is somehow associated with "being green," but the real meaning of the word is less clear. According to the dictionary, sustainable means using a resource without depleting or permanently damaging it. One key to sustainable thinking is making the distinction between income (which is renewable) and resource (which doesn't renew and can be depleted). I thought I learned this distinction many years ago, but it's proved easy to forget. For instance, I inherited a small amount of money once, and I should have put it away and regarded it as a resource, spending only income (interest) it generated. Instead I spent it as though it was income, and now it's gone with no hope of recovery. I also, with you, inherited a planet, and I'm dipping into its limited resources rather than learning to use only what's renewable. Fossil fuels are a resource, for instance, that we spend every day, and that will eventually be depleted. It's also possible to "spend" land until it's depleted. Just to reiterate, though I knew how to treat a particular cash resource, I didn't use it wisely. I believed that it was easily replaced, but it wasn't. We make the same mistake every day, in assuming that our planetary resources can be replaced, even though we know what sustainability means, and we may know the difference between income and resource. Years from now we (or our children or grandchildren) may ask, "What were we thinking?" Maybe the answer will be that we were too busy innovating to get serious about sustainability. jon posted this at 8:12 AM |
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