Has anyone else noticed that "innovation" has come to have a holy ring to it? In America, achieving more of it has become the central motivation for educating our children and funding new business ventures. Organizations reinvent themselves so they can invent new products and new ways to market them, from snack foods to college degrees. Not all of that works so well for all concerned, but to badmouth innovation itself causes people to look at you like you're the Unabomber.

Please indulge me while I probe our acceptance of--if not addiction to--ceaseless, churning change, as embodied in our attitudes toward innovation (by which I mean introducing unexpected things and ways of doing things--which need not be original, just new to your culture.)

Consider following this injunction to think and act in a certain way with regard to innovation:

Judge the value of innovations broadly; whether producing or consuming, weigh society's benefits, costs, and risks with your own, and not merely in terms of money.

If people always thought this way, we wouldn't have leaf blowers, pop-tarts, an obesity epidemic, or the Keystone XL pipeline project. We would rake our leaves, eat our oatmeal and veggies, and ride bikes and mass transit.

Technologists love to solve problems. They will never run out of them, because most of those they tackle are side effects or deficiencies of previous technological fixes. Were it not for innovations like private automobiles and air conditioning, we might still largely depend on green energy and might not have global warming to solve. Not that I think we should all inhabit agrarian societies, but I do think that by seeking to  control nature, we choose hazardous paths and lose control over our lives. In many little ways, every time we adopt new technological innovations, we are complicating our lives.

Capitalists love innovations, particularly the ones they own. Some companies, like ex-Microsoft honcho and celebrity chef Nathan Myhrvold's  Intellectual Ventures, troll for patents and other IP, buying and selling rights to them like real estate. That company has acquired over 35,000 patents, yet none of them have made it into commercial use according to an investigation by the NPR Planet Money Team. Listen to/read that report; it is as irritating as it is enlightening.

The quest for software patents resembles a land rush, but there's no there there. What there is is a gold mine for litigants. According to the Planet Money story, much of the mining takes place in the small town of Marshall, Texas, where dozens of IP trolls (so-called "non-practicing entities") maintain empty offices simply to file patent suits to be tried by the friendly juries of the Eastern District of Texas. (In fact, the software company I worked for in the last decade was sued for patent infringement in Marshall.)

The net result of all this litigation includes no genuine innovation at all. It's medieval jousting, with patents serving both as swords and shields.

Some takeaways to ponder:

• "Innovation" should not be confused with "progress," or "new" with "improved."
• The more innovation a society encourages, the faster its problems morph and multiply.
• Patents are not innovations, and software patents are but a sandbox for speculators.

So, if In-no-va-tion be your mantra, let it bespeak desire for broad benefits, not narrow advantage. And if you innovate, try to predict and avoid unintended consequences of what you bring to life.
 

By Geoff Dutton

Illustration by Bryan Dunn