Author: JP

I’m a big fan of Richard Corrigan, and of the Lindsay House. I’ve known him for more than a decade now, and think his attitude and approach to food, to cooking, to the entire experience of eating food in a restaurant, it’s something close to my heart. A passion for what he does, the talent and flair to do it, yet the ability to avoid taking himself too seriously while he does it. He so obviously enjoys what he does, it’s a pleasure to watch him at work.

What does this have to do with innovation? Here’s a sideways look, akin to my long-ago post about the Meringue Moment. Something serendipitous and creative takes place when a consumer seeks to apply someone else’s innovation.

Think of an innovation as a recipe. It has some ingredients, some directions, some advice. And an expected outcome. Of course, when the innovator is as talented as a Richard Corrigan, the outcome is worthy of a Fritz Brenner. [BTW, thank you Wikipedia. Only Wikipedia could possibly have given me a reference to Rex Stout’s fictional detective Nero Wolfe’s cook, the man of 289 cookbooks. Bravo!]

Many years ago, I intended to have a number of close friends over for dinner, and wanted to cook them a Sea Bass with Coriander a la Corrigan. I really wanted to cook that particular dish, had done it a few times, but that particular time I had a problem. I knew that two of the guests didn’t like coriander, which they called cilantro, while the others absolutely loved it.

I happened to be at Lindsay House, and late that evening, mentioned my problem to Richard. His answer was predictable. You’re not cooking it, I am. And so he did. Dinner for eight chez JP prepared by the irrepressible Richard. What he also did was to tell me how the ingredients fitted together, so that I could play with that dish as much as I liked later. Which I did, and continue to. Wish I had more time to do it, though.
In similar vein, I was watching one of those interminable Cooking-On-Television programmes over Christmas many years ago, if gentle snoring and the occasional raised eyebrow could be termed watching. And then I sat up. There was a guy talking about things to do with leftover turkey. Boring. This particular time, he was talking about making a variant of the classic takeaway peking duck with hoi sin sauce and pancakes. Also boring. If it walks like a turkey and talks like a turkey, it’s a turkey.

What got my attention was that he moved to the subject of making pancakes. And how to make them as thin as the takeaway restaurants make them. He said, Roll the flour/water into a long snakeline cylinder maybe half an inch in diameter. Nothing new there. Cut the cylinder into half-inch segments. Done that, worn the T-shirt. Cut each segment into half again. Card-carrying member. Now take each pair of quarter-inch segments, place a little oil between them and then stick them back together and roll out the compound half-inch double segment into a flat disc. Aha. He had my attention. Steam the double disc and separate into superbly thin pancakes after steaming. OK! He had solved my problem.
The point was, I wasn’t interested in cooking pancakes but chapatis. I wasn’t interested in steaming the chapatis. I wanted to cook really thin chapatis but they kept tearing, despite strenuous experimentation in the flour used, the amount of water, the fineness of the flour, whatever. And the technique worked, and my chapatis were thin rather than doorstop-like.

The technique was the innovation. As a consumer I could apply that technique to whatever I felt like, and creativity could flow. Innovation happens when the consumer applies an innovative technique to work on  purposes that were not considered by the originator of the technique.

Much of teaching maths at school works on a similar principle. The first time my maths teacher asked the class “128 players. Knockout tournament. Assume no draws or replays, that every match has a result. How many matches in the tournament?”. And the class went 64+32+16 etc etc. Then he said. “Think about it. Only one winner. How many losers? So how many matches?“. Once we’d seen the technique, we could apply it in myriad ways.

Much of innovation is in creating a new perspective on an old thing. Much of the value of the innovation is taking that perspective and applying it to unplanned horizons and landscapes. That’s what customers do.

Some people think that issues like Net Neutrality and DOPA are confined to the US, and don’t understand why I (and many like me) think this is a global issue, and that everyone should get involved.

Let me try to explain why:

• The internet, whatever you define it as, is global
• The internet allows us an opportunity to innovate on a grand scale, and make a real impact on issues ranging from poverty thru healthcare thru education thru climate change thru to many other things important to all of us, including business
• The value of innovation is derived primarily by consumers
• US consumers are critical to the global innovation process, regardless of where the innovation is  “created”
• Anything that pollutes the path of the end-to-end internet stifles this innovation

Now that may sound altruistic-pinko-utopia to some of you; when you read the rest of this post, I hope to have changed a little bit of your mind.
The latest issue of the Economist referred me to a fascinating paper, via this article. [Oh frabjous day calloo callay, the article has not been DRMed to death].
The article refers to a paper presented by Amar Bhide at the CESifo and Centre on Capitalism and Society Conference in Venice (I shall resist the temptation to add Italy as a suffix :-) ). You can download the entire paper yourself via this site.

I quote from the Economist article:

The most important part of innovation may be the willingness of consumers, whether individuals or firms, to try new products and services, says Mr Bhide. In his view, it is America’s venturesome consumers that drive the country’s leadership in innovation. Particularly important has been the venturesome consumption of new innovations by American firms. Although America has a lowish overall investment rate compared wih other rich countries, it has a very high rate of adoption of information technology (IT).

Read the article and the paper for yourself. There are a few things I’m not sure about, there’s much I don’t know enough about, but one thing’s for sure. Innovation is about consumers and not innovators. This is not new, it’s been a while since I first heard Michael Schrage say it. What Schrage actually said was:

Innovation isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt.

The US is the biggest capital market in the world. It has the most “venturesome consumers”. It is critical to global innovation, particular web-related innovation. Global innovation is critical to our attempting to solve many of the long-standing problems we face. [Before you say it, I agree. Innovation is necessary but not sufficient to solve these problems, we have political and philosophical and spiritual and economic and cultural barriers as well. Or maybe I should just say Fear and Greed and be done with it).

So that’s why I care about doing everything I can to make sure that people understand the problems in the Net Neutrality Bill(s) and DOPA. And why we should all care.

These are not easy issues. But the consequences of getting them wrong don’t bear thinking about. So get involved.

Saw this in the Times today. A cosmetics company convinces the Dutch Supreme Court that one of its “fragrances” should be copyrighted; I can only infer that it couldn’t win the case on patent or trademark bases…. and given that the “original” retails at £40, and the “copy” at £3, I’m not meant to be surprised.

Whatever next. And people wonder why I call myself Confused.

I’ve now spent time reading through comments and coverage on the web, and came across Vicki Davis’s blog and post on the subject. It’s an absolute must-read. She knows what she is talking about.

Her point on the number of comments being made by people who have not read the Bill is itself worth noting. While I did read the Bill, I did not have the contextual knowledge she so clearly has, as to how schools in the US manage access to social software today. So I’m very grateful for her insights.

Anyone interested in the use of social software in education must read her post and her detailed critique of the Bill. There’s so much there for me to absorb and learn from. Thank you Vicki.

Thanks to Kevin Marks for bringing this to my attention. I quote from the ZDNet story:

• Web sites like Amazon.com and MySpace.com may soon be inaccessible for many people using public terminals at American schools and libraries, thanks to the U.S. House of Representatives.
• By a 410-15 vote on Thursday, politicians approved a bill that would effectively require that “chat rooms” and “social networking sites” be rendered inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the Internet’s most ardent users. Adults can ask for permission to access the sites.
• “Social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids,” said Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican and co-founder of the Congressional Victim’s Rights Caucus. “This bill requires schools and libraries to establish (important) protections.”
• Even though politicians apparently meant to restrict access to MySpace, the definition of off-limits Web sites is so broad the bill would probably sweep in thousands of commercial Web sites that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow “communication among users.” Details will be left up to the Federal Communications Commission.

Kevin also pointed me at what Danah Boyd had to say about this, which you can find here.

This is serious stuff. If the Bill becomes law, for one thing my Four Pillars suddenly becomes No Pillars. Or at best Two. But that’s not important.

What is important is Danah’s point about access. Social software skills are becoming more and more important, and are wonderful tools to create and release value. We are still learning about how to use them in education, healthcare and industry, but the value proposition is so profound that little, if any, analysis is required. What the Bill does is disenfranchise those whose primary access to social software is in schools and libraries. Which is incredibly saddening.

A few other observations.

One, the House voted 410-15 to pass the Bill. I wonder how many of those 415 have ever seen MySpace, much less used it.

Two, the Bill, while ostensibly designed to block MySpace, will affect all blogs and social networks for that matter most 21st century web sites, from Amazon thru eBay and Flickr. This is disenfranchisement on a magnitude that I find hard to believe. Again, probably carried out by people who have limited, if any, experience of the tools and facilities.

Three, if the Bill passes, the most likely outcome is that the very activity it seeks to prevent moves deeply underground, an appalling possibility. People forget the transparency that the web provides. At work I’ve always felt that driving dissent underground is counterproductive. In this context the parallel is worse than just counterproductive; new ways will be found that are actually harder to police than the status quo. And will cost a lot more. And yet fail.

Four, what we need is the exact reverse. Education in the benefits and risks of collaboration tools and social software, and ubiquitous access to the tools. And maybe we need to start not at the schools and the libraries, or even in the enterprises, but in the legislatures. Worldwide.

I’d be interested in knowing what Judy Breck and John Seely Brown and Clarence Fisher et al feel about this, with its terrible impact on education. So I shall watch their blogs with even more interest than is usual, if that is possible.