Unnovation

= innovations that take society backward, because they destroy authentic value

Description

Umair Haque:

"Most innovation, well, isn't: it is "unnovation," or innovation that fails to create authentic, meaningful value. The biggest stumbling block to innovation is unnovation: most companies are too busy unnovating to ever learn how to truly innovate.

In the race to innovate, most organizations forget a simple but fundamental economic truth. A new process, product, service, business design, or strategy can only be described as an innovation if it results in (or is the result of) authentic, durable economic gains.

Unfortunately, much of what our economy produces today isn't innovative — it's unnovative. The evidence is hard to dispute: we merely need to note how deep the global decline is, how consistently 20th Century business fails to do stuff that matters — or just how many industries are caught simultaneously in deep crisis.

Here are some examples of unnovation.

The Hummer was a product unnovation, which destroyed value for both society and Detroit.

CDOs were a financial unnovation, that crippled the financial system, and have cost everyone hundreds of billions.

Integrating into auto finance was a business design unnovation for Detroit — one which diluted and sapped the incentives to make authentically innovative cars.

Hedge funds are (probably) a management unnovation. Industry structure, fee structure, and well, the giant financial meltdown of 2009 all suggest that hedge funds create little value, and are simply capturing it instead.

Windows was, many years ago, an innovation. Today, it's an especially toxic unnovation — one which is actively stifling the development of an operating system that's not the software equivalent of an Edsel." (http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/05/unnovation.html)

Example

Case study of the Hummer as 'unnovation': http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/06/hummer.html