Intimate Innovation

Soft Innovation: Towards a more complete picture of innovative change (NESTA research report July 2009). In this report, economist, Paul Stoneman, uncovers a picture of rapid innovative change which depends on changes in aesthetics, rather than technology. He calls this ‘soft innovation’. Soft innovation mainly concerns product innovation and differentiation. The report covers ground more fully considered in Paul Stoneman’s book, ‘Soft Innovation: economics, product aesthetics and the creative industries’ (Oxford).

He develops the distinction between the conventional focus on ‘vertical’ innovation, and conjectures about ‘horizontal innovation’; and a new form of vertical innovation, in which price reduction and ‘constrained aesthetics’ are what differentiates the product of service eg no frills airlines. These are such suggestive ideas.

• ‘horizontal’ innovation implies an approach to governance (the way we do things round here…the extent to which we have internalised our purpose) that is different; it is equalising – it implies that a greater value is place on alignment, and relatedness, than the capacity to dominate. It describes an approach to governing relationships in which we ‘attend’ to different things than we would in vertical innovation.
• some of those different things we might attend to include all of the parties to a system (or a problem, as in the model of radical efficiency) in ways which notice differentiation, and try (as part of how we govern relationships) to make use of difference
• those involved in a horizontal governance system are also, themselves subject to vertical governance – from external or internal sources; at the point where these intersect – where the horizontal and the vertical meet – there are huge challenges at remaining ‘in touch’ with oneself; and in intimate relation to others. I wonder if people at work ‘act out’ at the points where they experience this intersection of the vertical and horizontal – rather than moments of inflection, these are moments of intransigence; where the main task becomes ‘keeping things as the are’. We must remain stuck, at all costs.

I also wonder about the new form of vertical innovation and the notion of ‘constrained’ aesthetics. Perhaps the constraining is the source of the innovative ‘tipping’ ….

As an aside, what might be the aesthetics of innovation – as a process, as an experience? Some theoretical physicists speak of pushing theories until they are beautiful; symmetry is a prevalent idea in evaluating advanced mathematics.