Nick Carr posted an article in his blog that deals with the contribution IT can make to innovation. This excited a discussion (e.g comments, AccMan post) with the basic position “people and the the companies culture are the most important factors”. I totally agree to this view but there is still a point to mention: IT is the road innovators are driving on. Getting ahead on a dirt track is much more difficult than speeding up on a freeway. So innovation really isn’t one of the greatest benefits of IT but the use of (distributed) systems can support innovation processes significantly. Just think of wikis, boards, the blog community or the countless specialized individual systems that are used by many companies to improve their communication, documentation, visualization and so on. Most of them don’t have innovation as their primary target but at least they introduce new possibilities.
Even if IT is a commodity nowadays it is still easier to drive a nail into the wall by using a hammer than by just using your hands.
One Response to “take advantage of the hammer”
Something to say?
An excellent observation maz but I would still argue that the tools are useless without some clue how to use them and what they mean to the individual. We’re miles off that. Sure, bags of blogs (the total would not cover the population of the UK assuming all are ‘live,’ which I very much doubt.)
The other point many people miss is that innovation is something corporations are not used to. They spend most their time wrestling with IT to get transactional ‘stuff’ done. How else can you explain the billions earned by SAP/Oracle/IBM/Microsoft in selling *existing* applications? Total revenues in that space around $180 billion. Innovation from social software doesn’t even register a blip on those numbers.
Left by Dennis Howlett on January 23rd, 2007