An interesting follow on discussion with
Divya Ramachandran had us talking about the subtleties in word play and semantics around innovation, appropriation and adoption. Part of the difficulty centered around, for me, that appropriation of a design seemed a lot like innovation to me. A design in use. But appropriation
is different from acceptance or adoption.
A nice distinction comes from the late Professor Rolf Faste of Stanford University:
INVENTION: is the creation of new ideas
INNOVATION: is the acceptance of new ideas
I think acceptance could very well be replaced with adoption. In other words, an invention, or a creative idea, is not an innovation until it is out there, being used in the world. When an idea is made to happen, then it could be called an innovation. I think my previous design mentor Darrell Mann used to talk about it as:
innovation = making things happen
So key to this is that an innovation doesn't have to be overtly creative - it probably has to be new, but it certainly has to be in use rather than sitting in someone's head, or as a pretty picture somewhere.
