Dominant Lens "I don't know why they would be considered innovative except that they're new, different, and sometimes life-changing." “Not built on a previously, existing framework. That’s gotta be innovative. Yeah.” “...all software patents that I have every seen, have been built on the shoulders of those who have come before them, if not built on their toes. Ah, most of the software patents are incremental, they bring very little to the part that wasn’t already known.” The dominant lens of innovation involves an overly-simplified notion of newness that rejects any notion of imitation, adaptation, or other gradual or incremental change. This can be seen in the data by people explicitly saying that radical innovation is the only innovation, or by people citing examples of innovation that are radical. | Challenging Lens “Well, its been done before - just not to this scale, I guess.” “It's not a new idea but I think its rapidity with which it's taken up into society .” "To me it's innovative because it's a brand new thing. It's taking technologies that have existed in the past and it's pushing them farther, kind of closer to their limits of what's possible." The challenging lens of innovation accepts imitation, adaptation, or other gradual or incremental change. This can be seen in the data by people saying this explicitly, or by citing examples of innovation that are incremental or gradual. |
The Big Picture
Word cloud showing the relative frequency of all keywords appearing in non-dominant microinterviews
The image above shows a word cloud of all of the relevant keywords appearing in all of the microinterviews that were classified as "non-dominant." This shows some of the non-dominant ways of thinking about innovation, typically associated with politics, leadership, and the concept of "change" more broadly. Interestingly, aspects of the dominant way of talking about innovation appear here, too, such as "technological" and "profit."