This is part of an article about innovation, that I stumbled upon, I thought of QODE when reading it.
A Holy Trinity
Just as critical as defining innovation is figuring out what distinguishes innovative ideas from humdrum ones. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, took that as his task.
To Johnson, three of the best innovations in recent years — the web, Google and the iPod — share three qualities. They have simple user interfaces. They reuse existing information. And they were created by small groups of people, not cumbersome committees. "With the web, the powerful insight was the ability to click on a blue word and go somewhere — the linking," he said. "Networking theorists thought you had to have two-way communication, multiple link levels and more authoring built-in. Those are all good ideas, but the beauty of the web is that you just click on a blue word." Even the most computer-phobic person can point and click.
Google is nearly as easy to use. When it began, competing search engines often employed busy graphics and organized their results in opaque ways. Google presented only its memorable moniker, a mostly white screen and a text-input field. Likewise, the genius of the iPod is its scroll wheel, which allows a user to rapidly spin through hundreds, even thousands, of songs. These three innovations make existing information easier to find and organize, Johnson pointed out. They allow a person to recombine text, photographs and music in ways uniquely useful to him. "The iPod is a tool for taking information digital music files and creating your own media experience," he said. But none of them is a philosophers stone, turning lead into gold. Rather, each recycles. That even applies to the web, which has revolutionized communications. It merely lets users to share knowledge, whether in academic papers or news reports, and products, whether from eBay or L.L. Bean, in new ways.
