Eco-Innovation Highs and Lows: A Review
Creative destruction, eco-frivolity and 67 other innovations I saw this week.
For anyone with even a passing interest in innovation, the Trendwatching Brief should be considered mandatory reading. Apart from providing a refreshing perspective on international creativity, the brief challenges you to rethink consumption, values and human behaviour. Plus, of course, it’s a fun read.
So it was with great interest that I opened the latest brief titled Innovation Insanity. It presented 67 innovations from around the world that were ‘on trend’ – perfect for living better, saving the planet or just plain looking cool.
My interests lie at the intersection of green, brands and innovation. With these filters in place, I scanned the new ideas and found they generally fell into four buckets:
1. Revolutions – According to the theory of creative destruction, revolutionary innovations lead to the undoing of the status quo. Digital usurped analog, Wal-Mart displaced Woolworths and so on. These ground-breaking ideas don’t come along every day and they’re difficult to predict. But I thought there were a few in the list that might qualify.
2. Evolutions – The ‘reality TV’ of innovation. Take a successful idea, give it a minor twist and position it as something new. Familiar enough to be comfortable, different enough to be talked about, these ‘purple cow’ ideas comprise the vast majority of innovation. They keep us consuming while we wait for the next big thing.
3. Differentiators – Differentiators lie somewhere between revolutionary and evolutionary ideas. These innovations make us sit up and take notice, but won’t inspire us to tattoo the company’s logo on our head.
4. Fast Failers – It took Thomas Edison 3,000 failures to invent the electric light. A number of the ideas I reviewed seemed like they’d fall into the fast fail category – destined to be more valuable for their learning than their success.
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