What’s Innovative Pussycat? Woah, Woah, Woah.
Posted: December 5th, 2011 in Innovation
by Rick Strezo
Tom Jones sang, “What’s New Pussycat?” not, “What’s Innovative Pussycat?” though I think that those of us laboring in the field of innovation would be far better off had it been otherwise.
New versus Innovative? Am I splitting semantic hairs? I don’t think so.
Then, what exactly is the difference between new and innovative?
All innovative things are new, but many (most?) new things are not innovative. Huh? New is never before seen, novel, different. It is inherently neither better nor worse than its comparative set: it is just dissimilar. New is benefit agnostic and for that reason, to do new is relatively easy.
But to be innovative takes work. Innovation starts with new as a necessary but insufficient condition and layers in other critical requirements. The innovation math goes something like this:
New +
Competitively Differentiated +
New Benefits +
Valued by Customers +
______________________________________
Economic Value Created = Innovation
And it’s that last element in the long addition problem, Valued by Customers, that’s most essential. Generally speaking, anti-conformist New doesn’t give a rip about customers’ needs: it looks at what’s out there and does something different. But for non-conformist Innovative, delivering customer value is the whole point: different that doesn’t leave the customer better off is a non-starter.
So, what’s new Pussycat? The Sharper Image (as the sum total of pretty much every product that they’ve ever sold), blue ketchup, the Edsel, New Coke (they didn’t name it Innovative Coke!), Crystal Pepsi, Breakfast Mates, the Apple Newton, meat dresses, Euro Disneyland… you get the idea.
This same new versus innovative question is addressed in a different context by Steven Sondheim in his Pulitzer Prize winning “Sunday in the Park with George.” In this work, Georges Seurat explains to his mother the difference between fad and art (represented as pretty and beautiful, respectively):
“Pretty isn’t beautiful, mother.
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges,
Is what is beautiful.”
And by the way, IMHO, Aretha’s hat is neither pretty nor beautiful—nor innovative for that matter—though I do suppose it is new. Woah, woah, woah.