Simply new and different do not innovation make. In fact, the difference is pretty substantial. According to the OED:

innovative: featuring new methods; advanced and original.
novel: new or unusual in an interesting way.

I was spurred to write this commentary after seeing a Tumbl’d photo of a creative bathroom arrangement by serial entrepreneur and innovator Jakob Lodwick. Here’s the photo, for reference:

While I find the arrangement of the toilet paper dispenser interesting, and love that there are people like Jakob out there willing to publish this sort of thing when they discover it, I take issue with it being called “innovation.” The bathroom does feature “new methods” (or at least one), and, hey, it’s plenty original, but does it fulfill the third requirement? Is it sufficiently advanced?

I call foul. It’s interesting that the toilet paper dispenser is screwed into the chair, but at the same time it’s a waste of a chair, arguably one of the most functionally perfect inventions in human history. There would perhaps be merit to this if it were posited as an art piece with some message behind the configuration, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I think it would make much more sense to put the basket on the floor, keep the roll in its usual place — at arm’s length on the wall — and then have an extra chair to use. From a functional design standpoint, it seems more like a misstep than innovation to me. As it stands, the chair is impaired for other uses and the toilet paper dispenser can now be accidentally removed from the bathroom.

I don’t mean in any way to single out Jakob or indict his creativity. In fact, I’m not so certain the post wasn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. Rather, his photo-and-single-big-word post prompted me to write something I’d been meaning to articulate for a while. I think in the slightly feverish atmosphere surrounding the software and web development community nowadays, there is a tendency to get a little too excited about things before they’ve either been properly examined or vetted by history.

Novelty is a good thing, and I’d hate to live in a world without it. In fact, a lot of innovation — I’d even wager the vast majority of innovation — comes from experimenting with novel ideas. But novelty is not innovation on its own, no more than simply experimenting with food, machinery, or art (regardless of your credentials) is innovative on its own. The same goes for software. It’s the reason things that momentarily enthrall us eventually fade: many of them are just novel. The things that stick, on the other hand — the wheel, the chair, rock music, Craigslist, the MP3, and the Post-It (literally) — those are innovative.

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