Importance of History on Innovation Today

Preparing for an upcoming presentation, I decide to start with a quote from famed philosopher George Santayana:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

The perception of what innovation is and how we view it in our organizations has a lot to do with what we've believed about how it was done in the past. Unfortunately, our view of the past is colored by the way history has been presented to us. The Myths of Innovation is a great read describing the facts behind the lone inventor/innovator myth (i.e. Thomas Edison with the light bulb and the Wright Brothers with the airplane). History is easier to remember when we compartmentalize inventions and innovations as being this Eureka moment attributed to a single person or group. The truth is harder to swallow when you consider the timeline of innovations before and after the one person who gets the credit in the history book. Advances in aviation and light bulbs continue to this day.

So why is studying the incremental innovation histories of these inventions so important going forward? If we believe the cliff notes version of these past inventions, we can become biased to thinking that we or our organization can ever be that creative or innovative when our reality may be totally based on a flawed historical view. Taking this forward to a current example, there are those that would credit Steve Jobs as the creator of the IPod and IPhone. Steve Jobs may be an awesome visionary and creative leader but he's backed by thousands of creative staff to turn vision into reality. As humans, we like a straight line problem and solution and a person to give credit to, but reality in the world of innovation is failure cycles with twists and turns in ideas that are difficult to predict. They involve groups of lots of individual sparks of innovation across individuals, companies and countries which are all dependent on the availability/affordability of the needed technology to pull it off.

Study of past companies and the path to get to where they are can be an encouraging process to show you that those who have innovated before you have gone through the same struggles and failures that you're experiencing. Study the "real" history and be encouraged that others have gone before you and succeeded.