How the idea of ​​innovation has changed in our country

The term “innovation” has acquired dozens of definitions. Everything has become innovative. But how has the understanding of innovation changed? And how to talk about them in such a way as to convey the value of your company and product and not get lost in the information noise?

Why is it important to know how people understand innovation?

IKRA conducted a study, the starting point of which was the principle inversion from lateral thinking: what if the difficulty with innovations is not in how we implement them, but in how they are implemented in us? Or, to use the language of social constructionism, in the way that innovation is understood in society, and in the actions that people take in connection with it.

This philosophical tradition teaches that the reality in which we live is constructed in a special way, and the “obvious” phenomena around us are in fact social constructs – “non-verbal agreements” that people have made to understand things in a similar way and act in accordance with it. Outside of these “non-verbal agreements”, social constructs do not exist, because it is people who give them meaning and introduce them into the world.

This is what happens with innovation: our ideas about them are taken from numerous ratings of innovative companies, interviews with experts, articles in the media, pop science, our own experience, etc. People have not yet fully agreed on what exactly we consider innovative, which means that a robo-pizzeria, a plant for the production of water from hot dogs, and anything in general can be innovative in the minds of consumers. And this, in turn, means that the market does not have to be innovative, you just need to be convincing and authoritative. There is both good and bad in this.

From scientific heritage to large-scale state programs

Innovations in our country largely follow the Soviet rhetoric, where they lived in scientific institutions, among scientists and engineers. These were “formal” innovations from state scientific laboratories, research institutes and design bureaus. And “custom”, closer to life innovations often existed in the informal economic practices of the population and small-town inventions.

To compile a timeline across decades, we looked at media history, key government regulations, and public opinion polls. The following are not specific examples and events, but the general topics and directions of public discussion, which, if we turn to the nature of the “social construct”, turned out to be the source of ideas about innovation that exist in our country today.

1990s. Soviet legacy

The pressing questions are about survival, profit, finding and realizing opportunities in the redistribution of property and the reinvention of markets. There are no other innovations. The state is desperately trying to preserve the remnants of the Soviet scientific and technical reserve, business is aware and building itself, and the population is desperately trying to navigate the new reality and, without suspecting it, is looking for and finding innovative solutions and practices in a large number of everyday situations. Small-town inventions on the principle of “Very skillful hands” or manuals and newspaper materials “how to use the remains of X to create Y” (such publications were in Rabotnitsa, Peasant Woman, and later in Young Technique, Do It Yourself , “Inventor and Rationalizer” and other magazines, an extensive archive can be found, for example, here) is a great example of this.

2000s. Techno-optimism

Back in the late 1990s, the demand for scientific discoveries and applied developments began to be slowly presented by the oil and gas, light and food industries. But in the “zero” everything changed – the state begins to form a whole network of supporting institutions, laws and programs.

So, in the early 2000s, federal target programs and special economic zones were formed. A letter appeared about the basics of policy in the field of science and technology until 2010 (in 2002), in 2006 a program was launched to create technology parks in the field of high technologies, which will run until 2014. The infrastructure of state corporations responsible for progress and modernization is being created: Rostec, Rosnano, VEB to finance state projects and others.

The 2007s are becoming a time of sweeping techno-optimism and techno-modernism, where the newfound stability of the economy and the growth of incomes of a strengthened state are manifested. This construction is also read by the population, which can be seen, for example, in a study by VTsIOM (June 63): XNUMX% of our country’s respondents believed that innovation is a necessary condition future prosperity of our country, all investments in them will certainly pay off, and you need to invest more. At the same time, 53% found it difficult to explain what, in fact, innovation is. In short, 22% said that these are any innovations; 15% – introduction of modern technologies; 6% – that the use of the achievements of science and technology.

2010s. Modernization

The 2010s became the decade of the expansion of the state within the discourse of “innovations”. In 2011-2011, the Skolkovo innovation center was created and began to actively develop. Already by XNUMX, brand awareness of Sk was quite high and was closely entrenched in the language in conjunction with “science”, “innovation” and “center” (according to the FOM survey). Our countries have the idea that innovation is absolutely necessary because modernization is needed, although it is not always clear what it is (still according to the results of the FOM).

In addition, through active investment in R&D and the consolidation of research organizations and economic flows, the state is also gradually intercepting not only the informational, but also the economic agenda of innovation. Echoes of this can be seen in another FOM survey (June 2013): 55% of our countries still associated innovation with progress and the future, but there was no personal component, emotion or experience in these connections. And there was almost no business or business processes there – only the activities of super-subjects (the state or very large corporations) with serious investments and solid returns in the future.

Another of the few studies on the perception of innovations, conducted in 2016, generally confirms the current picture: the Soviet legacy is still valuable, engineering is still strong, state paternalism in science will clearly benefit science. But at the same time, I personally, a specific resident of our country, am not ready for innovative behavior or the introduction of innovations into my everyday life.

All this was large-scale, and even too large – one could not find oneself in it. On top of this global structure, in 2018, the National Projects 2019-2024 appeared, the heirs of the previously existing Priority National Projects. It was the National Projects 2019-2024 that gave us such important realities of our time as a tilt towards digitalization and digital transformation.

As a result, by 2020, it turned out that:

• Just as it was not completely clear what innovation is, so it remains. There was trust (especially in the “zero”), there was techno-optimism, but there was no understanding.
• The language and conversation about innovation has largely been reserved for the state. The “change-improve” rhetoric gave people the idea that the state knows better what is needed, and science already had a huge credit of trust. Only an ordinary person in this conversation about innovation has no place left.
• The same thing happened with business. His innovative processes and solutions simply did not fall under the prevailing understanding of what is innovative, at least until the boom of interest in flexible development methodologies (Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Lean, etc.), the principles of which began to be implemented and applied by different companies and businesses -divisions.

Reinvent the conversation, not the language of innovation

Today, “innovation” has become integrated into the info-noise and has become clickbait in the headlines, because behind its vague design, even with great confidence in technology and the modernist aspirations of the state, it does not always show a clear positive impact on his or her life to a particular person. Namely, the increase in the standard of living and its comfort are considered as one of the most expected effects of the development of science and technology.

It is not enough for companies to use “innovative” marker words, because in the current system of ideas, innovations turned out to be quite far from everyday human experience and even specific business practices, on the territory of large projects, the future and science.

The answer to the current situation may not be the invention of a new language, but rather an attempt to democratize these very innovations – to make them part of everyday life and a process of co-creation. Through maximum visibility of the impact of specific solutions on the quality of life and training in creative thinking skills of employees and customers, companies have a good chance not only to land “innovations”, but also to invest in their own human capital and create a loyal client community.

Examples here are IDEO, Unilever or IKEA. In each case, this is a different way of working in the logic of joint value creation (customer co-creation), which, in addition to closer interaction with users in development and promotion, implies more active involvement in all stages of implementation. OpenIDEO works with the requests and needs of various local communities; Unilever arranges local competitions to solve specific problems facing the company and selects the winners; IKEA, in fact, crowdsources user ideas, and then helps to implement the best ones and receive appropriate tangible and intangible recognition.

In all these cases, companies do not so much play out of need and give the user the opportunity to reveal their pains and desires more deeply, as they offer to come up with something completely different, with which a large number of people will continue to work. Anyone can get involved, and for this it is absolutely unimportant to know about the typology and structure of innovations, about market trends – it is enough to give confidence that any solution will be valuable, and innovations start with you.