Item — HN Reader

Another way I like to look at this is to define Innovation in a bit of a different way then most people think about it. If you think about Innovation as simply "removing steps from a process", it's a playground for all sorts of ideas.

In a nutshell, take any process at all. Maybe something you do a lot. Or something you have some vested interest in. Or something that you aspire to learn. Really break it out into its nitty gritty step by step details. Now mull over where you see steps that can be removed or combined. That's what most of the time people get really excited about. E.g. "They used to have to do these 7 things to order a cab, and now its just these 3 things"

Concept is described really well in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Something-Really-New-Creating-Innovat...

3 comments

I'd define it a bit more generally as a reallocation of resources that results in a higher yield.

You may not exactly remove a step, but simply adapt it - e.g. self-checkout.

I'm sure there must be some examples where an innovation added steps - e.g. the takeoff checklist for pilots.

I’d define it as necessarily causing greater physical efficiencies of human motion or human action per circadian periodical cycle, where high-tech causes necessarily >10 efficiencies in coordinating human action for achieving the same goal.

I'm sometimes surprised that no one thinks about doing this at all. You can watch thousands of people do something and think "if only we..."

It's particularly maddening if the rest of the sentence is "put that information online" or "shared those updates somewhere", because the solution is dirt cheap to build. Hunting information is an expensive waste of time.

The flip side is that sometimes, things are done a certain way for a reason that's not immediately obvious.

Value chain innovation

That's a great tip! Thanks for sharing nate. I'll have a look at the book too