Hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving with your family and friends. We had a fabulous time, celebrating with family and friends over multiple days. Lots of calories were consumed and now comes the hard part of trying to shed them. The incentives to go and exercise is proving harder and harder. I just came back from the second town hall meeting where we all got to hear about the plans for the facilities renovations and how paying for them will result in a serious belt tightening. It will not be easy, but this is the reality.

It is at these times that one should not forget that innovations are critical to what we do and that we should continue to find the strength to keep going despite the morale issue that will try to pull us down. So, what is innovation? Merriam-Webster says ” the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods”.  Wikipedia says “Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs.”  The first definition is in the right spirit of innovation. You innovate without thinking about an end goal. The second one is more goal oriented. You innovate to meet some new requirements or existing “market” needs. For us, the market is our faculty, students, staff and alumnae.

By  the second definition, I am proud to say that LTS has introduced several “innovations” in all areas that we support. Patron driven acquisition,  creative and innovative use of the resources in special collections by faculty from all disciplines, the many ways in which we are collaborating with the faculty on the use of instructional technologies to enhance teaching, learning and research (such as digital storytelling, the use of maps, and multimedia annotations), many ways in which we have extended the use of Drupal to accommodate the needs of community as well as improve efficiencies (such as automating the feeding of data and eliminating manual updates), and a whole list of web applications that have simplified many of the administrative tasks, and the use of document imaging systems and data warehouses. The list is long and can go on and on!

In the innovation spectrum, some of the really wild ideas such as the Amazon Drone or Google Glass emerge because they are simply new ideas with no particular needs that have been articulated yet. All of what I listed above and what we are currently engaged in are better solutions for existing “market needs”. We need to first establish that what we are going to be engaged in are relevant to our users. In other words we don’t have a way to come up with such “wild” ideas. There are several reasons for this. Increasingly, our organizations have become lean; any experimentation has the potential of being viewed as someone “wasting time”; there is simply no time to dream up wild ideas; even if an organization encourages innovations, aversion to failure keeps many from such experimentation; lack of guarantee that an innovation will be adopted and actively promoted; and finally lack of recognition for innovations that do not meet the criteria of “satisfying the existing market needs”.

It was not like this when I began my career in the mid-80’s. For a significant portion of my time, I experimented with all sorts of emerging technologies and developed software that no one asked for, but ended up using it later. I had great bosses who encouraged (and were able to) such explorations. Things started changing in the mid ’90s, when  we all were forced to be more goal oriented and focus shifted to excellence in delivering and maintaining services that are basic. The rate of innovations since the mid-90s especially, has been fast and furious coming from the private sector than from Higher Ed. A lot of this has to do with the culture in Higher Eds and the resistance to change. I strongly suggest that you read “Innovations in Higher Education? Hah!” by Ann Kirschner and the books and articles referenced there.

Innovations coming from private sector companies have a few of common characteristics – these companies are relatively young and their leadership tends to be young and fearless; they are in very strong financial position; they have incentivized innovation (such as Google allowing its employees to to do what they want for 20% of the time, which has allegedly been shut down!); they don’t seek permission from their users to implement new ideas; through their marketing prowess they make us all believe that the new innovations are great for us; they take huge risks in the process.

The leading innovations (too many to mention) in all areas recently have been made possible by technologies. In many of these cases, they have been implemented without a lot of care and thought. For example, the revolutions in delivering newspapers, books and journals have proven to have tremendous advantages. However, issues around accessibility (those who cannot afford the technologies to use them are disadvantaged), lending (how do you do interlibrary loan of electronic content which tends to be device dependent and the policies on such sharing remain unclear at best), preservation (for eg.,  how can we guarantee that PDF in its current form will remain intact 200 years from now)  and a boat load of policies.

Similarly, the whole issue of security and privacy in this digital age remains a serious concern, but the innovators seem oblivious to all of this and keep going. Google Glass brought to surface this issue again, but that seems to have died. There have been umpteen questions about the delivery drones. Will it be cost effective? How will they interfere with air traffic? What will happen if they fail midway through the flight? Will it have cameras and what are its privacy implications? What does it mean to FedEx and UPS who depend on Amazon for a significant portion of their business?

You see, the greatest innovators don’t get caught up in these types of questions when a great idea strikes them. Analysis paralysis and innovations don’t go hand in hand! And, every major innovation begets more innovations!