Or are we just too impatient?
by David Mantey, Editor, PD&D
I’m currently watching, listening and reading Michael Mandel’s take on The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S. - the fact 
that I even have this capability is a testament to innovation in multi-media information dissemination and a symptom of onset adult Attention Deficit Disorder, which will be diagnosed by an online pharmacist’s web crawler and pinged as a spam prospect.
The failed promise of innovation, if anything, assigns a guilty verdict to new products in order to remove all personal culpability. Tell me how BlackBerry addiction and internet fatigue are legitimate problems.
If you can make a case for those two, I still want to know how the story makes for headline news more popular than any current event.
My explanation? Self-diagnosis is in, and it’s more common to sit in a meeting and talk about the many sicknesses that ail you rather than your plans for the weekend – consisting of the many things you’ll be forced to cancel because you’re suffering from the exhaustion of a life lived as an “ambivalent networker.”
Back on our supposed inventive shortcomings that read like a thanks-for-trying participation ribbon or an honorable-mention medal for the design engineering community.
Innovation is not a promise or a deal that has been struck with the public. The only sure thing is we’ll continue to come up with theories, provable or not, that will inject rampant excitement into imaginative potential consumers.
Within the presumed benefit of innovation lies the expectation that we will experience a greater number of technological failures than life-altering tech-savvy breakthroughs. That, and we need to get over flashy new features that really don’t make life that much easier to live. I tend to think that most new apps amp up trivialities to the point of annoyance, but I’m drawn to the Joy of Less rather than a Jim Rome-like electro-lust.
Innovation always falls short of expectation. It’s the reason the artist rendition is released before the prototype, and the prototype is then paraded around the country like some Ozzfest freak show to see if anyone is as excited as they were when they first viewed the mock-up on a Discovery Channel product design chronicle.
Are we not as innovative as we thought? From 1998, Mandel cites a possibly tremendous innovative shortfall as we expected:
- Fast satellite internet.
- Amazing biotech drugs.
- Fuel cell propelled cars.
If you think that innovation has failed, cite your delusions of grandeur and sci-fi gadget envy rather than the economy, education or whatever makes for the best headline on a homepage. The symptoms of the failed economy are no more true than the symptoms of a self-described failure sitting at home wallowing about what he/she could have been instead of making active changes.
We can also attribute our demand for immediate return. We want a flying car and we want it now. We want to be teleported. We want cheaper, faster, cleaner power. We’re spoiled children who cry unless we get to open a gift the day before our birthday. Calm down. Have certain innovations failed? Yes. Has the promise of innovation as a whole failed? We don’t know yet and who’s to say we need an answer 11 years after inception?