PARANOVATION: The Falsification Of Innovation

They Asked for “Disruption”, Now They’re Getting It…

By Marshall Barnes, R&D Eng
Copyright July 5th, 2012 All Rights Reserved

Welcome to Paranovation, a blog that I originally started over at blog.com but moved here because of too many 502 errors and threats that they would suspend my blog because I never sent back the activation link which they repeatedly failed to send me. Hopefully my experience will be a massive improvement. So all of my posts from there have been moved here, as you will be able to tell since they’re all dated.

As someone who had spent over 40 years working on radical innovations and inventions, I have found that the current industry of innovation promotion, or what I sometimes call “hype” has become flooded with people who know little about the subject, so much so that the industry is way passed being counter productive to business. It’s become, in many ways, a threat. When the amount of misinformation and contradictory concepts reaches the level that it misleads business leaders into wasting time, money and resources, as well as promoting strategies that will cause a business to become vulnerable to a competitor, then you have a situation where plausible threats to business exist. In effect, it’s no different from getting bad medical or legal advice except that in this field no one is getting sued. In fact, the innovation hype industry have insulated themselves by promoting the idea that failure is good, that innovators have a responsibility to fail and that you should fail fast, and fail smart, if you can believe such nonsense. But if you are in a business that is concerned with innovation, you’ve probably heard some of this already. The question is – did you believe it?

I created this blog for one purpose and one purpose alone. To fight back against these threats by exposing them for what they are. You see, they’re no threat to me – I already know how to innovate and be creative on a level far above anyone else I know and I have the track record to prove it. What this is about is saving YOU from the pitfalls that this industry is creating. You may have read the New Yorker article by Jill Lepore about the fallacies of disruption theory. In that she mentioned the fact that this industry has attracted its share of “hucksters” though she came nowhere near the reality of the situation. Simultaneously, she’s in no position to do anything about it. As I created this blog originally more than a month before her story was published, I was already aware of the situation and had begun commenting on it in my blog. As a member of a number of innovation organizations, I had seen first hand what was going on for over a year, and had finally determined to do something about it. Paranovation is part of the result.

Anyone can counter attack Lepore and some have begun to. She’s not an innovator. She’s an academic – a historian. Not only do I have a massive track record in innovation but it includes a background as a conceptual theorist and a specialist in propaganda, psychological operations and information warfare. I intend to wage a war against this wave upon wave of B.S that threatens to take this industry over and the whole disruption theory in particular. All of these mindless morons blabbing about disruption this and disrupting that and are not only clueless as to what it actually means from the Clay Christensen founding of the idea but more importantly, clueless to the fact that no one has to settle for what they think will be disruptive. The fact is that anything can be disrupted, in the original sense of the word and I intend to be that disruption to all of this nonsense. In one of my posts, you’ll see what happened when an innovation hypester tried to take me down after I was critical of one of his posts on another site. My point being that I am in an unique position to take this task on because no one can come back and say, “Well, what do you know? What’s your background??”. For that matter, my bio and background is here, and my press office feed is here. Check them out for yourself.

You will find this blog to be strident, straight forward and sometimes abrasive. The posts also tend to be longer than most blogs but that’s because I have something worthwhile to say, and if you can’t figure out how to bookmark it to read later, or just don’t have the attention span to keep reading, then it’s not for you anyway. I make no apologies for that, in fact, I believe that it acts as a filter. I have no interest in cow-towing to the lowest common denominators in society, and I am sure that readers that have similar concerns as I address, and “get it”, will find the fair that I offer up here to be beyond compare. There is probably no one else in the field that can match the diversity of my background or the level of innovative achievement, so my insights come from a point of view that is as unique as it is advanced.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy Paranovation: The Falsification of Innovation.