Internet Innovation: The Best is Yet to Come!

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Although it is difficult for those born post-1990 to conceive of life pre-Internet, in the grand scheme of things, the computer is a relatively young invention and the Internet is even younger. By taking a look at earlier transformational periods and their patterns, we can predict the influence and impact of the current wave of Internet-based digital development and gain insight into where we are in the evolution of the digital transformation.

Three Types of Innovation

In 2009, Google's digital marketing evangelist and web analyst Avinash Kaushik posted a blog entry about the misuse of the word "innovation." Kaushik was particularly frustrated with hearing the word thrown around constantly, as if it applied to everything. It wasn't until Kaushik heard a talk by Google's former CIO Douglas Merrill that things began to turn around. Merrill broke down the definition of innovation into the following three types.

1. Incremental innovation. This is probably the most easily understood definition, meaning as time goes on the world improves, getting better piece by small piece. iTunes is an incremental advance enabled by the development of the iPod. Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Nintendo Wii, Zynga and Groupon are successful creators of incremental innovations, along with thousands of other companies that have capitalized on the Internet, many successful and even more unsuccessful.

1. Innovation with a side effect. Things are still getting better piece-by-piece, but one of those small improvements suddenly triggers a dramatic increase of developments. Individual improvements are incremental and appear to be part of a steady progression. However, the combination of several little pieces ignites such a flurry of further developments that human society is completely changed. An example is Apple's iPod, and subsequent development of the iPhone and iPad. Other innovations with side effects during the Internet Transformation have included eMail, search technology, online commerce, virtual worlds, online gaming and Microsoft Outlook, all of which spawned thousands of businesses and a massive new marketplace.

1. Transformational innovation. This is the rarest type of innovation. These inventions are so influential that the steady incremental progression suddenly takes a huge leap forward in one step. While a side effect can change the character of an entity or system, this kind of innovation is truly revolutionary. The Internet is the transformational innovation that empowered Steve Jobs and Apple to create the iPod, iPhone, iPad and iTunes.

The Impact of Transformational Innovation

All three types of innovation (incremental innovation, innovation with side effects and transformational innovation) have occurred since the early 1990s. Amazon launched in 1994, the same year that FedEx became the first to offer online package tracking. Netflix, Google, and PayPal all launched in 1997 and 1998. Napster, the very first peer-to-peer file sharing program, was first released in 1999. The Internet has jumped from computers to mobile devices, televisions, airplanes, cars, and medical implants. It has led to dramatic changes in the way people share information, communicate with each other, do business, and generally live their lives. It has diffused itself through almost every device and electronic product in use today.

All this took less than 20 years.

Transformational Innovations

To understand the implications of the Internet-based transformations now impacting almost every aspect of human life, it's valuable to look back at other transformational innovations such as the printing press, steam engines, battery power, electricity, automobile and computer, and to understand that it took far more than two decades for each to have an impact on society comparable to the impact the Internet has had already.

In the United States, the first wave of industrialization in the early 19th century introduced factories that began crowding out small scale artisans. By the end of the 19th century, industry had been expanding to a huge scale using modern tools and methods developed beginning in the 1850s and 1860s. The last half of the 19^th Century and first two decades of the 20^th Century witnessed a period of invention and application of technology that was not only unprecedented in history but remained unparalleled until the current wave of Internet and computer generated innovation and invention. From 1860 to 1890, approximately 500,000 patents were issued by the US patent office, including the ones for the early light bulb and telephone.

The Industrial Revolution spawned transportation, electricity, communications, steel mills, oil refining, the assembly line, the automobile, air travel and the invention of a number of practical items, many of which laid the groundwork in their respective fields for years to come.

These new inventions required infrastructure to be set up that would enable them to be implemented and monetized. The rise of the modern firm at the very start of the 20th century reflected the new organizational complexities of businesses. Production, management, and operations were now on completely new levels, a process taking more than they 50 years.

Transformational Innovation: Steam and Internal Combustion Engines

For 150 years, steam engines revolutionized commerce and trade, becoming the primary means of land transportation until the advent of the airplane. While steam was by far the most efficient method of power since its introduction in 1712, it was not until 1794 that a breakthrough was made in the United States by John Fitch, who constructed the first working model of a steam locomotive. By 1804, the first working full-scale railway steam locomotive was built in England by an engineer named Richard Trevithick who had discovered a way to use high-pressure steam in engines. This allowed for much more powerful engines to be created, which were still small enough to be practical in a transport capacity. These were the engines that he used to create his full-size steam locomotive, which would mark the beginning of an era.

Working off of Trevithick's model, George Stephenson built one of the first commercially successful steam locomotives for the colliery in England at which he worked. This engine, completed in 1814, marked the beginning of the spread of steam locomotive technology, which had revolutionary impact on society, business, culture and human relationships. In the United States, the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, connecting the country's suppliers of primary products with manufacturers in a way that spearheaded massive increases in growth.

Odd though it may seem, a parallel to the Internet can be seen in the internal combustion engine. When the internal combustion engine was first conceived, its practical uses were very limited. However, society realized its potential and created other machines that were made to be powered by the engine. Today, the combustion engine powers an incredible array of machines, ranging from high-tech factory equipment to the cars that we drive every day.

The Internet, just as the combustion engine before it, is spawning a plethora of innovations that will unlock potential as unimaginable to many of us as the advances spurred by the combustion engine were to its first users. The Internet and computing have revolutionized transportation, not of material goods, but of information, social connectivity and entertainment. It took decades for the computer to get to the point where we are now, and even still, computing power is continuing on the path of acceleration known as Moore's Law, whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

Just as the steam locomotive revolutionized transportation for 150 years, the Internet and modern computing will continue to revolutionize the world as we exploit their potential.

Transformational Innovation: The Internet

Most people agree that the Internet is the biggest transformational innovation of the past 50 years, and many argue it's the most important of the past 100 years, since the Industrial Age. But the Internet started out with very humble beginnings. The Internet was first conceived as a way to provide an American intelligence and military advantage over the Soviet Union. The World Wide Web introduced the Web browser, which could easily navigate between different Web pages that were hyperlinked together. The Mosaic Web browser, which made the Web popular, came out in 1993 and unleashed what has since been an unstoppable progression as the Internet became commercialized and began its journey towards becoming an integral part of the world's society.

Infrastructures have been developed that utilize the Internet as their backbone. Most modern electronic devices are networked in some way, and those that aren't have networked updates planned.

All of this evolved from a transformational innovation that was really intended to collect and organize intelligence data more quickly and efficiently.

As incrementally revolutionary as the Internet has been, many of its greatest future contributions are yet to come and will result in a basic restructuring of Industrial Age inventions and advances. The media and advertising industry, like many others, remain embedded in Industrial Age business and organizational models.. We are still in the earliest stages of Internet-based innovation and application. The best is yet to come and the changes have just begun.

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