As the worlds journey through the second industrial (Internet) revolution carries on apace, todays businesses face an emerging challenge. Unless your company has its own "in-house" network professionals it is likely that the demands the Internet places on your business, whilst clearly a massive opportunity are also the source of what can seem like spiralling overhead costs in terms of personnel and knowledge.

 

Back in the mists of history during the first industrial revolution, the electric light bulb was causing a stir. The new technology was clearly a fantastic opportunity for business of the time to increase productivity and improve working conditions. It was basically a new fangled technology which could enable businesses to "work smarter".  Now where have we heard that before?

The first electricity installation companies were small bands of highly educated and highly paid technical afficionados who were evangelists of the technology rather than being more akin to the matter of fact electricians of today. The technolgy has nowadays moved from invention to commodity to utility and that process probably took 10 to 20 years to fully complete. There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between that revolution and this one.

Heres one cast iron fact. Businesses today need networks. Whether it is to connect their towering office blocks in each corner of the world into one great corporate network or just to connect their office computers to their printer and the internet to read their emails, they all need their networks. We have tried to think of one single business that wouldnt put itself at a disadvantage in todays world by ignoring everything related to the internet such as emails and websites and we have failed. From the sole trader window cleaner to the corporate giant, all of them now need their networks.

 

 The technology is now moving into the realms of utility rather than being "a great new invention". Nowadays your average Granny in Scotland is just as likely to switch on the laptop as they are to switch on their central heating. Ok thats a dubious fact I'll concede but you get the picture. The world has changed forever and the Scottish business community as well as the residential community now need their networks. The technology is now thought of more like a central heating boiler than the hubble telescope to the average consumer. They just want it to work.

Todays networks now need plumbers. Todays Scottish businesses now need network plumbers and not the techie evangelist types of the last 10-20 years. They need matter of fact network tradespeople who they can call upon to get things working properly when they arent. They dont need an inhouse plumbing enthusiast who does plumbing for a hobby and thinks theyre a bit handy with a pipe bender and they certainly dont need a plumbing department full of plumbers in their overalls ready to fix a boiler at a moments notice. 

 

Ok weve stretched the plumbing analogy a little too far here but I believe the point is made. When it comes to network plumbing and you need the system to just work. When you need a no nonsense expert in the trade to advise you on the best systems for your requirements or just to make your existing systems do the job that you need them to do for you, day in-day out, give us a call at Rustyice Solutions. The network plumbers.

I had the opportunity to speak to a group at a university recently about innovation. In fact, I've spoken to four universities about innovation in the last few months. There's a growing awareness that innovation needs to happen in university settings. This would include innovation on the administration of the university, in the teaching methods and in what is taught. But that's a sideline to this post.

One of our customers, a senior faculty member argued that all this talk about "innovation" was pointless, and missed the main target, which was that we needed more focus on science and engineering education. In his mind, innovation was equated to technology, and only scientists and engineers could bring new technologies to life. While we agree that scientists and technologists can bring innovations to market, we'd argue that that definition of innovation is awfully narrow. It seems that innovation can occur in many avenues that have little or nothing to do with technology, engineering or science.

In fact we have recently worked with a financial services institution, a health care insurance firm, a life insurance firm and several other firms in the services industries where there are no physical products developed and few if any engineers or scientists. Yet these firms are innovating. Innovating their service models, customer experiences, processes and business models. Apple, held up as the ultimate innovator, is a technology firm but innovates instead more around user experience, linkages, partnerships and content.

There are a number of firms that innovate around technology and science, so we don't want to downplay the importance of technology in innovation. However, we do need to understand the balance between product innovation and all other kinds of innovation, and the importance of engineering and science to innovation. It's really a question of set theory. Technology innovation is a subset of innovation generally, and while all technology innovation is innovation, all innovation is not technology innovation. As much as it may pain my engineering friends to say it, there's a lot of innovation happening that has little or nothing to do with technology. Conversely, there's a lot of technological research that will impact our lives through new innovations as products and services. The key to this reasoning is to understand how technology neednt be the innovation but can more often than not enable the whole spectrum of innovation subsets. But reducing investment in these areas doesn't mean we are less innovative, it just spreads out the responsibility for innovation more broadly. But that had already happened in the 70s and 80s, as private enterprise took on more direct research and investment and the traditional nationalised style government's role declined.

OK, enough of the tangent. Innovation depends on creating and developing new ideas. Some of those insights are based on new technologies or improvements to existing technologies. Some innovation, however, is based on insights about services, processes or business models, and don't rely on technologists or engineers for insights. To claim that all innovation is technology innovation, and that without engineers and scientists no "real" innovation can be accomplished is to view the world of innovation with a very narrow lens.