During a meeting at my job we were discussing the core characteristics we wanted both our company’s public image and its products to exude. Almost everyone in the room decided that we wanted to be innovative. We wanted innovation to be something that mattered and was a core part of the future direction of the company. When I say almost everyone, I mean one person didn’t agree. And that one person had a serious bias against the word “innovation.” In her mind, she felt that innovation was a bad idea. She felt that to be innovative meant to ignore your users. There is some validity to this statement but in so many other ways that’s just dead wrong.

Innovation is so many different things depending on context that it’s an easy word to be scared of if the context is misunderstood. In its absolute simplest description it is merely doing something which has not been done previously. This could be driven by your users but, barring the occasional genius, users aren’t well known for innovation; for one thing, if they truly had something new and innovative they would also be smart enough to develop it themself rather than just give it away. This however does not mean that innovation doesn’t work to the benefit of the user. In that meeting, one of my colleagues stated this idea very succinctly that there is, and must be, a divide between understanding your users and following them.

An excellent example of this would be what is most likely plugged into your computer right now: an iPod. When the iPod first came out, not only was the tech industry generally unimpressed but so too were the Apple users. They didn’t simply want an mp3 player. They wanted something grander, something like they had been discussing and (most likely) requesting from Apple, whatever that was. And today the iPod has changed the face of not only that industry but our culture itself. It was an unwanted innovation which, once used, showed the wisdom of the developers behind it. It wasn’t what the users requested that was made, but what they wanted (whether they realized it at the time or not). They understood their users.

Is striving for innovation dangerous? Hell yes, but so is running a company. You can try to create something no one’s thought of before and end up with a whole new paradigm or you could create a waste of time that no one will ever use. To me, there are only two types of software companies: those who innovate, and those who mimic the innovators. Anyone who wants to be a part of the latter group shouldn’t be a programmer.