The Innovation Delusion
"For forty years, innovation has been the hottest buzzword in business. But what if the benefits of innovation have been exaggerated, and our obsession with the new has distracted us from the work that matters most? It's hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it's a new technology or a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell argue that our focus on shiny new things has made us poorer, less safe, and--ironically--less innovative. Drawing on years of original research and reporting, Russell and Vinsel show how our fixation on innovation has harmed every corner of the economy. Corporations have spent millions hiring chief innovation officers while their core businesses tanked. Computer science programs have focused on programming and development even though the overwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. Suburban sprawl has saddled cities with expensive infrastructure and piles of deferred maintenance that they can't afford to fix. And sometimes, innovation even kills--like in 2018, when a Miami bridge hailed for its innovative design collapsed onto a highway and killed six people.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
4people
2020–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > That the private-sector can trigger crises that have no political or technological fix is on very few pundits' radar.
Interestingly, there seems to a number of cultural solutions to this problem. Like, imagine if the people of LA adopted a fondness for living in dense urban environments, and a reluctance to "live near nature," the problem of wildfires becomes much more tractable. Or for example, a culture of maintenance (forests, power infrastructure, infrastructure fireproofing, risk preparedness, etc.), like outlined in the book "The Innovation Delusion," could very well reduce risk a considerable amount. Unfortunately our civilization is too much stuck in its traditional ways to consider such solutions.
- For the folks that wants a structured reference around maintenance, this book [1] it's one of the best of the topic.
[1] - The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most - https://a.co/d/eInjwZD
- I am on your same wavelength. Props to you for pursuing this mentality. I believe you would enjoy the book “The Innovation Delusion” by Vinsel and Russell
- Rather than reading yet another article about how there’s all that COBOL still out there powering critical systems, which should comes as no surprise whatsoever to regular readers of Hacker News —— why not read a book about the deeper reasons how and why old technologies persist, and the ethic and duty of maintaining them. Specifically:
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2006).
Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (2020).
You won’t agree with everything in those books, but they will make you think deeply about old technologies and the stories we tell ourselves about innovation.
- A review of a new book called The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell
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