New concept: Innovation Requires New Words, Requires Journalism

By David Nordfors and Turo Uskali

When SRI President Curtis Carlson first heard about the concept of Innovation Journalism, he said injo is important, because it will establish a common language for discussing innovation processes. This makes it possible for society to discuss innovation.

Chuck House, Stanford Media-X executive director and former head of ACM, independently made a similar reflection: A reason to why HP back-then could spearhead innovation was that many of the engineers came from Stanford, sharing a unique set of vocabulary for describing electronics, which made it possible for them to efficiently communicate ideas with each other.

Language is at the core of innovation!

We suggest journalism is even more important in innovation societies than in traditional societies!

Here goes:

1. Innovation is the introduction of something new
   
2. In order to introduce something, it needs to be communicated
3. Communication requires shared language
4. New things need new words or word combinations to be a part of the language
5. The News makes/spreads the new words to us so that the new things can be included in our language, discussed and introduced.
6. Therefore: Journalism enables society to discuss new things and introduce innovations.

This applies for all journalism covering innovations.

Injo - journalism about innovation processes and ecosystems - is a special case, but a very important one. It disseminates language for discussing how innovation happens in society. So innovation journalism enables society to improve innovation processes, which can affect the rate of innovation even more than the journalism about the innovations themselves.

If you agree, and have a bit of an academic mind - here is the word to hook up with injo: neologism. "Neologism", according to the dictionary (Wikipedia), is "a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created ("coined") — often to apply to new concepts, to synthesize pre-existing concepts, or to make older terminology sound more contemporary. Neologisms are especially useful in identifying inventions, new phenomena, or old ideas which have taken on a new cultural context. The term e-mail, as used today, is an example of a neologism." It continues, "Neologisms often become popular by way of mass media, the Internet, or word of mouth (see also Wiktionary's Neologisms:unstable or Protologism pages for a wiki venue of popularizing newly coined words). Every word in a language was, at some time, a neologism, though most of these ceased to be such through time and acceptance."

So innovation journalism and neologism form together a new key concept.

We are presently preparing a paper, to be presented later this year, that will develop this concept further.

InJo Fellowships 2007 Kickoff @ Stanford

Here are photo albums with pictures from the kickoff week with the Innovation Journalism Fellowship Program 2007 at Stanford.

New InJo Book

(by David Nordfors and Turo Uskali)

Erkki Kauhanen and Elina Noppari at the University of Tampere have now released the results of their research on innovation journalism in Finland, a project that has been going on for two years with funding from Tekes, the national Finnish agency for technology and innovation.

The study is the largest single compilation to date of empirical research on innovation journalism, setting a benchmark for future research. This seminal Finnish research has more emphasis on social innovations than previous work. This is clearly its most important achievement, and contribution to innovation journalism research.

Erkki and Elina argue for a wider definition of the concept of innovation journalism than the orginal one (which they call "Nordforsian" InJo). The focus is not on the innovation ecosystem, rather on the future of society. We agree that more emphasis may have been put on social and cultural aspects in the original work, and it is definitely key for innovation journalism to be able to discuss the future. Still, it seems constructive to limit the definition of Innovation Journalism to journalism about innovation, covering innovation processes and ecosystems. Yes - all innovation affects the future and all innovation causes change, this is true. But not all change is innovation and not all of the future is set by it. So it does make sense to keep some distinction between innovation journalism and forward-looking journalism, and to journalism of change. InJo is a subset of these wider scopes. With this said, we are happy about this book and the discussion it raises.

The Finnish study points at important issues, such as that journalism covering innovation in Finland today does not present the future perspective very much. Another interesting finding is "the hyperdominance" of ICT themes among the technology innovation related topics at the cost of all other fields of technology. Furthermore, the emphasis of the stories are centered on Finnish perspectives on innovations, and not on the international dimensions of innovation processes. The study identifies several needs of improvement.

The report is available for download on the Finnish innovation journalism site and at Tekes official site.