(Source: http://www.lingoport.com/innovation-rejection-and-overcoming-pitfalls) We pay a great deal of attention to innovation and sing its praises. But actually the road to creation, improvement and acceptance is messy and full of pitfalls. Innovation is often hard to recognize and to assign value, at first. More often than not, its introduction doesn’t live up to everyone’s expectations. But still it leaps forward, gracefully or not. I think it’s worth considering innovation more closely, given my own trials of bringing software to market, as well as watching the current industry public opinion mêlée regarding crowdsourcing.

1. Innovation, Rejection and Overcoming Pitfalls
Internationalization Articles, Uncategorized January 25th, 2
We pay a great deal of attention to innovation and sing its praises. But actually the road to
creation, improvement and acceptance is messy and full of pitfalls. Innovation is often hard
recognize and to assign value, at first. More often than not, its introduction doesn’t live up
everyone’s expectations. But still it leaps forward, gracefully or not. I think it’s worth
considering innovation more closely, given my own trials of bringing software to market, as
well as watching the current industry public opinion mêlée regarding crowdsourcing.
Innovation promises great leaps forward. It offers hopeful and seemingly wondrous shortcuts
and economies to everything it touches. It’s a new way, maybe audaciously conceived, and
often tricky to execute. It’s also a fundamental pedestal for all we do. And many of us, if w
are perseverant and lucky, are actually in the business of being innovative. But innovation
always faces initial rejection. It’s just part of the deal.
There’s the promise of dramatic improvement, the skepticism, disappointment and persistence that we find so addicting. So I think i
worth the time dissecting that process a bit, so we can all benefit a bit more from understanding the inventor, while bringing ourselv
forward in ways we can apply to our professional and personal lives.
Great Leaps and Incremental Improvements
I recently read an article that proclaimed a requirement to call something an innovation is a 10x improvement in a process, expense
service. I rather like the idea of putting a numerical value on innovation, as it sets a target standard to be aiming for. I can ask, does
my product provide that 10x improvement? That’s a demanding figure! However I don’t think you can discount innovation that isn’t a
startling.
Some innovations, think of the printing press and more recently the internet, offer astronomical gains in productivity and informatio
access across society. Going to the library to research has become a quaint activity, with power usurped from librarians everywhere.
The internet becomes our personal assistant, advertising vehicle and even a translator. That doesn’t mean incremental improvement
aren’t important either. Actually, I think the two are implicitly married, and that one doesn’t persist towards adoption without the
other. Broadly applied innovation has an ecosystem of technologies, users and materials. For example, improvements in virus
protection probably don’t have a 10x multiplier on internet use, but they do have a cumulative effect on browsing behavior of the
people who adapt that protection. Think of the distinction in terms of game changing, and solving serious pitfalls. Both are importan
to success and adaptation.
Now it also seems that with innovation, you also necessarily encounter a sociological refusal that I’m saying you must overcome to be
optimally successful. An example from my mid 90’s past we’d consider small minded now is needing to lobby a particular VP to grant
internet access to sales people to help them research customers sites. The establishment fear was that people would spend all day
surfing inappropriate sites that would take away from productivity. I can’t imagine an information technology company in that scienc
focused business applying that same reasoning any longer.
People, particularly from my generation or older, discount social media and blogging, but it’s actually a fairly effective and potent
form of circulating news – yes many may not want all the minutia that comes with it, but it can be used quite powerfully and person
when used well.

2. In a more pedestrian example, I often hear about how code analysis tools won’t work, particularly applied to internationalization, ev
when there’s apparent proof in project and customer success that they do. I consider it a badge of honor that a leading localization
company featured in their blog how internationalization tools are a myth. They all but called out my company’s product by name. Y
an open mind and some actual research or even a phone call would have shown more of an embrace of the possibility of improvemen
that actually help the whole industry. People are all too happy to kill off innovation without a serious thought or investigation based
their experiences in the past. In other words, past attempts were unsuccessful before, so we’ll assume nothing could have changed.
The blog post even sited products that have been extinct for years as evidence. Small example but this is how reactionary thinking
plays out in management efforts that can potentially be damaging in an information industry routed in advancing technologies and
development methods.
Where Innovation Comes From
I haven’t noticed a clear path to an innovation process, but what I do know is that ideas are common, good ideas are rare and good
ideas followed with action are rarer still. A dynamic individual may have or come across what many would feel is a good idea, about
to 8 times per year – some people much more, some less. Ideas are always fun and exciting to me, but I confess to only following up
a few. The rest of creativity goes into tweaking current projects, or reading and learning and bringing those ideas into everyday
activities.
Since there isn’t really any value in a creative or innovative idea without follow-through, there is nothing wrong and everything to ga
by running with someone else’s innovative idea or improvement. You just have to keep an open mind to where it may come from.
Big ideas can come from the top down or bottom up. But incremental improvements more typically come from your everyday users o
developers living with a product every day.
For instance, an ongoing challenge for us in our Globalyzer product, is that when our clients first apply it to perform static analysis o
their code, they often end up with what we refer to as false positive results. That is, the product will flag internationalization errors
and in particular embedded strings, which may be programmatic elements such as debug statements or database queries. We
developed rules based filters and a back end database to minimize, catch and tag them, but they typically need some adaptation an
customization for each code base. That’s fine and to be expected and managed, and even a strength of the system, but what if there
was another way?
And in fact a Jr. Programmer/intern working at my company doing a lot of code scanning for service projects made a simple remark,
“what if we compared those strings to an actual dictionary? That would tell us quite a bit about the nature of the string just based o
content, rather than programmatic rules.” It was a very good idea and one of our architects adapted it to make it real. By the time y
are reading this, this improvement will have been released in our software. The young programmer is back in school and has moved o
but his good idea is about to become a real part of our product.
Innovation Devalues Everything it Touches
By its very nature, innovation puts either a person or process out of work. It wouldn’t be worth anything if it didn’t make someone
more productive with less. At the same time, the first rounds of innovation are typically full of pitfalls that need to be overcome.
The immediate case that comes to mind is the current brouhaha over crowdsourcing. In case you haven’t attended LocalizationWorld
read up on industry happenings, or participated in numerous LinkedIn discussions, Crowdsourcing is either a great evil or the most
innovative thing that’s happened in our industry in a while, or something in between. There are complaints about the very concept,
devaluing of translator expertise and what some people feel is an inferior end result produced by enthusiastic, but naive, volunteers
willing to work for accolades alone. Others, notably at Facebook, feel it’s a process that results in faster, cheaper translations at a
higher quality. It’s not hard to find evidence supporting both sides, and I suppose at the moment final judgment on immediate result
may not be the relevant criteria. More likely the industry could potentially have something to gain using the technologies for renderi
translations in context with application pages, rather than the contextless traditional table view. These tools can be applied to more

3. traditional translation resources, while also gaining a better linguistic review platform and buy-in from in-country clients and
employees – who are after all, the real stakeholders and judges in a localization effort. But that’s just my understanding of it, and I
may be overlooking something. Certainly there’s a long way to go, but I wouldn’t be caught on the side of belittling the persistent
follow-through of dedicated people bringing ideas into reality and adding enhancements to overcome pitfalls.
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