I’ve been reading a lot these last few days of my holidays. I’ve been thinking about innovation and what it means. I watched a slideshow on The Pirate’s Dilemma this morning. What it says about innovation should be a cautionary tale to all. Innovation is about stepping outside the boundaries of what is. Pushing those boundaries gives us new ways of looking at things. Once we start looking in new ways at old stuff, we potentially cross from being an imitator to being an innovator. This is very important. It’s the stuff of which so-called progress is made.

Being part of the academic ‘establishment’, I sometimes feel that having an ‘anything’ establishment is to deny the possibility of innovation or even any thing resembling progress. I keep butting my head against the establishment, simply because if it remains the same we stagnate. One of my pet peeves seems to be a practiced head-buttery against established processes within organisations, particularly my own. I happen to be on a committee or two where we discuss the cutting edge of our presentation of ourselves to the world (otherwise known as a ‘website’). This is a continual rethinking process and we’ve done some pretty intense rethinking in that space (and by ‘we’ I mean the teams who have worked on it, I and the committee just get to pick on it and give them some little hints). It’s great that we’re attempting to keep up with what’s happening in the world wide web of university sites, but are we really innovating?

All the technology that I get to use at uni is constrained. There is an SOE (standard operating environment) that allows the management of a couple of thousand PCs without which the tech guys would be forever fixing things. The number of things that can go wrong is significant and there are pages and pages out there that discuss these. What I find ironic, though, is the tendency to mandate the use of these SOEs equally for everyone. Even the boundary pushers.

I worked for nearly two years on a PC until I managed to cobble together enough funds to buy myself a MacBook. I hated the PC. It had a watermark on the desktop that you could never get rid of. Every restart there it was again. Even if I’d deleted it. It was a vicarious conversation between me and the tech departments. They kept telling me they were in control of my computer (okay, it wasn’t really mine, but I would never let them stick something in my office and they wouldn’t consider it, so let’s just say they were interfering with my workspace). I was not able to push the boundary of that machine, because they kept re-boundarising it. It was their’s.

When I got the Mac, I had to send it in to have Office and a few things installed so that I could work within the system. Can you imagine my horror when I found the same branding system had been installed! And to add insult to injury, if I set my background to black to cover the black logo (and take ownership of my workspace), blow me down if it didn’t flick over to white. It was worse than what they did to the PC. At least on the PC the logo would be gone until the next restart. But Macs are much clever (or at least mac programmers are). I could not get rid of that logo to take ownership of my workspace. Except that I’d managed to keep the original disks that came with it. How I managed that and how I actually got away with it was due to the innovative way in which I ordered and received the computer. It wasn’t through normal channels. It was through the funding I had for an innovative project. Innovation begets innovation. So having the disks, I reinstalled the whole kit and kaboodle. My workspace is now my own.

Without that ability to own my workspace (aka my computer), I am less innovative. With the ability to make over and tinker, I become more innovative. I step outside the boundaries. I broke the SOE to do so. I think I’m in breach of a policy or two, because I don’t have some of the settings that are mandated, and yet, I’ve been more productive.

I need to make a case to the PTBs about how we allow innovation. How can we allow people to step outside the defined areas (particularly when there are thousands of them) and how can you prevent it? Prevention is something that have down pat. SOE is like that other anti-innovation three letter acronym (DRM), although in this case I think it’s called ‘asset management’. Whatever it’s called, there needs to be ways around it, there needs to be some lawlessness in order to create new things. This is just how it is.

What boundaries have you fallen over today?