Adding Values

Many people equate innovation with technology… A dangerous halftruth and a serious underestimation of the tremendous variety of innovation. Innovations add value or fail. There is no economic added value without adding values. Values are about culture, about organising our life. The more radical an innovation, the more distant it is from what we know and recognise, and therefore the greater the risk of failure. That’s not necessarily bad. It is, however, possible to decrease this ‘cognitive distance’ by understanding the cultural side of innovations. Are firms looking for customer-victims or for customer-cocreators? Society is never standing still. Innovations and social change interact, co-evolve. Free creativity is wonderful, but sometimes it’s more rewarding to think of ‘productive creativity’. In Darwinian terms the suvival and further development of innovations is not only about variety (creativity), but also about understanding and influencing selection. During his whole professional life Dany Jacobs (Brugge, 1954) has been studying competition and innovation in a variety of industries, from dredging to horticulture, for airplane manufacturing to cocoa, from steel to fashion. His book on the knowledge economy, Het Kennisoffensief was elected Book of the Year in 1997 by the Dutch organisation of business consultants Ooa. Currently he is professor of strategy at the University of Groningen and the Amsterdam Fashion Institute. This book includes an updated version of Dany Jacobs’ stimulating essay Creativity and the Economy, written as a preparation for the Innovation Lecture 2005 of the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs on Competing with Creativity.