Innovating or Renovating?
I constantly see that almost every software organization claiming to be Innovating. In my decades of software engineering experience working for organizations that are 50+ years and very recent startups, a very handful of organizations are actually innovating, but most are renovating. Let me explain what I mean by that. Innovation is typically means a radically new business idea or product, much like VoIP, ride-sharing (when it came out) etc. Thanks to my time as a technology leader at a large insurance company's Innovation department, it became clear to me that making incremental technology changes to enhance the existing product is more aligned with renovating. Innovation by accident is rare, but innovative organizations make a dedicated and long-term effort at ideating over different ideas gathered from various sources to understand their feasibility, profitability etc. These ideas can be dozens or more in a year taken via innovation-funnel using a fail-fast principle. Only a h...