Incremental Innovation

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized creative destruction which has come to mean radical innovation. It comes as a great relief to me that we do not live in a world of constant creative destruction which could foster the haphazard evolution of our society. However, I am extremely pleased to be living in a world of constant incremental innovations, with creative destruction providing the spice of life.

Reading my RSS feeds I happened upon "A Need for speed: The path to a faster loading start sequence" from the Official Gmail Blog which delineated the process by which the Google team went about making incremental innovations to its Gmail service.

They tested and broke down the processes into its components (the flow of data between client and server) and thought about a different way of doing things, a more efficient way. As a result they managed to reduce the number of HTTP requests from 14-24 to 4. Well done!

The information technology space is characterized by creative destruction and incremental innovation. Let’s look at web-based email as a radical innovation. Hotmail was first, soon to be followed by countless imitations, all a little bit different but all utilizing a web-based model. Perhaps this creativity caused the destruction of client based applications, especially in the personal email space. So from the launch of Hotmail in 1997 incremental innovations have taken place to strengthen and develop the body of knowledge that supports web-based email systems.

As a regular user of such systems I have seen first-hand these changes, all of which have greatly increased my efficiency and ease of use. Incremental innovation may be subtle, even the blog points out that you may not notice the difference, but with each change comes room for another change until another creative destructive event occurs … exciting!