Does innovation work when it's too innovative?

Innovation is needed now more than ever and companies, governments and organizations are trying to figure out how to become more innovative, and more successful at innovating.

But can the new thrive without the old?  

Once the first adopters of an innovation have latched on to something, can the rest of the world catch on without some form of help?  Or as Geoffrey Moore in his excellent book, Crossing the Chasm might ask, "How can we move from Early Adopters of an innovation to the Early Majority?"

There's an interesting paradox here:  most marketers would agree that something completely new is a difficult sell...even though we are all in the business of selling something new.

In other words, innovation needs to be new, without being new.

Do we need a bridge from the old way of doing things to a new way of doing things?  If so, what is that bridge and how do we build it?

Let's look at one area of innovation growth:  the Internet innovation attracting the most attention these days is the explosive growth of social media networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Helium, del.icio.us, Craigslist and Wikipedia...new Internet environments that allow people to connect and collaborate in ways never thought possible before.  The book of the moment by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff describes all these social technologies as a Groundswell.  This stuff is so ubiquitous, so easy-to-use and so inexpensive that more people are engaging with it at an exponential pace every day.  It has become so mainstream, that many people credit these networking tools for changing the very nature of the US political process.

But there's one more potential reason for why these innovative ideas have become mainstream so quickly.  They don't really seem that new.

Each of these tools are in some way based upon systems that already exist, that people are already comfortable with, that are entirely familiar.  Address books, bulletin boards, diaries, episodic storytelling and networking have been a part of everyone's life for generations. None of these innovations have asked users to change what they are doing - rather augmenting what they already do.  And most users do not exclusively use these tools without combining them with some for of actual connection in the real world.  A business person may keep their address book in LinkedIn, but they still call someone up to get to know them better, or share a cup of coffee with them between Twitter posts.

Another example comes from the beginning of the World Wide Web in the 1990's, when everyone extolled the power of virtual businesses.  Someday, 

everyone assumed, there would be no more "bricks and mortar" stores - everything would be virtual.  Perhaps - but it hasn't happened yet.  Instead, there has

 been a gradual redefinition of retail to a hybrid that combines both the Internet and actual visits to stores.  Old style retailers ranging from J.Crew to Sears, to Barnes & Noble and Best Buy discovered the power of the Internet to expand sales and communicate directly to their customers.    Customers of the stores became customers on the Internet, because they found everything to be just like going to a store - even a "shopping cart" was provided.

And why am I typing this blog post with a QWERTY keyboard...

designed to help slow down a typist's speed so that a mechanical typewriter wouldn't jam quite so often?

The hybrid of old and new provides a bridge for innovation. Innovation needs to be old as well as new, familiar as well as novel if it is to be adopted.