Society depends on innovation to create our common future. Innovation itself is a creative process, where the “old” is being replaced by the “new”. This creative destruction acts as an eternal wave throughout history, pushing the limit on human endeavor further ahead, year by year, generation by generation.
As in every process of change, our ability to understand and influence the process of innovation is how we as individuals take charge of our own future, and it is the way we as a society come together and face common problems.
George Bernhard Shaw once noted that “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” This illusion, if true, is a difficult challenge for all those of us who believe in innovation as a driving force for development and improvement. How can innovations be explained, realized, understood and implemented if we live in an illusion of communication?
The media was for a long time the communicating part of the innovation ecosystem. Is that still true? Well, let’s just say that communication is fast becoming a broader playfield. While the media faces its own problems, the communication landscape in a more general sense is becoming more and more important, and more and more diversified. Every company is becoming its own communicator to a much greater extent, and every individual too. What does this mean to our common knowledge, our common understanding of innovation and its role in society? And what does it mean to innovation stories when the balance between owned, earned and bought media slides too far in one direction?
These are some of the issues we will discuss in the Communication Track of IJ-8.
