I recently read a book called "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun. If you've read other books on innovation, like "The Innovator's Dilemma" then this book will be sort of a rehash for you, but with a few new ideas. If you haven't read any other books of this kind, it's a good place to start.

Anyway, as I was sitting on the plane reading this book, I got to thinking about the way innovation is perceived in the world of technology. Take the iPhone for example, it's marketed as "Revolutionary." I have one, and it's easily the best phone/pda/ipod I've ever owned, but it's certainly not revolutionary. It's evolutionary, and when it comes right down to it, you the user of technology want things to evolve rather than revolve. When technology evolves it's built on the strength of the successes and failures that came before it. When its revolutionary it's far more prone to failure, because it's 100% new and untested in the real world.

What this means is that innovation is slow, difficult, and hard to find. A lot of people think about the magic spark of innovation, like the proverbial apple dropping on Newton's head. But the reality is that it takes a lot of work and in many cases some happy accidents to make things that are truly innovative. It often takes building something to find out how it can be improved. Designs in the lab are one thing, but seeing all the unintended uses in the real world is quite something else.

I had a chance this past week to visit a client site and watch them use WebGUI to run a 15,000+ person convention. That kind of insight is where a lot of really great innovation comes from. Not from me, but from watching three dozen people registering users, taking orders, looking up answers, and so forth. Real world problem solving is where innovation comes from.

This is why feature requests and bug reports from the WebGUI community are so important. Without constant feedback from people finding new and innovative ways to use the software, there's just no way we could progress forward as quickly as we have, and do. Like the book says, "You can't find anything new if you only travel where others have gone." Our community is the spotlight that shines the light on the dark areas we didn't know existed, and therefore have never explored.