Do we need tech innovators in libraries?

Michael Kirton’s article Adaptors and innovators in organizations says we need innovators. According to adaptor-innovation theory both adaptors and innovators are needed by organizations because they complement each others strengths and weaknesses.

Adaptors tend to operate cognitively within the confines of the appropriate consensually accepted paradigm (Kuhn, 1970) within which a problem (novel stimulus) is generally initially perceived. Innovators, by contrast, are more liable to treat (formally or intuitively) the enveloping paradigm as part of the problem. Adaptors, for example, are liable to produce solutions which reinforce the paradigm…innovators are more likely to produce solutions which threaten the paradigm and…[may] help bring about a paradigm switch (Kirton: 213-214).

How much tech innovation do we need in-house/in-field? How much can we support? Does the library field need to go external to the field for innovation? How will we know this? Has tech in the library field gone stale? ILS companies don’t seem to recognize that what they are doing isn’t good enough anymore, that they are adapting, not innovating. A number of us even recognize that the piecemeal approach of multiple systems isn’t working because there aren’t enough of us with the expertise and/or the systems librarians to make the different pieces work well together.

Examples of innovation strategies from business include “crowd-sourcing” (Editor Executive Briefing) and Proctor & Gamble’s strategy (Huston and Sakkab: 2006). Crowd-sourcing is a term used to describe a new business model in which companies use the internet to parcel out their work, identify ideas or solve technical problems. You have an idea? Take it to a crowdsourcing company where if they like it they will get a group of people together to work on it and develop it (who will get royalties in turn for their work) and you will get a set percentage in royalties because you had the idea. Can the Access Conference Hackfest or code4lib be repurposed for this? Should they be?

What was Procter & Gamble’s innovation strategy? They “created a technology brief that defined the problems we needed to solve, and we circulated it throughout our global networks of individuals and institutions to discover if anyone in the world had a ready-made solution.” Someone did and they modified the solution to fit their business needs and were off and running.

How many of us inadvertently or purposely ended up creating a technology brief or wish list based more on limitations or our understanding of what is currently possible – we have X, we would like to add or correct Y about what X does now = XY – versus brainstorming? Is now the time to create technology briefs in the library field based on what we desire and circulate it to the world at large? DLF did this for ERMS, though I wish they’d added a consortial component to their specs (or did I miss that?). What would happen if we sent our wish list/brief to a crowdsourcer? To the world at large? I’d like to see the results. Would you?

(Jan. 10, 2007). Billion man research team. Financial Times. Accessed Jan 23, 2007 in EIU’s Executive Briefing.

Kirton, Michael. (1980). Adaptors and innovators in organizations. Human Relations, 33, 213-224.

Huston, Larry and Nabil Sakkab. (March 28, 2006). Inside Procter & Gamble’s new model for innovation, Harvard Business Review. Accessed January 24, 2007 in EIU’s Executive Briefing.

Editor. Strategy and competition. Accessed Jan. 23, 2007: Executive Briefing