The first internet wedding

It's Valentine's Day this week so we need a story that links love and innovation.

How about the first internet wedding? It happened in 1848. At that time, the world was getting used to a disruptive innovation. This was the telegraph. The continents were becoming joined together for the first time by cables laid under the oceans to form a networked society. Before the telegraph, information travelled over land at the speed of a horse, perhaps 40 miles a day. So news from London would probably take four days to reach Leeds. The telegraph enabled information to be transmitted from one place to another in a matter of minutes. The network gradually extended across Europe, over to North America, on to India, Australia and beyond. The world must have felt like a global village, with information travelling so quickly from any place on the network to any other place, however near or far. The diffusion of this innovation is described more fully in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (384.109 STA in the library).

In this book, Standage tells the story of a wedding that was conducted using this Victorian internet. The bride was the daughter of a Boston businessman who had fallen in love with one of the clerks at her father's business. Her father was unhappy with their relationship and wanted her to marry someone more 'appropriate'. To prevent the marriage, he sent the clerk to England on business. Of course, at this time transatlantic travel was undertaken by ship. Its first port of call was New York.

The enterprising young woman sent a message to her intended, asking him to go to the New York telegraph office, accompanied by a magistrate, at an agreed time. She was in the Boston telegraph office at that same time. The magistrate then conducted the marriage ceremony over the wires, with the bride and groom being assisted by the telegraph operators who translated their vows into Morse code.

It is hard to believe, but the marriage was deemed to be legal.

We sometimes state that innovation is socially shaped. The artefact alone is not the innovation. Here is an example of an artefact (the telegraph) that was devised for one social purpose being adapted to be used for a completely different purpose.

Some of our students are exhibiting a similar degree of creativity in their studies on the Innovation & Enterprsie module. These students are taking the product being developed in their project module and showing how they now might use it as the artefactual basis of an entirely different innovation.

Happy Valentine's Day!

A beacon to us all - is innovation always good for us?

Today Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, apologised for the mistakes the company had made during the build and implementation of its social advertising system called Beacon.

He explained that the company had set out to build something that was easy to use : "our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends."

In his blog, Zuckerman stressed that Beacon is a product which helps Facebook users to share additional information with others. It is interesting that he omits to mention its intended use for raising adverting revenue!

How does Beacon work? It tracks Facebook users' purchases online at sites registered with the system and then advertises these purchases to members of their social network. Follow this link to read how one Facebook user found out about purchases made by her husband from her PC.

Most commentators have picked up on the privacy issue related to this story. Our interest, in this blog, is to note its lessons for students of innovation.

These include:

1. Organisations should make sure that their investment appraisal evalaution techniques extend beyond a consideration of technical issues and a cost benefit analysis. This company might have incuded some appraisal of the likely impact on its users and the consequent reputational damage it might suffer.

2. Innovation does not always benefit all stakeholders or wider society. It might affect people in society who are not even directly users of the innovative product or service.

This leaves us considering the question: "At what point does an innovation, that turns into a disaster from the shareholder perspective, become known as a bad idea rather than an innovation at all?

photo: courtesey of Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Do we need another blogger?

According to a recent report on the BBC website, a new blog is created every second.

So why do we need another?

Perhaps we are already inundated with general blogs. But this one has been set up a specific purpose. It is primarily aimed at students studying on undergraduate and postgraduate innovation and enterprise courses. Over the coming months, this blog will give us the space to reflect more fully on aspects of innovation that have been introduced during the innovation course. We also plan to discuss some topical stories, drawing upon theoretical concepts introduced on the course to aid our understanding of the issues.

So, there we are. Another blog has been created. I hope you find something of interest in some of our postings.