What's New about Innovation?

摘要

In his speech at SLA's annual conference in Toronto Don Tapscott referred to the invention of the blackboard and its enormous impact on education. He used this example as an analogy for explaining that some of the greatest innovations did not come outof new inventions, but by adapting or harnessing old ones. I suppose you could draw the same analogy from the use of the wheel. Round stones with holes in them had been around for ages, but when Man thought of putting two of them together to create a wheelbarrow, it was a monumental innovation. Woman probably worked it out long before, but knew that Man would use the invention to make her do all the transporting, which he had had to do previously. I digress. Innovation feeds on the appropriate use of information, and that's where we come in.