A recent article in Forbes asked if innovation was purely the domain of the young, saying

“youth seems to have advantages in innovation: everything is possible, knowledge is fresh, obligations are few and reputation is not at risk.”

Innovation can occur in products – we see this clearly in the field of mobile technology, for example – as well as in processes and services. Depending on the impact of innovation on environmental conditions, it can be classified as breakthrough innovation or incremental innovation.

Any environment, business, culture or otherwise will be shaped by innovation that evolves through periods of incremental change, and will be punctuated by innovative breakthroughs that either enhance or destroy the existing competence of firms and the individuals that make them up.

Incremental innovation creates changes through cumulative processes until a major advance that creates discontinuity ruptures the beginning point altogether.

Through incremental innovative improvements in products, for example, the underlying technology is both enhanced and extend, and thus reinforced as an established technical order as well as a socio-political one.

Individuals with a lot of experience are usually the best at carrying out these incremental improvements – we saw this with Steve Jobs as he turned Apple into the market-leading brand it is today.

Generally, younger people are more effective at bringing about breakthrough innovation by creating new technology that disrupts old ways of working and thinking. Major innovations can represent technical advances so significant that no increase in scale, efficiency, or design can make older technologies competitive with new technology whether product, process or service.

Again as an example we can look to Steve Job’s younger self, driving innovation at Pixar and then designing, developing and marketing the now ubiquitous Apple products.

Older, more experienced people may work alongside younger risk-takers in bringing innovation to a company. It is not for one group or the other to stake a claim on innovation – as we have seen, both types of individual are needed to bring about the different kinds of change that happen within a lifecycle of a business.

What is really needed – both in business and in government and beyond – is a culture of innovation. Often vested interests prevent innovation from fully emerging. There are many innovative patterns that are bought into by Western governments, only to be stored away and not implemented. For example, there are alternatives to oil, but due to investments in oil through vested interests many other innovative alternatives that could replace its use are not supported.

This does not have to be the case, as we can clearly see in the case of Japan, which has a culture of improvement of processes, or “change for the better”, captured in the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen. This philosophy teaches people to eliminate waste and to increase productivity, and encourages all – not just CEOs – to implement this and look out for opportunities for amelioration.

It is important to remember too that innovation can come in many forms, not just through business. Spain has a strong culture of innovation when it comes to architectural design, for example the ‘Metropol Parasol’ or ‘The World’s Largest Wooden Structure’ which opened in Seville, which can be seen as part of a long tradition encompassing the surreal modernist buildings of Gaudi and many others. These buildings could be also be compared to Dubai’s ambitious architectural projects, which double are important both in terms of business and in driving the way that people think about planning for the modern city.