Daniel Burrus (“Three Potent Secrets to Innovation”, CERM Risks Insights # 74, January 2, 2015) gives us some guidelines out of the intricacies and the paths out from labyrinth to true Innovation.

Burrus’s article seems to summarize Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit”.

I have often tried to dismantle some people’s habits – mainly professional – and I’ve almost always found myself hitting the same impenetrable (rubber) wall: “Why should we change? We’ve always done it this way.”

My latest experience was with Logistics that is, try to make professionals see that Logistics is not only transportation – or forwarding – and warehousing, but that can also be a powerful and convenient means of production during transportation and warehousing.

According to anthropologists, the human race was born nomadic: it had to travel to make its living, its living depended on its traveling.

It may well become so once more, due to climatic and economical changing conditions, that determine man’s habitat characteristics.

Desert areas are expanding.  Rain forests surface is reducing.  More and more water-thirsty crops are cultivated.

On the economics side, the UE thrived on low-cost imported labor from poor European countries, from North-African countries, and from South American countries.

Now, things have changed.  Some of the most clever European youth must find jobs abroad.  They have to move after generations lived in the same, old towns.

True is also that – put down to basics – innovation requires that one will or will have to change to survive.  The basic drives – or inputs – therefore, are will or need, and survival.

In 2015, it will be 200 years since 1815 Wien Congress.  On that occasion, Klemens von Metternich defined Italy as a “geographical expression”.  And still it is like that, both politically and economically.  Its rating varies among the lowest of western European countries, and, unless some kind of social cataclysm occurs, it is doomed to stay like this for many years to come.

Every new Italian government promises innovation programs that will supposedly improve  social conditions.  But – both due to the laissez faire attitude of the italian people and its ingrained culture such programs have always failed.

Though they might have collapsed by their own.

It would be a big mistake to sweep tradition away as if to wipe a slate clean,   Bertrand Russell said: “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”  But at the same time, planners have to be aware of the risks connected, both to resist innovation and to ask tradition to be a panacea.

Observing sound and innovating logistics practices, I found interesting and impressive examples who were not afraid to argue with their bosses about innovative logistics programs.

Here we find the pillars on which innovation is based: the will or need to survive.

Though being a novel, 1962 John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – In Search of America is an interesting representation of how young families live in motorhomes and move according to jobs while children attend camp schooling. What I found most interesting is that these families didn’t feel any need for “roots”, comparing their way of living with large cities inhabitants’.

Maybe in a the future of the construction industry will not be focused on buildings – houses, and skyscrapers, it will be focused instead on building roads, railways, ports, airports.

Also, the future of work may be home based.  IT technicians can easily work at home.   Children can be taught at home.  Bankers and financial advisors can work at home.  A  customer of mine controls from home his heat treatment plan that produce cars safety components.  The same could be done with oil refineries, petrochemical plants, steel mills; and so on, and so on.

If we add to this the convenience of producing or transforming products while moving or transporting them, we easily realize the tremendous power of innovation.

Of course, manpower will be unavoidable: by 2050 world’s population is forecast to be some 7 billion people.

And, though traditional, manual labor is still very important for the global economy, we will continue to see innovation erode the role of this labor as everything seems to become mechanized.

ISO 9001 reflects this change: while the 1987 edition was written thinking almost exclusively of tangible products, its latest 2015 revision looks very closely to the risks for the quality of intangible services.

The number of socially-oriented organizations delivering benefits continues to grow.   But it’s difficult to understand where the money they live on comes from.

May be – world-wide – countries will continue to provide more services than goods.   Quality mass production will require more and more clever and skilled engineers to design, run, and maintain automated production processes. We might therefore see the jobs’ triangle – or pyramid – increasing its height and its base becoming smaller.

Both innovation and tradition are no joke, and they are both very powerful.  When innovative projects fail, traditionalists are only too ready to shout that man will never fly.   When traditionally approached projects fail, innovators do the same, crying out that we should have tried something different.

Innovation and non innovation – or tradition – have to be carefully balanced when launching any new project.   The risks to go too much on one side or the other have to be carefully identified and analyzed at project inception.