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Understanding Innovation

At this point I'm in the researching phase, and have to pick innovative artist, I presume at least. I have a few artists in my head from various fields that I would deem "innovative", but I'm not fully sure what an innovative artist really entails. It could be related to creativity, how pioneering an artist is in his/her methods or thinking, how he/she addresses his/her audience, how much he/she challenges the norm, how he/she creates, to conclude, a lot of things. I have landed on a scale.

What I'm thinking is that close to all of artist's work is original, maybe not on the surface but if you research it more you can find something original about it, so surely it's innovative because it's something new, it's new in some way. However that is not what makes something innovative I don't think. In order for something to be innovative it needs to be consequential, and I am not just talking about this in an arts sense. Some are inarguably innovative like Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd wright, Thomas Edison, Charlie Parker, or Leonardo Da Vinci; these are inarguably innovators because what they have created has revolutionised their field. These innovators fall on the furthest point of the scale but I think that as soon as an artist's new creation becomes the basis, and inspiration for other new work he/she can be considered innovative, because there are consequences to his/her work. My initial thoughts was that innovation is subjective but I was wrong, and would readjust my statement to say that it is quantifiable. Some are more innovative than others, whilst some are just very original. If I was to think more on that scale I would maybe have innovative in the middle and pioneering on the right end. The innovators I mentioned are more pioneers really.


That's my thinking anyway, but I went online to see what others thought and landed on this website where "world leading innovation experts" whatever that means, give their definition of the word innovation. Now obviously they're approaching this from a different angle, focusing more on business view, but I think it is still applicable; Here's their take on it:

The article's writer then goes on analysing what he has, and himself creates the "ultimate" definition.

From this I am learning that having an idea is only half of it really, an innovation is often a new take for solving a challenge, an idea cannot really do that. The whole value to company isn't really applicable, but thinking about large scale cultural architecture, the company becomes the city/town etc. A great example of that would be Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, having such a large impact on the city of Bilbao and its economy that it started a phenomenon and was rightly called the "Bilbao effect". Therefore thinking further on, depending on what type of building I'm making I'll need to consider what it gives back to the audience as well.


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