In 2008, Samsung ran a print advertisement picturing a lissome young couple next to a forest road. They have dismounted from their mountain bikes to tend to an injured young deer. Mr Lissome has unfurled a flexible electronic display from the side of his mobile phone and is consulting a website about first aid for fawns. Samsung researchers are “inventing new technologies one could only imagine”, the copy boasts, “so getting real-time interactive first-aid instructions for a wild animal at a moment’s notice becomes a real possibility”.
I cut out the page and stuck it above my desk: a warning of what could happen if innovation were allowed to run amok.
Keeping innovation useful is a constant challenge for big companies, partly because it is so hard to pin down. Asked to pick from four definitions of innovation at London Business School’s Global Leadership Summit last week, 58 per cent of the audience selected the shortest and widest (from The Economist): “fresh thinking that creates value”. But such a broad definition could be applied not only to the technology that may give the world the mobile emergency veterinary information service it has long desired, but also to the service itself, to the way it is conceived, developed and sold, and even to the business model of the company that came up with the idea.