Sorry, Your Big Idea Isn’t Big Enough

Lessons learned from the “not so famous” Dvorak keyboard and the diffusion of innovation.

Of course, innovation is a critical component of success for any business. Without new ideas and products, companies would quickly fall behind their competitors. Innovation does not always lead to adoption — in fact, it’s often quite the opposite. Many businesses fail to realize that the need for adoption is complex and that the innovation must fit into an existing methodology or system. This is where things can start to go wrong.

One interesting and little known example of this is the Dvorak keyboard, invented in the 1930s. It was a more efficient alternative to the standard qwerty keyboard — a more ergonomic and faster keyboard design, claimed the inventors. Despite these benefits, the Dvorak keyboard never gained widespread adoption and is now largely forgotten.

Let’s take a closer look.

First, this new keyboard design required a significant capital investment. Remember this was the 1930s and changing a keyboard require changing the typewriter. This was a significant obstacle to both individuals and corporations and the financial expense was prohibitive. Second, and perhaps a more significant issue, this required the typist to learn a new keyboard fingering position. Simply put, this required one “unlearn and relearn” a process what was inculcated into your consciousness and existed as an automatic process driven by both brain and muscle memory. History blurs the story a bit, but the incremental improvements never reached a critical mass to drive innovation, adoption, and transformation. QWERTY survived.

While innovation is key, adoption is essential. Put simply, businesses — from retail to medicine — need to adopt new ideas and products in order to stay relevant and competitive. In our fast-paced world, there is little room for complacency — companies need to be constantly moving forward if they want to survive. And survival can be both economic and clinical. Additionally, it is often not enough to simply embrace an innovation. Companies and individual also need to ensure that it diffuses throughout the system. And similar to the Dvorak keyboard, this requires customers to “unlearn” well entrenched thinking that is logical and authoritative. Professionals will often hide behind academic and intellectual justifications for behaviors and cling to those notions even in the face of a superior solutions. But even in those instances where advantages exist, superior innovations must past an “acceptance threshold” that include methodical, psychological, and financial obstacles to gain broad-based acceptance.

Chances are, your QWERT inclinations are engrained in a habit that would be very difficult to change. This was a powerful lesson for Dvorak and can be directly applied to many innovations, professions, and industries today.