Innovation Is a Lie.

When “disruptors” present us with the same things we already know—wrapped in industry jargon and packaged as something new—we should be suspicious.

Photo by Emma Ou on Unsplash

Capitalism tricks us into believing that innovation is good. 

It’s an idea that we discussed during the recent Gender and Women’s Studies class I took as part of my journalism master’s, and it’s kind of the central tenet of capitalism: By privatizing industries and forcing market actors to compete, those companies have to innovate (or make things cheaper) to attract new consumers and stay relevant. We get shiny new things—better phones, faster computers, advancements in technology—because someone was trying to carve out their space in the market. 

But I’m here to argue that most so-called innovations are frauds. Most offer nothing new. Most “innovative” ideas are not revolutionary in any way. They result from the clever rebranding of familiar objects and companies, presented by “disruptors” who hope consumers have fleeting memories and short attention spans. 

(As a side note: I’ve referenced my Gender and Women's Studies class, which delved into food politics, several times in this newsletter. You can explore more ideas sparked by the class, including my two-part final essay on boycotts, available here and here.) 

My colleague at Fresh Cup, Fionn Pooler, recently recapped a story about Blank Street Coffee’s newest location, The Green Room. (I’ve covered Blank Street in the past, once when speaking about the power of coffee shops to build community and another time about the looming threat of robot baristas and automated espresso machines.) 

The article Fionn recapped, which appeared in Restaurant Business Online, presents Blank Street’s Green Room as an “innovation cafe,” writing that the space is “a concept store developed to showcase advancements in menu, design and service.” In other words, as Fionn later summarized, “Blank Street Coffee has invented a revolutionary new concept: the coffee shop. The techy venture capital-backed startup grew quickly based on small footprint, high volume kiosks—but is now opening an ‘innovation cafe’ to showcase things like ‘espresso with sparkling water on the side’ and ‘breakfast sandwiches’. It’ll never catch on.”

This article isn’t meant to slam Blank Street, and I don’t think The Green Room is really an issue in itself. Instead, the equating of “sitting down and eating pastries and enjoying coffee in a manner untold thousands of other coffee shops already do and have done for years” with “innovation” is what struck a nerve. 

In doing some research on this topic, I learned that the theory of disruptive innovation was first introduced in the Harvard Business Review in 1995; at the time, it offered a novel framework for understanding innovation-fueled growth. But as the same publication bemoaned 20 years later, “disruption theory is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success” in part because too many people “use the term loosely to invoke the concept of innovation in support of whatever it is they wish to do.” 

These days, the idea of “disruption” feels more often like a punchline, a word that gets used when tech companies attempt to dismantle and extract money from otherwise functional industries, all while claiming that they were dysfunctional—and painting that entire process as innovation. As Stanford professor Adrian Daub wrote in the Guardian several years ago, “Are the changes the tech industry brings about, or claims to bring about, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension of how it has always functioned?”

It isn’t just that the repackaging of the familiar as “innovation” feels disingenuous—it’s that it’s often accompanied by eroding labor standards under the guise of progress.

For example, there are Amazon’s touchless grocery stores, where people can just walk in, grab their items, and leave without ever going through checkout. The technology, called Just Walk Out, was supposed to eliminate the need for workers to ring up patrons. But then, reports began alleging that the technology was really fueled by people. “Does Amazon’s touchless technology, which allows customers to grab what they need on shelves and ‘Just Walk Out’ without going to a cash register, really rely on human workers in India to review the purchases?” USA Today asks. 

Amazon acknowledges that the Just Walk Out technology relies somewhat on human labor. A spokesperson told USA Today that the technology “is made possible by artificial intelligence like computer vision and deep learning techniques, including generative AI, to accurately determine who took what in any retail environment” and that some level of human monitoring is still necessary. They call the claim that it relies heavily on labor, primarily from workers in India, “misleading and inaccurate.” 

Whether or not the claim is true, it certainly makes this presentation of  “innovation” look questionable. In a story called “The fake innovation of gig companies,” Ryan Cooper points out that workers for apps like DoorDash and Uber are paid abysmal wages from companies that promised their platforms would provide something innovative. “They are not actually innovative, in the traditional economic meaning of the word,” he writes. “Instead they rely on the most ancient employer technique of all: plain old labor exploitation.” 

Although innovation “typically refers to technology that allows for more production with less labor,” the piece continues, Cooper cites examples where technology has allowed for further exploitation, like Amazon warehouses, where workers are highly monitored using advanced technology to ensure they meet certain production quotas. 

He also cites an article by Hubert Horan that claims Uber, a company that promised innovation with its app-based car service model, actually created a less efficient way of getting rides. “Capital markets declared that Uber might be the most valuable transportation company in world history without demanding actual evidence of improved efficiency or even a plausible explanation of how revenues could someday ex­ceed costs,” writes Horan. 

None of this is to say that innovative technology hasn’t improved lives (even Uber, which I talked about in a post last year, provides a service that makes ridesharing more accessible for people in underserved communities). And the examples above are very different from a cafe claiming that serving sparkling water with espresso is a new concept. 

But I think they do illustrate that the calling card of capitalism—innovation—isn’t always genuine, and that many companies claiming to be innovators are instead borrowing from others, reinventing the wheel, or using innovation in a way that primarily improves shareholders’ bottom lines rather than lives.