Does innovation create happiness?

I am in the innovation business, leading our clients through Lean Six Sigma improvement projects, occasionally running parts of their businesses, and even teaching them to do these things for themselves using our techniques. Our work exists because our clients rely on innovation, and Lean is a proven tool. We also innovate our own work by examining our performance, adjusting our methods, learning and improving. Like our clients, we must continue to build better mousetraps before somebody else does.

Whether you realize it or not, you are in the innovation business too. Unless you're oblivious to the outside world, you opportunistically adapt to change and adopt new habits in every aspect of your life. You might use a computer in your work; your parents can tell you about typewriters and slide rulesComputers are better, even if they do pose a whole new set of problems. You probably use a mobile phone, and if you still have a home phone it's not likely to have a curly cord connecting the base and handset. You might lust for a new HDTV, or a new hair style, or the latest Times best seller (or a Kindle to read it.) Every habit broken serves a common purpose: better, faster, cheaper.

Innovation is in our DNA. Better products and processes. Faster, cheaper transportation. New systems for communicating and collaborating. Cleaner energy. Cures for disease, and softer pillows on hospital beds. Billions of humans reaching for a better life. Untold million minds recombining knowledge in novel ways to create new industries overnight. If knowledge is power, then innovation is wealth.

But what is the nature of this wealth? Adam Smith speaks of marginal utility, the unending question of what an idea can do for us. Psychologists and philosophers debate the relationship between material wealth and happiness. As the juggernaut of innovation rolls across the world, many ask whether human happiness is a function of wealth and power. Are we really better off? Do we lead happier, more fulfilling lives? Is all this innovation good for us?

Technology is neither a blessing nor a curse, but merely a set of tools. The determinant of good and evil is what we do with our tools. We may all possess the same creative spark, but one person will use it to attack cancer while another creates the Improvised Explosive Devices that turn Iraqi roads into killing fields. We may indeed create toys too dangerous to entrust to our own childish hands. This reveals no inherent truth about innovation per se, but much about our species.

Any talk of progress must include a comparison of human suffering. Any assertion, for example, that American life in the 1850's was happier than present times must also address sticky details like dentistry, where modern innovation has surely reduced the average person's pain. So that seems like a good thing.

On the other hand, those 1850's folks had to depend on each other in different ways than we do nowadays. In fact, sometimes it seems that our rush toward convenience is leading us into an ironic state of hyper-connected isolation. We have 4-door cars, but most of the time we drive them by ourselves. We have 24/7 email access, but we seldom meet face-to-face. We can download movies to our phones, but we watch them alone. Isolation is the "i" in i-Tunes. Why? Because we can. Self-service gas stations weren't invented because people dislike interacting with others, but that's why they flourished.

So maybe progress is both a blessing and a curse. Where we might gain convenience and ease suffering, we may also lose our close connections to others and perhaps breed extremism. But that's not a matter of innovation, but of human character and frailty. In the end, for better or worse, we will be judged for what we are as people.