I like your perspective of focusing on “relevance”. That should be the ultimate purpose. Innovation should be perceived as a instrument to achieve more relevance, not as the search of a change for change sake.
Actually, businesses are usually quite adverse fo “change for the sake of change”. Change induces cost (in terms of investments in manufacturing, distribution etc.). And Businesses justify the additional cost of change if there is an additional value associated with it. And the additional value is created if people-users recognize that the innovation proposed by a company is more “relevant” for them.

In other terms, whereas “change” and “relevance” are not always going along together, “relevance” and “innovation” should, by definition. I spend a significant part of the first class of my course on management of innovation to let my students think between the enormous difference between “change” and “innovation”. The former has not a judgment of merit (the more you change the better it is); the latter has merit (or relevance): a change is an innovation only if it induces improvements, only if it has more sense, if it is more meaninfgul and more relevant. Otherwise it is simply a change.
Differentiation, in strategy theories, means being different because your product is more relevant to people than other competing offerings.

Unfortunately, whereas the theory works perfectly well, the way it is implemented is often shallow and short-sighted. And therefore we observe for example dozens of models of cars in the market that are simply variations of the same recepit, with no innovation at all.

I’m afraid the explosion of variety and changes that are not relevant is also a consequence of a shallow vision of creativity. We have been overwhelmed by a vision of innovation as the result of the fast creation of a large number of ideas. The result is a large number of products in the market where people can hardly find a difference, that rapidly become obsolete, and where brands are eventually guiding the purchasing choice. Maybe we should come back and talk a little more about research rather then creativity. We need depth rather then variation. That’s why having researchers discuss the “change” in this conference is important. After all, when we assess the quality of an academic article, we do not judge simply for its novelty, which is easy to achieve. We judge also for its relevance.

Business finds meaning in uniqueness and novelty to attract customers and most of design today is focussed on trying to achieve this effect. Here designers trained to make a “difference” are set the task of finding newness and variety to create a huge volume of artifacts that unfortunately have contributed to the huge pollution of our artifact and message universe. Few have focussed on the task of creating “relevance” which is an ethic that may need to be nurtured in design schools and businesses alike if we are to counter the threats of the “difference engines” that seek change at any cost.

I have discussed these in depth on my blog “Design for India” and have many downloadable papers on my website. Having worked in a design school in India for over 35 years now we look back at the role of ideologies and ethics that shapes our design intentions and attitudes which in turn shapes what we do and how we do it. Focus on environment and social equity have been concerns that formed the high level agenda at the school ever since Charles and Ray Eames articulated the India Report that was the foundation on which our school was founded in India. looking back at this masterpiece exactly 50 years after it was written, we find more meaning today, in a world searching for Change, for change sake, all in the name of good business.

Changing the Change is a good title if it is understood in this context and here it may be relevant to call attention to the 5000 year traditions of the village economy in India that attracted Christopher Alexander to study human habitats and the contribution of forces that shaped the Indian village. Eames called for a deep look at the Indian village for value systems that are durable and sustainable. The call was not misplaced and even today this call has meaning and would do designers a lot of good if only we are willing to learn from the value of the local, of scale and performance that the village in India represents.

My work on bamboo as a resource for human development in India and the use of design as a vehicle to manage this change has been informed by these ideas about design and we have been teaching this at the National Institute of Design where I live and teach. I am not claiming that we do not have our share of skeptics and detractors from this perspective which is very difficult to live and work by in a world full of ideas of change for change sake. I have recently discovered the work of Hazel Henderson who provides an alternate vision from the leading economists of our times and I do believe that we need to move from “Difference” to “Relevance” and here we have many design thinkers contributing to such a move for humanity. I will name a few here in the context of the stated issue. recent books such as “The Design Way” – Nelson and Stolternman, “The Semantic Turn” – Krippendorff are a couple that come to the top of my mind just now. There are others that I have discussed in detail on my blog which include the “Mayo Clinic Experiment”, “The NextD initiatives” and the “KaosPilots” all of which look at a new and emerging design paradigm that is echoed in the “Changing the Change” initiative which I do hope will be accepted by the larger mass of scientifically thinking humanity.

Prof M P Ranjan
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID)
National Institute of Design
Ahmedabad, India
http://www.ranjanmp.in
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com