By Richard McKeever
Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered human flight in 1903 – a familiar first known the world over. On a recent visit to the RAF museum in Hendon, North London I was fascinated to see the actual distance of this pioneering 120 feet flight measured out on the wall in one of the galleries. 
What is striking is how short this distance is – in fact far shorter even than the wingspan of several larger aircraft in the museum. Yet the designers and engineers who constructed these larger aircraft remain unknown and uncelebrated.
Last year I was invited onto an awards panel and was lucky enough to visit some truly inspirational community projects: the judging process brought up some thinking about innovation and replication. I found my desire to focus on innovative projects was almost irresistible. Yet just as subsequent designers have improved on the Wright brothers original construction – producing planes that carry more people condiderably further distances - it was impressive to see community organisations who had taken an idea from elsewhere and successfully implemented it, scaled to suit their local situation.
Creativity and innovation are rightly celebrated – indeed we at Community Links have our long running Ideas Annual series which does just that and the Chain Reaction event last November was predicated on encouraging new ideas and innovative thinking. Our Everyday Innovators work programme is specifically aimed at unleashing creativity and develping new solutions from amongst those with direct experience of a problem. However the value of generating all these new ideas and innovative solutions is so they can be widely shared and implemented by others. Avoiding re-invention of the wheel is the point.
It’s not uncommon for community and voluntary sector organisations applying for funding to discover that existing, succesful projects cannot continue to be supported as funders’ priorites turn to new ideas. And they should – supporting new ideas is vital – but not at the expense of continued accomplished performance.
Oli Barrett in his Daily Networker blog touches on a similar issue, resolving “not to confuse what is new with what is interesting”. In my view it’s all about what works. If a new idea is the correct solution to a problem that’s great but if the application of a bit of age-old wisdom does the trick then, thank the person who passed on the idea, and implement the solution.
But do we celebrate imitation? Whoever heard of a statue built to commememorate someone copying anothers success … or an award ceremony recognising replication of an established project? Sometimes we might try to hard to look for the innovative when the tried and tested is just what is needed to take flight.
Hi Richard, thanks for writing on this topic. Using today’s craze to build the tallest skyscraper, I try to show why the original innovation is special compared with the followers. It’s here: http://pradeephenry.blogspot.com/.