Pure fads typically belong to the less serious spheres of social life, to children’s worlds of play and game. Their capriciousness would therefore seem natural. But to characterize them simply as capricious or trivial does not explain anything. It is only another way of referring to their short life span and to the fact that they do not, as a rule, leave any permanent traces in human culture.
We can now better formulate what makes the difference between a fashion and a fad, on the one hand, and a ‘real’ innovation, on the other hand. As we have interpreted Schumpeter, the important thing in any process of innovation is the integration of a technical invention into a new social practice. First becoming part of its own practice makes an invention into an innovation. Whereas a fashion always remains embedded in the same old social practice, both fads and ‘real’ innovations have to find and establish new social and cultural practices. What separates a fad from a ‘serious’ or more long-lasting innovation is that a fad establishes only a very limited play-like social world of routines and practices of its own. As a rule, it leaves the world outside its limited scope untouched. Even though millions of children and even adults exercised enthusiastically with their hula hoops at the same time – its mastery took practice – and their diffusion assumed an almost epidemic scale, they did not change any other social practices or the cultural habits of their practitioners. They remained hobby items and their social and cultural extension was very limited. In contrast, a successful commercial innovation which will leave long-term effects behind it obviously has to penetrate and change wider social practices. According to Lehtonen, ‘the higher the number of attachments and practices that are potentially connected with a technology and the better it fulfils the promise associated with it, the more likely a technology is to be seen as something “necessary”’ (2003: 371). If, for instance, the mobile phone had remained just a wireless phone, or a toy to play with, it would not have revolutionized our culture to the present extent. Today the cell phone has multiple functions, with different degrees of importance to different social user groups, but everywhere it has clearly changed ‘the path of development by breaking with former routines and habits’ (2003: 371).
The Establishment of New Markets
There is, however, one principal problem in analysing inventions and their transformation into innovation from the point of view of their social and cultural evolution, as Schumpeter suggested. The firm can only observe, and is only concerned with the market and the market roles and performance of its close competitors. It does not have any direct access to information about the taste, habits and preferences of its consumers. (Market research tries to overcome this, but it is always faced with limitations on what it can observe. The information that guides a firm’s actions is different from that of its customers.) From the point of view of a firm, the decisive criterion of an innovation or a ‘real’ novelty is whether or not it is a part of the same market segment as the old product, or if it has created a market of its own. There is no other way for the firm to know when it or its competitors have succeeded in producing a new product and not just a copy or a new version of an old one.
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Jukka Gronow