Conformity to the accepted ways of life is the common feature of cultural life. But in every culture, there is a non-conforming minority called as ‘mystics’ and ‘creative minority’ too.
Culture provides the frame work within which they try their new ideas. There non-conformity is not negative but constructive. They seek to change the culture. They try to break stagnation.
Such an initiative may be intuitive or cultivated or both. All inventions, independent or by ‘stimulus diffusion’ and discoveries ultimately bring about a change in culture. Man’s inventiveness is the product of his culture creating ability or his problem solving capability. All invention, discoveries, diffused elements from alien cultures can be put together under the category of innovation.
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Each innovation responds to the propensity for conscious human ingenuity one small innovation may have un-imaginable ramifications in terms of more new ideas, more new patterns of living it may promote. The process of alteration as such, infects, never ceases.
Inventiveness or ingenuity may be treated as entirely a matter of individual’s independent skill or intelligence. But at times, the prevailing cultural conditions like psychological boredom or stagnation becomes catalytic for inventiveness.
The drab continuity of the glamorous upperpalaeolithic tradition during Mesolithic period in Europe generated the seeds of frustration. It was this suffocating cultural content which ultimately brought about the innovations leading to the Neolithic revolution.
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A series of cultural activities such as science, art and fashion are cultural expression of organic play of impulse. While science and art may be conceived as cultural sublimation the realm of fashion in more directly a biological play of impulse, in which a craze for novelty is at the root.
This psychological factor rather than purely utilitarian factor of’ need’ or necessity is an important factor which may directly or indirectly explain many innovations in any culture.
For invention as well innovation, resistance to their acceptance is the most important obstacle. The differences in resistance encountered by innovation though diffusion or through invention are more of degree than of kink. The fate of either kind of innovation depends upon the culture whose door it is knocking. But at times resistance may be selective.