My rhetorical analysis essay will be on the risk/reward of the innovation cycle when improving upon ideas and products already in society. My introduction will be a brief summary of the problems brought up in my speech about building upon flawed concepts with Electric Vehicles. I am going to talk about how seemingly every car company is settling to go electric for their “sustainable” option, when much more environmentally friendly options are becoming viable. This is driven by the fact that studies have shown that EVs aren’t really that more eco-friendly compared to their gas-powered counterpart. This will be followed by my thesis statement: although improvement on current technologies is detrimental to innovation, processes that include deviation from the norm can (and has) lead to massive improvements in society.

From that point forward, the analysis will be focused on my second artifact, the recycling logo (the three green arrows pointing to each other to form a triangle). The logo itself lends itself to the same idea of repeating on already established ideas to achieve a common goal, in this case being environmental sustainability. The difference, however, is that these ideas build upon fundamentally sound and successful ideas, instead of facades that pretend to be eco-friendly. These products see the “reduce, reuse, and recycle” phrase and instead interpret the logo to mean “innovate, create, and evaluate”. This way, innovation doesn’t mean taking small steps forward on a flawed idea, and instead means taking an existing idea, altering it in some way that will improve the sustainability of said product, and evaluating how it does in the market and in practice. The discrepancies between the two are subtle, but makes for a world of difference. In today’s modern society, it is the difference between improving our daily lives and being complacent with what we have today, and accepting that there is no better solution (when in reality there is).

Sources to use:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/lifetime-emissions-of-evs-are-lower-than-gasoline-cars-experts-say.html

https://www.inno-foodproducts-brainbox.com/2021/03/25/the-innovation-cycle-a-process-to-be-managed-throughout-the-product-lifespan/

https://hbr.org/2009/09/why-sustainability-is-now-the-key-driver-of-innovation

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351978917300331