Innovation through UX

This blog post by Jen has attracted my attention... I will probably state the obvious the same way Matt is good at doing (so he claims)... ;-)

Jen's post makes it obvious to me that the UX phase in a project might very well be the "easy" way to innovate in a project.  By comparison to a project without UX.  Here is why. 

First, software engineering people are mostly concerned about construction of the software.  Their focus is delivering the code.   

Second, software engineering people are... software people., this is their expertise. Many of these guys will be concerned by usability or innovation but this is not their primary focus.  They are first and foremost experts at software technology, tools, languages, software design patterns, mostly software creation centric stuff... (I believe for most of them at least)

Our UX team is by contrast much more in touch with the research world, it seems to be a natural aspect of their role to be aware of what is out there so they can integrate these academic projects into a real projects. 

In the example brought up by Jen it is clear that a software engineer could have thought of the multi-vibration thing but probably without awareness of the research project done in a particular university.  It would probably be a "wouldn't it be cool" kind of enlightment.  

As valid as this "wouldn't it be cool" idea might be it would lack the link to the academic research and would probably be much harder to sell if at all possible.