Due to some unexpected technical problems, the first lecturer--I dont's remember his name--didn't leave much impression on me. All I know was that he put some funny pictures on the screen in addition to the topic of his speech--how to innovate. Regarding to this interesting topic, I feel I must further develop the idea.
The key word in the definition of innovation is “new.” The common trap about newness is the assumption that new means something the universe has never seen before. This turns out to be one of the most ridiculous assumption in the history of mankind. Here’s proof: Name any great innovator, and I guarantee they borrowed and reused ideas from the past to make whatever it is they are famous for.
The Wright brothers, the inventors of powered flight in the United States, spent hours watching birds. As boring as it seems, we have bird-watching to thank for the supersonic jet planes we have today. Picasso’s development of cubism, one of the great artistic movements of the last two centuries, was heavily influenced by his exposure to African painting styles, as well as the work of an older French painter, Cezanne. And Thomas Edison did not create the concept of powered light: You’d have to talk to the thousands of people who died before Edison was born who turned wood, wax, oil, and other fuels into controllable and portable light sources.
Even in today’s high-technology world you can find easy connections between what we call “new” and ideas from the past. The World Wide Web and the Internet get their names from things thousands of years old. The first webs were made by spiders, and the first nets were used to catch fish by indigenous people around the world, thousands of years before the first computer. Google, the wonderful search tool, is often called a search engine, in reference to concepts of physical mechanics, not digital bits.
All these examples prove that the trick to innovation is to widen your perspective on what qualifies as new. As long as your idea, or your use of an existing idea, is new to the person you are creating it for, or applies an existing concept in a new way, you qualify as an innovator from their point of view, and that’s all that matters.
I agree that innovation does not mean a totally new concept. A few weeks ago I attended a talk by Mr Seah Liang Chiang, a local technopreneur who said that to be successful in business, one do not have to invent something totally new. He/she can just provide something already in the market, and do it better than the others. Based on his own success story it is true because his company does the ID tracking system like many other companies do.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, whether to sell a new concept, or to provide a better service, both are innovative. Current research in technology mostly focuses on continuously enhancing the existing model, instead of inventing a new model. Decades, or centuries ago, when technical invention was not booming in today’s speed, definition of innovation might vary. In either way, we human beings apply the accumulated knowledge of the surrounding and seek ways to improve it.
The communication system today also catalyzes the process of innovation. One of my advisors who is proficient in digital image processing once told me that, the moment he proposes a new idea in his paper, there would be a few other professors all over the world working on it. This may hamper the originality of innovation, but in another way encourages more people to contribute to the idea.
The degree of ‘newness’ is sometimes arguable. Take the example of the lost-wax casting, despite of being a modern invention, it was actually developed in ancient China a few thousand years ago. Whether a ‘new’ invention is by accident or by getting inspiration from the past, it is still an invention because without it, there won’t be an revival of an olden technology.
To sum up, I agree with Jing that innovation does not necessarily mean a totally new model.