#Innovation: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it!

#Innovation:  Can’t live with it, can’t live without it!

The urge to innovate became more and more accelerated during the last years and it became hygiene and a mandatory way of working and seeing things. It took me a while to understand and adapt to a way of thinking that needs constant innovation but here I am, embracing the idea and below trying to describe the phenomenon with the help of some inputs that I found on this.

-         1st of all, to try and define innovation:

The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay.

To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products. In business, innovation often results when ideas are applied by the company in order to further satisfy the needs and expectations of the customers.

                                                                                                        businessdictionary.com.

Innovations are divided into two broad categories:

1. Evolutionary innovations (continuous or dynamic evolutionary innovation)

2. Revolutionary innovations (also called discontinuous innovations) which are often disruptive and new and include taking risks.

Imitators take less risk because they will start with an innovator's product and take a more effective approach. Examples are IBM with its PC against Apple Computer, Compaq with its cheaper PC's against IBM, and Dell with its still-cheaper clones against Compaq.

Now the idea of innovation takes shape but here comes the 2nd part that intrigued me and that is, how do you tell when you’re discussing about innovation or invention?

The words innovation and invention overlap semantically but are really quite distinct.

Invention can refer to a type of musical composition, a falsehood, a discovery, or any product of the imagination. The sense of invention most likely to be confused with innovation is “a device, contrivance, or process originated after study and experiment,” usually something which has not previously been in existence.

Innovation, for its part, can refer to something new or to a change made to an existing product, idea, or field. One might say that the first telephone was an invention, the first cellular telephone either an invention or an innovation, and the first smartphone an innovation.

To continue on my thoughts, independently if we discuss about innovation or invention, consumers have become increasingly habituated to look for and want what’s new, best, fastest, more convenient, or more fashionable, and to tire of products much more quickly. This mindset applies to virtually every category: even previously slow moving ones such as dishes, toothpaste, or paper towels. For firms to sit still and not successfully innovate is often to wither away, since competitors and start-ups are moving extremely fast on the market! Complacency is not an option. In this increasingly educated and talented world, with lower labor and production costs abroad, successful start-ups can pop up anywhere.

There you go, a glance of my thoughts on how to define innovation, and the way that the world around us is changing and how we need to adapt. It’s a continuous effort to keep pace with the speed of evolution but it’s here and it’s happening so you’d better start ‘running’!