When we think of invention the first image we see in our
mind is that of the steam engine or the spinning jenny and their inventors
James Watt and James Hargreaves. When you think of innovation there is no
specific big idea which comes to our mind. Innovations are incremental – after
you identified the shortcomings of your existing product or offerings, or when
you see that you can improve the quality of your offerings you innovate. It may
be the way you relocate the bath-tub in the bath room for saving space, the way
you hold your tennis racket for greater effect, the improved mix of spice in
the food for better taste, the way the strings are pulled or played by the
guitarist for better sound or melody etc. It is because of its pervasiveness that
the magic of innovation is invoked too often when organizations look for
improved results or of doing things differently.
An important aspect of innovation is that your idea need not
be a sui generis – like the steam engine or Wright Brothers’ flying
machine. It can be some thing which already exists in another organization. You
may adopt the same idea to suit the genius of your organization or business.
You don’t have to be shy of being a copy-cat as long as your copy serves your
unique requirements well.
Inventions are often the output of blue-sky research and
development. All inventions need not be the outcome of accidental or unintended
findings. Most often when the inventor sees his invention he may feel it is of
no immediate use. We have examples of the famous misquote attributed to Watson
Senior of IBM in 1943 when the first computer was invented (though there is
scant evidence that he made it – according to Wikipedia), “I think there is a
world market for may be five computers,” or another high profile statement of Rutherford B. Hayes,
President of US (1877) about telephone when it was invented, “It’s a great
invention, but who would ever want to use one?”
Therefore, many inventions find their way to usefulness many years later.
Innovation
has a sense of urgency. If you do not innovate you will perish. The world is
changing fast, the market not only fancies new offerings but evolves in a
myriad ways faster, and consumers continuously look for more economical but
better products. That is the urgency about innovation. If you do not innovate
someone else will.
One
way of knowing a little more about innovations and how to go about the task is
to know recent important innovations. Let us look at three of the eight The
Economist’s Innovation Awards for 2013:
• Energy and the environment: Tim Bauer, Nathan Lorenz
and Bryan Wilson, co-founders of
Envirofit, for developing a compact stove that reduces indoor pollution by cutting smoke, toxic emissions,
biomass consumption and cooking time compared with traditional designs.
Envirofit has sold more than 650,000 stoves in more than 40 countries.
• Social and economic innovation: Jane Chen, Rahul
Panicker, Naganand Murty and Linus Liang of Embrace, for developing a low-cost
incubator to reduce
neonatal deaths in the developing world. More than 20,000 babies in a dozen
countries have benefited from its design, similar to a sleeping bag (see
photo).
• Process and service innovation: Salman Khan (a techie and not the cine actor),
founder of Khan Academy, for creating a free
online-education platform that
now serves more than 10m students each month and has delivered more than 300m
lessons.
We can see from the above examples that an important aspect of
innovation is that most of them look like very simple ideas. Yes, they are; surprisingly
we can really see their simplicity only after some innovator has propounded the
idea. This leads us to the most important clues to innovate – do not
necessarily look for big ideas; in every small operations you do in your
organization, in every little system you have installed, in the nicks and
corners of your processes, your product designs, your marketing - you may have
a window waiting for you to innovate – and grab The Economist’s award.
By V K Talithaya (vktalithaya@managementmasala.com)
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