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Innovation in Technology - Technology in Innovations

Introduction

Humans differ most from other animal in the way of using different kinds of helpers to do everyday life easier. For the whole life span of mankind there have been great inventors and scientists trying to come up with new ideas in understanding life and universe. Often those achievements are only seen long after the actual invention and the understanding of a specific invention can take years or decades. But now things have changed while the the number of inventors has soared among the constantly increasing development and research. It feels like everything is been invented already and it is not possible to come up with huge inventions like gun powder and telephone but just some minor improvements on things all around us. Nowadays there is a constant flow of inventions and new things coming to market but what it actually really needs of an invention to be a real innovation and possible to commercialize and produce it.

Competition among companies and enterprises is really tough and it forces to innovate. Improving old products enough to attract customers or then if lucky to innovate something the buyers are willing to get even if they didn’t even know they needed that. Perhaps the best situation with innovation is inventing something really useful and easy to spread all over the world or at least to the desired market area. The changes in economy and industry during the last 50 years have caused somehow an innovation chaos. With the help of all the information technology and resources available it is possible to create high tech products quite easily. All needed is just the innovation; someone’s desire towards a specific problem, small talk during the coffee break or years of research on finding a solution for something. To be able to be a technology innovation it is needed to be in the front line of technology or even a bit further and to be able to give the consumer of the innovation what he or she or it needs. For an innovation to achieve success it is needed to change the ways we act, what we are used to doing. Innovation should also be adopted and accepted to be a part of our life.

Technology innovations

Most of the innovations come from big companies trying to get more and more customers with new and fancy and innovative products. Thus the huge research and development sectors among companies it still gives life to only about 30 % of innovations. The rest 70 % never hits the market but end up in patents lying around and maybe waiting for the time for those to come or the to be sold out to a company willing to try to use the new invention in its own business³. Huge companies are a huge source of innovations for themselves and for others. The problem with an innovation is how to make sure just this innovation is the one world needs at the moment. Technology innovations usually consist of research on new ideas and some kind of need for something.

Innovations can be small incremental innovations, standard innovations or radical innovations. Incremental innovations consist of only small changes on some existing product maybe introducing new materials or shapes for a product. standard innovations can be modular innovations or combination innovations. Modular innovations change some part of technology with something else f.ex. replacing analog tuner within a television with a digital one or replacing the CRT of television with some new technology. Combination or architectural innovations use the technology available and innovate new ways to use it. Radical innovations are just radical and there might not be anything left from the previous way of doing things after implementing those. See¹

The radical innovations are the ones most commonly seen as innovations while the standard innovations are seen as inventions and incremental innovations are just improvements. The problem with innovation is that even the smallest incremental innovation can be the significant one changing the whole industry. Innovations are somehow combination of knowledge². Sharing the knowledge and transforming it into a brainstorm resulting innovation is the problem organizations are facing at this innovative community. Japanese car manufacturer Toyota tries to get innovations out of its R&D personnel by allocating time when the innovators are free to invent their dream cars or what ever they like. Letting inventors loose is sometimes good idea to come up with innovations but if will also result in huge amount of non profitable and not produceable innovations.

Conclusions

But still with all the innovations we are left with a problem to find out which ones to develop further and which ones are going to hit the market. There is no universal answer to know how the innovation is going to manage unless it is really something unique, special and needed but there is no way to know that. It is impossible to predict the future and it is impossible to change the past. Technologies come and go and still there are some of those to stay and some stay only for a little while. The safe way to technology innovations is to do incremental innovations or then just accidentally end up having a radical innovation.

References

¹ Grupp, H. and Maital, S. 2001. Managing New Product Development and Innovation. A Muctoeconomic Toolbox. Edward Elgar Publishing. Cheltenham.

² Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. 1998. The Knowledge Creating Company. Oxford University Press.

³ Rivette, K.G. and Kline, D. 2000. Rembrandts in the Attic: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Patents, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

2005-02-25 | |