Hello, My name is Brenda Savoie. Our topic for today is what are the sources of innovation. So, buckle up to start learning.
You might have hundreds of inspirational stories of people including entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, students etc who have turned their self generated ideas into something that have proved vastly beneficial for human beings in one or the other way.
For example, Mark Zekerberg launched Facebook to help people connect, stay in touch and express their feelings with each other. Karl Benz invented the first vehicle so that long distances are travelled in less time.
But the question of the hour is how do these people come up with such great innovations? and what can enable you to innovate as well? Let’s look at the three great sources of innovation.
1. Feel the pain
The complaints of people is one of the greatest sources of innovation. Feeling the pain is simply looking around and listening to the complaints of your people. What is that which makes your people complaint frequently is exactly you need to understand.
The innovators feel the pain of their people and then try to come up with suitable solutions. Let’s take 2 minutes to recall the story of James Watt. United Kingdom in mid eighteenth century was facing the negative impact of coal burning on health and environment.
People were complaining and demanding the prevention of same. James Watt, felt and confronted this pain of his people. What he did is that he started experimenting on a steam engine. He finally, with his successful invention of steam engine, succeeded in removing out the complaints of his people.
2. Sense the wave
Sensing the trends in your economy is another known source of innovation. Let me clear the metaphor ” sense the wave ” with the example of Sherpalo Ventures, an investment firm that from past seven years has been involved in providing financial support to early stage startups in India including Naurki.com, InMobi and Green Dust.
When we asked the founder of Sherpalo Ventures namely K.Ram Shriram how does he selects startups for investment? In reply, he said that ” we fundamentally believe in spotting trends in an economy and backing up startups that address those trends”.
We spotted in early years of 21st century that young educated people of India were searching for jobs online. Naukri.com sensed out this wave and thus created one of the largest Indian job portals.
3. See the waste
The third greatest innovation source is seeing the waste around. Everyone in an organisation sees the waste of paper and other material around.
An engineer who used to work with SAP Lab India one day observed that a lot of energy was being wasted when employees forgot to switch off their monitors while going for coffee breaks.
He devised and fixed a small micro-controller underneath the cup. The chip used to send signals and put off PCs automatically when an employee would lift up the mug. This idea was so simple that it was implemented in the entire organisation. The waste was seen and thus removed by that engineer.
Hope you enjoyed reading my topic. See you next time with another stunning topic. Till then Goodbye!
