Saturday, December 09, 2006

Innovation

In Oxford dictionary means make changes; introduce new things, ideas, and methods. These new things have atmosphere of original, improvement, advance and modern. So this innovation should be something new that better than before or previous one.

People then try to describe more precisely on this “better than before” term. Many efforts have been taken to define these words in such a way so that we examine this innovation characteristic. The innovation then puts into the test where people can observe it. The innovation could be many forms across many aspects of life (of human being of course). It may be a tool, equipment, method, procedure, or simply a theory. For sure, if this is meant for “better than before” then at the end this should converge to the ultimate goal of all: improve the quality of life of human being.

World civilizations since the first human consist of triangle of [P]eople-[P]rocess-[T]ool. The quality of life does improve by the advance of new tools which may change the process or vice versa. From the stone-age, to the bronze-age, to the iron-age, then moves further to industrial era and now; information era. We all have seen that process and tools have influenced the way of human life. Whether it improves or not the quality of life, only you can answer it. You may not know how the old life was perhaps :-).

But from all those innovations, all will fall under three value possibilities:
Enabler -> make something impossible to become possible
Efficiency -> improve productivity, saving things (cost, effort, time, life, safety), etc
Control -> something unknown, unpredictable, uncontrolled now can be monitored, controlled and hence able to predict and manage.

One innovation can satisfy those three values above, or at least, it should be recognized to be one of them. Otherwise then what these innovations were invented for?

So what is your innovation?
---
Salam,
# ./