Innovation: How important is it realy?
Innovation is and has been the locus of the most meaningful progress in the history of the world; innovation of products and services, of social norms and legislation, health, and politics. Innovation is the introduction of new things or methods or both, for doing something. Innovation is improvement and progress.
Nothing is so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking.
If you are not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
Innovation and technology have been proven to be considerable drivers for growth. Innovations that materialise as products and services that become economically valuable create new markets or challenge existing ones. Moreover, the original objective of a research is many times not the same as the commercial product that materialises out of the process. For example, the laser reader that so many businesses use every day to scan product codes (e.g. supermarkets) was not invented with the retailers in mind.
Albert Einstein did not have the automated checkout systems in mind when he was completing his discoveries on the law of photoelectric effect.
The externalities of the effect of cross-fertilisation of ideas in innovation and technology create the pre-conditions for further advances of directly linked or less so fields of research. Innovation creates further innovation and that is an undeniable reality. Of course, not all innovations creates direct social gains, and many commercialised innovations lead only to wealth increases of their inventors and innovators (i.e. firms or individuals). It is also very hard to quantify the beneficiary externalities of social gains. Another undeniable reality is that state funding of research and development (R&D) plays a most significant role in making all these innovations we enjoy today actually happened. Many research projects do not have immediate visible commercial use and thus, private companies are not likely to undertake the research of such ideas on their own cost. This is the case where governments usually step into nudge researchers and firms to undertake R&D activities with long-run social benefits, even if in many cases, it is the private firms that benefit the most from state-funded.Every technology that makes the iPhone so ‘smart’ was government funded: the Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display and the voice-activated Siri.
