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Tuesday,  November 27, 2007 

Title: Critical Innovations

Reference: “Top 25: Innovations”. CNN.com. March 1, 2005. Http://www.cnn.com/2005/tech/01/03/cnn25.top25.innovations/index.html

Innovation continues to play a critical part in business development. Companies are spending more and more resources, processing time, and thought on the best way to satisfy customer demands, eliminate waste, go green, and to achieve business success through intellectual leverage.

Tuesday,  November 27, 2007 

Title: Critical Innovations

Reference: “Top 25: Innovations”. CNN.com. March 1, 2005. Http://www.cnn.com/2005/tech/01/03/cnn25.top25.innovations/index.html

Innovation continues to play a critical part in business development. Companies are spending more and more resources, processing time, and thought on the best way to satisfy customer demands, eliminate waste, go green, and to achieve business success through intellectual leverage. Private companies are often at the forefront of these initiatives as venture backed companies and smaller organizations are often focused on ledge edge technologies, new opportunities, and underserved markets that larger organizations cannot easily or profitably address. It is often these organizations that are not heavily vested in outdated methods, constrained by enterprise politics, or limited in scale or in scope to specific market metrics. As a result, these organizations often come up with novel ways to address problems or to produce results. Innovation in like minded companies is not a just a business process, but a relevant aspect of an organization’s DNA. Those without the environmental support, risk taking, and creative design mentality are normally not product innovators or market changers. In the referenced article the commentator lists many of the most outstanding innovations for the past 25 years. I am listing the top 10 that appear in the article:

1. Internet
2. Cell Phone
3. Personal Computer
4. Fiber Optics
5. Electronic Mail
6. Global Positions Systems
7. Lap Tops
8. Compact Discs
9. Digital Cameras
10. RFID Tags

I found this to be a really interesting list. All of them have had a large impact on our daily lives, our work lives, and the way that we communicate. They have also spawned new and related creations that are creatively disrupting our interaction patterns at an accelerating rate.  New media applications for example have been built off of cell phone and digital camera applications, and social networking sites on the Internet have had a large impact on community building across the World Wide Web. A common link between all of the these items is the out of the box thinking that it took to create these developments and then to generate applications that consumers and businesses did not even know that they wanted. Surely it is a sign of genius to be able to take a novel concept and move it from the edge to the mainstream of application usage. It is vital for every organization to embrace innovation at its core and to use it to meet critical needs even if they are yet to be defined.  I am applying these concepts to my tool box and I encourage others to do the same.