Inventors… innovators… entrepreneurs… these terms are often used interchangeably by many people. Several corporate who are mostly in Technology are always putting on their profiles, innovative company, innovative services, and innovative products. Yet I would argue that they all refer to different links in the total common value-chain of progress they do.
While inventors are more idea-oriented and entrepreneurs are more action-oriented, they both share an approach to problem solving that is non-linear. Innovators, however, can either be linear or non-linear. The linear innovators tend to be evolutionary, making incremental improvements, while the non-linear innovators tend to be revolutionary (not simply the Arab uprisingJ).
We can all think of innovations that were revolutionary in nature; the automobile, the phonograph, the Internet. Likewise, we can also think of more linear innovations that were evolutionary: better engines for cars; better sound systems for the phonograph; the World Wide Web (enabled by another incremental invention, html code, scripting etc..) for the Internet and communication.
Evolutionary innovators ask questions based on the limitations of existing solutions while revolutionary innovators ask questions no one else has thought of before. This sentiment was eloquently captured by Robert Kennedy when he paraphrased a quote by George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not.”
While both types of innovation play a vital role in the developmental ecosystem of technology, industry and business, it is the non-linear or revolutionary innovations that make the most significant advances. These are the ones that make the real difference. The really huge achievements in technology and the world at large are the result of visionary activists who imagine and then build something none of us had previously thought possible.
In the era of Karl Benz, the light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, and the automobile embodied this vision for possibilities that did not yet exist. But while quantum leaps like this tend to get more attention than incremental improvements, we should not minimize the importance of evolutionary innovations, the accumulation of which make the world a better living place through millions of small, gradual steps. Many incremental improvements become far better products and businesses.
For the most part, revolutionary ideas are implemented and commercialized by entrepreneurs who make evolutionary advances: the Wright brothers may have invented the airplane, but it was innovations such as airmail, military air forces, and commercial airlines that evolved the invention into a commercial enterprise.
The precursor to today’s steam engine the Greek Aeolipile invented in the 1st century by Heron of Alexendria went nowhere because no evolutionary innovator picked up on it to take it to the next level. Even after the first automobile was developed by Benz, mass adoption took decades. The car would not have revolutionized so many lives if someone hadn’t figured out how to mass-produce cars at an affordable price.
Here now the activity Quiz to answer and comment…
Please arrange below list on 2 groups of Revolutionary Innovations vs Evolutionary Innovations
internal combustion engine,
hybrid cars
electric cars,
biofuels
Telephone,
Mobile phone
iPhone
Photography
Digital photography,
Flickr,
PhotoBucket
Computers
laptops
Internet
World Wide Web
Elearning
eBook
Reasonable people can debate whether a particular innovation belongs in the first category or the second. What is not debatable is that while both play a role in the ecology of innovation, it is the truly revolutionary innovations that make all subsequent incremental improvements possible in our life that Seleaninews brings daily innovation to whether existing ideas or new ones.
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