The Future of Innovation

What is a future of Innovation?

As usual, to understand opportunities for future we should analyse trends from the past through the present into the future.

But firstly we should clarify what we will call Innovation in context of this short analysis. Our Ph.D. Student spend almost entire year looking for more or less widely accepted definition of what innovation is. So we provide here our understanding of what innovation is, and will consider the situation from this standing point.

First, - each innovation contain some idea on change of an actual situation, i.e. no change - no innovation. It means we need powerful instruments for getting innovative ideas.

Second, - idea became innovation just when we successfully implement it. So we need instruments to maintain process of innovation.

Now, what was in the past with these two components of an innovation?

1. For hundreds of years people got innovative ideas and implemented them by chance or by trials and errors. To understand what the future of an innovation will be like we should analyse what could be done to get and implement innovative ideas using instruments. In the 1940s a Russian scientist undertook a great piece of research into the history of systems evolution. Based on this analysis of real life experience of innovators throughout history and around the world he came up with certain conclusions and, based on these fundamental ideas, developed the theory on how to develop instruments to obtain effective innovative ideas in a effective and systemic way. Altshuller named it TRIZ (Russian acronym for the Theory of Solving Inventive (Innovative) Problems). Later he transformed TRIZ in to OTSM (Russian acronym for The Theory of Powerful Thinking).
2. During the last decades of 20^th century American scientist John P. Kotter undertook great research into the history of implementation of innovative ideas, resulting in his 8 Steps Model of an effective process of implementation of innovative ideas. Integration of Altshuller's and Kotter's approaches allowed getting innovative ideas and implementing them more efficient then before.
3. Above all we can see that competition in the world market increase dramatically and became global.

Now we could foresee some of the future of innovation. On the one hand instruments to produce and implement innovative ideas became more and more powerful. On the other hand the real world and market demand innovation more and more often. These two trends lead us to a conclusion that to be an innovation leader in the future companies and organisations should use concept of a regular, sustainable system or chain of innovations. In other words, to be successful in innovation it will not be enough just get one single innovation and implement it properly, but leaders of organisations should develop systemic chain of innovation. As a result demand for integration of powerful tools for innovation will grow up dramatically. Integration of OTSM-TRIZ and the 8-Step Model seems to be rather promising for creating a much more powerful approach for sustainable and systemic innovation.

Article © 2009 Mr Nikolai Khomenko. All rights reserved.