What is innovation and where does it come from?
Innovation is the introduction of new ideas, methods, or products. It refers to the process of creating something new or improving upon something that already exists. Innovation can come from a variety of sources, including:
- Research and development: This is the most common source of innovation. Companies and organizations invest heavily in research and development to create new products, services, or technologies.
- Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurs are individuals who identify a need or opportunity in the market and create a new business to meet that need. They are often considered the driving force behind innovation.
- Social and cultural influences: Innovation can also come from social and cultural changes. For example, the rise of the internet and digital technologies have led to many new innovations in communication, entertainment, and commerce.
- Accidents and serendipity: Sometimes, innovation happens by accident or through serendipity, as researchers and inventors stumble upon new ideas and techniques through trial and error.
- Open Innovation: It refers to the process of collaborating externally, with partners such as suppliers, customers, universities, and research centers, to generate new ideas, technologies, and business models.
Innovation can lead to new products, services, or technologies that can improve people’s lives, create new jobs, and drive economic growth.
The role of innovation becomes even more important for organizational survival due to the challenges of the 21st century. The rise of information technologies and the progressing globalization of markets transform economies and fuel digitization, automatization, and connectivity: the value creation shifts from capital-intensive to information-intensive industries. Firm innovativeness refers to an organization’s overall capability to engage in new ideas and concepts that may result in the implementation of new processes or the introduction of new products or services. We develop an enhanced, more holistic measure of firm innovativeness with broader applicability. We define firm innovativeness as an organization’s overall capability to engage in new ideas and concepts that may result in new processes’ implementation or new products’ introduction. Property technology companies have come into the market with innovative, disruptive, and sustainable business models, creating ground-breaking momentum.
Creativity draws on freedom of thought, the ability to generate new ideas, a willingness to seek out learning opportunities, and ability to see new perspectives, and the capability to think broadly and strategically. Innovation builds on creativity, translating creative thought into something useful by drawing on real-world expertise such as the dissemination of information. It requires a degree of adaptability, along with effective communication and collaboration skills. Several frameworks have suggested that creativity and innovation are important skills for the 21st-century worker along with curiosity and risk-taking expanding creativity and innovation to include entrepreneurial thinking.
The classical characteristics of innovation are that it:
1. is an individual process,
2. is hidden in the R&D laboratory,
3. is ungovernable and uncontrollable,
4. is more or less accidental,
5. is something that’s been going on for ages,
6. does not correlate with trending or consumer/customer demand and insight,
7. does not correlate with corporate strategy or execution capabilities.