Innovation….

Introduction

When I was a primary school student, people who had television were the rich in my hometown. Now we can see mobiles in everybody’s hand. Technology has changed our way of life, let it be communication, healthcare, entertainment, construction, travel or anything. What made man to invent all these things in the world?

What is innovation?

As per the Wikipedia, "Innovation is the application of new solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and society. The term innovation can be defined as something original and new that "breaks in to" the market or into society. One usually associates to new phenomena that are important in some way. A definition of the term, in line with these aspects, would be the following: "An innovation is something original, new, and important – in whatever field – that breaks in to (or obtains a foothold in) a market or society."

Let us have a look at some life changing innovations:

1. Use of Electricity
2. Automobile
3. Telephone
4. Television
5. Printing press
6. Computer
7. Machine gun
8. Communications Satellites
9. Medical inventions such as X-Ray, Ultrasonography, Penicillin, etc
10. Fiber optics

How we can be innovative?

I was discussing about innovations with one of my friend, he said now most of the things are invented and it is very difficult to do research and find out new things. According to me this is a wrong attitude. This blocks our mind and the way we look at things. If you are a software professional, I suggest having a look at Apache Software Foundation open source tools and packages. How these come into existence? People might have thought of helping the community and developed some great stuff. In my opinion we might not be able to become “father of a greatest invention” but we can definitely start building small Java packages which will help the community. If I am an automation engineer why not develop an automation framework and share with the community so that others also make use of it. Every small thing will definitely be useful.

More and more graduates are now attracted towards higher studies and getting into Research. There was a trend wherein students used to have "Software Engineer" as a dream job but now the things are slowly changing.  Let us hope for the best!!!