What is Innovation?
When you say innovation, it is also related to research and development process. It’s actually research and development and innovation process.
In research, it is the generation of new knowledge from the systematic investigation of recent concepts and exploration of natural phenomena for the generation of new knowledge.
Development is the application of that new knowledge in order to create new products, processes and services through design, prototype and testing.
And the last stage is innovation. It is the translation or integration of these new products, processes and services into the market.
We say that innovation in actual terms that we use is technology commercialization and utilization if we are referring to technological products, process, and service. As an example of this process of R&D and innovation, for example, ChatGPT, in research they are studying algorithms and programs of natural language processing and machine learning.
And then for the development. They develop a web-based application called ChatGPT with certain features and accessibility to the users.
Now, if the market or industry successfully integrates ChatGPT in their processes, services, and they create value for the market, then we call it innovation.
Now, the question is, do you need to follow that process? Do you need to have R&D before innovation?
Actually, no, because there are several types of innovation. So if you just have a creative idea and you implement it without research and development and the market accepts it, then we also call it a successful innovation.
Besides technological innovation, there are other types of innovation. Because now, we are free to imagine different types of innovation.
One is business model innovation that can disrupt the industry and create new markets. Business model innovation comes from new ideas on revenue models, distribution channels, customer relationship, etc.
Another impactful innovation now is social innovation, which is a community-based solution to socio-economic and environmental problems.
And normally, social innovation is related to achieving SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals. Innovation can be done in the academy, in the industry, or government research institutes.
And there are a lot of methods of generating innovation. One is, it is actually popular, design thinking. It is a human-centered approach that gets feedback from the users before actually studying or developing the product. So they would get feedback, the actual needs of the users.
So it involves, design thinking involves empathy, ideation, prototyping, validation. From a prototype, you’re able to translate it to a minimum viable product. So you have pilot customers that would actually want to pay for that minimum viable product, and then you continue to validate and test your prototypes until you get a point that you have a product market fit.
Another method for generating innovation is agile innovation, which is usually used in a lot of companies right now. It is forming a multi-disciplinary theme or a theme from various departments of the company wherein they are flexible, adaptable, and responsive to the customer in terms of product development.
