Nowadays, our live is full of technical comforts making our lives much easier. But because we are less confronted with problems, we are not as eager as before to find creative and new solutions. How do we make sure we don’t lose our innovation drift?
As we saw with the invention of the computer, the technology evolved from a huge (and really expensive) machine to a device which almost fits your pocket. A very important aspect of this development is ‘need’. As these enormous computers brought a lot of physical problems, there was a big need for them to evolve into smaller, and more user friendly devices. When the physical problem was solved, a new problem came up, consumers could not understand how to use the computers. The command prompt was replaced by an easy-to-understand user interface in just a few years.
But now most of these major problems are fixed, innovations start to slow down. According to professor Economy at Stanford, Nicholas Bloom, technology growth in the USA is decrease from 3% (in the fifties) to 1% per year. This is odd because engineers and researchers were almost doubled in the same year.
So much opportunities and yet we innovated slower than 60 years ago. How is that possible? When we are not confronted with real problems and challenges anymore, the need for new techniques decreases. The impact is simply too small. We saw the same phenomena in the Golden Age in the Netherlands. A similar decrease in innovations happened as our lives were becoming easier.
The reason why it is becoming more important to fully integrate IT departments in companies, is to boost the innovation drift in companies again. To bring together people who actually experience problems in working environment and people who can develop a solution. The new problem now is to fully understand the business problem. Is the need big enough to solve this problem in an innovative way?
References:
