WHY IS INNOVATION SO FUNDAMENTAL?
Because it is the relationship between the present and the future, that is, between what is true now and what is unknown in the future, and many of the decisions that are made in the world are framed in this relationship. The innovation process is destined, to be successful, to produce a real or virtual product or service, which is not known today, and which satisfies current or new needs by creating challenges and opportunities with threats, joys and pains.
The incorporation of innovations in products and services is common today, with the smartphone being a routine example of how what was an old, black, heavy, scarce and expensive device has changed and how it has evolved into a multipurpose tool and functional. If you do not want to recognize that this type of disruption is in force and that it is accelerating, it is because you simply want to ignore the rapid development of the community and the world.
It is also known that many changes will come in very different areas and sectors that today are important locally and globally and that these activities are affected or are undergoing transformations due to the increase in innovations that arise as a result of the use of new technologies or approaches.. Scientists, engineers and other professionals, technicians or self-taught who are working in these innovation activities, tend to anticipate the problems that their work will solve, the needs that they will satisfy, the advances that have been made and the benefits that will be obtained once the expected results of their work, projects and undertakings are achieved.
These themes are an important part of what has been presented each year in many of the talks that comprise for example the "Congress of the Future" and thousands of other similar events around the world. They present very different topics and it is about highlighting the effects and steps that are expected to be followed in each of those hundreds of advertisements and the contributions that will be achieved when they are constituted in real objects, services or processes and are providing the alleged benefits that were anticipated.
The contributions and proposals arise from the communities that invest, research and consume in specialized issues such as: agriculture, food, livestock and fishing; or health, medicine, pharmacopoeia, equipment; or housing, support, comfort, flexibility; or transport, vehicles, roads; or air, sea and land; or tourism, entertainment, art, hotels and restaurants; or education at its different levels, development of science and knowledge, in situ or distributed; or in communications, media, coverage, territoriality, and multiple areas and sectors of recognized importance in current and future life. Certainly the contributions will almost always be limited and biased by their particular views, knowledge and interests.
However, faced with innovating or dying, it is essential that governments, congresses and judicial systems and university rectories incorporate themselves into innovation and contribute to it, unless they want to become increasingly cumbersome, expensive, and inefficient and obstruct, delay or reduce with their measures the race of innovation and with it the development of their respective nations.
There are different processes that are used to achieve innovations. Each area or sector of manufacturing or service activity (public and private) faces changes that are often the application of one or more innovations. Among these changes there are some that are recognized that they will become marketable very soon and other changes that, although they are rather distant, are still present in the decisions made in the different institutions, decisions that seek to respond to real problems or poorly satisfied or emerging needs.
FROM TRADITIONAL INNOVATION
In this section we present some areas in which innovations are produced that help human beings think, plan and execute them to reach contributions that advance in the achievement of satisfactions for people and for companies. So far we recognize at least two types of traditional innovations that are widely used and known: serial and exponential.
1.- Serial Innovation. On the one hand, there is the innovation that is born to provide a solution to a certain problem or enigma that produces negative effects and that is generally part of a sequence of stages, for which we can call it serial innovation , that is, an innovation is followed by another in the same area, but with the desire that it be a better solution in terms of: ease of use, better resolution of a problem, more profit, lower cost of use, less ecological damage, etc. This area of innovation is common within organizations that must ensure that their products or services are adapted to the needs of their customers. They almost always correspond to incremental and marginal improvements.
2.- Exponential Innovation. On the other hand, there is exponential innovationwhich already has deep roots in sectors such as manufacturing or medicine, which is very well represented as a synthesis in the Singularity University (SU) created in 2008 and which bases its proposals on the application of exponential technologies, such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, augmented reality, 3D, advanced robotics or artificial intelligence, etc., that allow the incorporation of change with a rapidly and continuously increasing acceleration rate and that facilitate substantial progress in different areas, sectors and current industries. These exponential technologies in their growth are capable of achieving outstanding results, since as the knowledge base grows, its accumulation becomes greater and greater, with which its influence, when it is used in a particular subject,it also grows older. But at the same time, it must be borne in mind that: an exponential technology can lose its impact or be replaced by another with more creative potential.
The SU is a prestigious institution that attracts many personalities of new technologies and whose contribution is helping in a very significant way to solve important problems that are presented to large and medium-sized global and local companies that hope to be protagonists of the development of the humanity and that in this way they are anticipating for the future.
TO THE EMERGING AND PLURAL: INTERSTICIAL INNOVATION
In collaboration with our team and professionals distinguish a plural area where you can innovate called "interstitial" which seeks to make innovations to fill the void when "force combining two or more areas, sectors or industries" occurs that it is creating surprising counter-trend scenarios for the world economy and conducive to pluralistic societies.
This category of plural innovation was born from: (1) the idea that almost all manufactured products and all services consumed by people and companies are in the process of modifications, substitutions or elimination and that these modifications will come out of the two types of innovations previously described - serial and exponential - which we consider that it contemplates only one less part of the field of innovation, (2) of the need to interrelate variables in the work of anticipation of futures with multiple scenarios, where the crossed impacts between variables is a fundamental aspect to identify new situations,about which many times there is no answer and remain as unknowns that must be followed with great attention and (3) apparently due to the availability of many new technologies that can improve industrial processes and habitual services and to the urgency of introducing innovations for the markets, the origin and the areas where new possibilities for innovation can arise are overlooked.
Innovation that arises from one or more interstices, that is, from the apparent void that exists when the mixture of two or more areas or industries is forced, seeks to achieve new products, services and their benefits (which will not appear or will be non-existent when working with serial or exponential innovation). In order to fill the gaps, it will be necessary to investigate and identify new problems, and the products and services that solve them, which until before this potential union were not considered since they were not known.
In other words, plural interstitial innovations will be aimed at recognizing new problems and unimaginable satisfiers, thereby creating a universe that has been barely identified or mapped up to now, and we assume that whoever dominates the field of these technical innovations will have a world order advantage.
This gap between different areas or plural sectors therefore creates an Interstitial Innovation Zone (ZII) that until now has not been fully developed and it seems to us that neither serial nor linear innovation covers it, apart from the fact that some gaps can be fill with innovative contributions born: by the contribution of new technologies, but there is also a great opportunity for the use of more traditional technologies and approaches.
Innovation and singular obsolescence in communication media. Today the groundbreaking changes that have occurred in unique sectors of economic life are easily recognized. For example, if the changes in communication are considered, the time when newspapers and magazines began, then radio broke in, later television, then network channels or multi-product channels, and When the internet appeared, parallel processes were born that allow today a person from home and with a PC or smart phone to provide (or provide) press, radio, television, music, etc. And all this for only a few years.
At some point, the sector of the written press could be analyzed, from the particular point of view of its future advances and the possible scenarios it could face. And if it had been done it would have probably shown that it was going to make a lot of progress in itself and that it could also diminish its importance and decline as an economic activity. And the same for the activities that followed: radio, television, etc. Each one had an innovative development, mostly serial - although they had the opportunity to have an exponential development - but they ended up at a stage very far from that, that is, it was not many years before their development rate tended to zero and at some point they disappeared. or they will disappear. The funny thing is that this change occurred not because the development of radio was another step in the development of the written press,Rather, it exploded as a result of the emergence of new technologies that had little to do with those used to produce and market the written press.And this is a type of process that leads to the disappearance of economic activities and will, we suppose, be very recurrent in the years to come, even though in their past life those companies or activities have had successful and innovative developments on a serial or exponential basis.
Alert.What we observe is that many of the companies that operate in the country, from mining companies to the most powerful conglomerates, and even states and universities, tend to have an unrealistic vision of the changes in which they will be faced in the coming years. and except for a few organizations are opening their eyes to fully anticipate new businesses and new activities that will occur in their respective industries and that will leave many resources unused and with very low salvage values or only as scrap metal or assets cultural or sentimental.Although this is a great threat, it is also a tremendous opportunity for development… if the current innovation paradigm changes, we would be at the dawn of another possible scenario of enormous potential to create and destroy wealth in nations and corporations.
In the analysis of the possible scenarios, of what humanity will face in 10 or more years, however, opportunities and threats much higher than those historically known are glimpsed and are represented precisely by: the new industries and sectors that will develop when have products and services that connect sectors, which until now are presented as independent and unique.
A pilot example. At least one area of plural innovation that we have studied refers to the interstices that result from the combinations or mixtures of different areas, sectors or industries that can give rise to market needs to have new products and services that, until now, they are unknown or in very embryonic stages. For example, someone could make an innovation that includes the mix of construction, health, sustainability, transportation and new technologies and it is recognized that: it is a “construction” innovation that presents a set of improvements for that industry particular.
But what is different is that when making a mix like the one previously described (construction, health, etc.) it is recognized, first, that there are several interstices where new needs arise, such as: " movable healthy spaces". In this way, it would be possible to have habitable spaces to live, work and entertain that were movable, either by land or by air or by water, with which the forms of human life and recreational and productive occupation of large territories would be expanded. to date not used by the public or private sector.
We fully lived this interstitial innovation space when we set out to create “healthy spaces”in which we combined: wooden construction, with elements of CU + (antibacterial copper), sustainability, temperatures, lighting, preventive medicine and environmental science. Promoting this mix between real estate companies, copper producers, construction companies, foresters, architects, engineers, researchers, health area and financier and although it seemed like a potentially very attractive offer for the community, the difficulty was in that the interstices between most of These sectors… had to be filled, that is, a need was created to innovate plurally and as it became a reality, a type of innovative healthy spaces could be reached and thus giving birth to a new and millionaire exportable industry and global, which is still available today.And like this, how many more are capable of exploring and exploiting?
THE CHALLENGES AND CHALLENGED BY INTERSTICIAL INNOVATION
This paradigmatic expansion of the field of innovation is not minor and we suppose it will have a great impact on the formation of societies and countries that, thanks to its exploitation, reach high levels of economic development and others will lose it.
But, it is possible that the greatest difficulty to be successful in discovering new needs that arise to fill the interstices of the integration of different areas or sectors, will be in having the people and new talents capable of articulating these new interstitial constructs and opportunities plurals. The training of professionals, executives and leaders to get to work in this new type of activities and be successful should begin to form from now on, but more focused on the principles that govern innovation and with changes in the traditional educational models of the last century, which must be developed from now on to address the entrepreneurship of new businesses and interstitial industries and a new emerging social and cultural reality.
In the network or plural relationship of known or traditional areas or sectors, numerous potential interstices will emerge, depending on the extent to which you want to work. Just as an example, so that you can see the opportunities available with this new way of innovating: (a) joining two sectors will produce: 1 gap where new questions will arise on how to achieve greater benefits than those that come from each of them, (b) when 3 sectors are mixed, there will be: 3 pairs of interstices of two sectors each and 1 of three sectors, that is, 4 new areas of needs and opportunities to innovate, (c) if there were four traditional sectors that are mixed, there will be: 6 interstices between two sectors, plus 4 interstices between three sectors and 1 between the four, that is,a total of eleven new business opportunities will be available in this ZII (Interstitial Innovation Zones). And so on. The possibilities are many. And for you, what are the ZII that you envision?
This new non-linear vision - which we have presented in this disclosure synthesis - is an opportunity to attract and invite many more innovators or prospects who want to be and of course: all companies, their managers and executives, to the governance of the central and local states, different social and political actors, artists and cultural managers, university rectors and intellectual leaders who: recognize that their future will lie in being applied in these new and profitable Zones of Interstitial Innovations (ZII) -plural and collaborative - and in the multiple spheres of its entrepreneurial, economic and social action in order to sustain the early transition towards the desired public and private development. Finally,It is urgent to create transversal meeting points and a market for the incubation of thousands of new businesses and the development of prototypes, products, services, agreements, transactions and various financing for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of emerging innovations.
The New Wealth of the Nations of the pluralistic societies comes this time, in part, together with this virginal paradigm of Interstitial Innovation that begins to travel the world. It is observed that even traditional innovation has already innovated. Today "everyone" can resume, innovate and innovate at different levels of their economic, private, social or virtual life. We urge you to cross borders, to leave the current singular spaces of comfort, ready to search for new opportunities in thousands of Interstitial Zones of Plural Innovation that are already available to everyone and at different levels in the public and private: Dare! Do not say afterwards that you were not warned in time.
(*) Some related articles: 1.- Inhabiting for good living XXI Century 2.- Is political innovation possible ?: now 3.- Entrepreneurs: wait or invest and innovate? 4.- New governance: will they continue to govern like the last century? 4. Possible development: with complex innovation & larger enterprises 5.- The Name of the Rose and foundations for the education of the new millennium. 6.- New modernity of the millennium. Will it be possible to avoid it? 7.- Requiéscat in pace or innovation from central banks?
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Omar Villanueva Olmedo:
Director OLIBAR Consultores Lic. Ing. FEN Universidad de Chile [email protected] 99 57 945 69 Co-creates content Team Publishing OLIBAR x RSP (Professional Social Responsibility) OLIBAR Consultores Int´l since 1972 Future studies, strategy and innovation for Development and the company
Chair: Mr. Carlos Olavarría Aranguren, Master of Science MIT / USA
