01 Problem Solving and Systematic Innovation -- What Is Innovation?

What Is Innovation?¹

Listen from the others.

Here is how Rana el Kaliouby think about innovation. Rana el Kaliouby is known as an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur in the field of expression recognition research and technology development, which is a subset of facial recognition designed to identify the emotions expressed by the face.

Introduction

Innovation is at the core of what you’re trying to do as an entrepreneur. But what is innovation? What does it look like, and how is it achieved?

So, what’s it?

Tim Miano, a Program Director at the MIT Innovation Initiative, said that he thinks innovation, right now, is a burgeoning piece of the economy that has to do with taking the technologies and the tools and the learnings of the last 20 years, and trying to put them into practice.

Rana el Kaliouby ², an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, said that she think it’s seeing a version of the world that doesn’t exist yet, and then painting a picture of what this looks like for the rest of the world. Then you have people aligned behind you, and you can all move towards that vision.

Ramana Nanda³ said 'I think of innovation as taking an invention and commercializing it, making it into a product or company that is creating some value for society, where people are actually paying for it.'

David Miller⁴ thinks innovation is a combination of two things. One thing is, it’s something new. It’s something that hasn’t been done before, right? It’s unique. It’s different. It’s original. And two is, is it’s useful.
Wareen Katz⁵ said’ Innovation is the activity whereby new products,
technologies, ideas, techniques are generated, which sometimes displace or destroy older established practices or products.'
He also thinks that Innovation happens usually with a person who is emotionally distraught regarding current scenario or situation. This could be a user of a product, or user of a technique, or a user of a practice that
doesn’t like the way they’re currently involved in the ecosystem. They don’t like the current technique or method for doing something, and they want to fix it or change it or improve upon it.

Karim Lakhani⁶ said that from his point of view, innovation means problem-solving – taking on an activity, finding a problem, and then going about solving them.

Peter Barrett⁷ said ‘Innovation, to me, is looking at really creative approaches to difficult problems, and looking at them in different ways that others haven’t done before.’

Conclusion

After seeing all the passages above, what do you think about innovation?

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1. The image and the inspiration are from a class of Harvard Business School. ↩︎

2. Rana el Kaliouby is cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, a leader in emotion AI. ↩︎

3. Ramana Nanda is the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration and co-Director of the Private Capital Project at Harvard Business School. ↩︎

4. David Miller is the Executive Managing Director of the Clean Energy Venture Group (CEVG), an investment organization that provides seed capital and management expertise to early stage clean energy companies. ↩︎

5. Warren Katz is the Managing Director of the Air Force Accelerator Powered by Techstars, where he advises entrepreneurs on technology commercialization efforts. ↩︎

6. Karim R. Lakhani is a Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and one of the Principal Investigators of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH). ↩︎

7. Peter Barrett is a partner at Atlas Venture, an early-stage venture capital group specializing in the life sciences. ↩︎