Foundations of Innovation

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Here’s a little story – I had the pleasure to participate and present yesterday in an unconference meeting named - “Local Storming” about local and mobile applications (hosted by the Hub Tel-Aviv and Yoav Segal). After getting some nice feedbacks (ty guys) I was encouraged to blog about the concepts.

I like structures

People who know me, say that I’m a structured individual - I like to group things together into a logical structures. Friends often tell me they better speak SQL to me, ‘cause I can’t understand free text. They must be right in a way.

Being a structured person, helped me a lot as entrepreneur. It made me understand that innovation is not magic, there’s a system - if you only know how to structure.

Foundations & blocks

Before structuring, you need foundations. Foundations are the root elements to all other pieces of the puzzle.

I usually say, that there are 4 forces in life: needs, money, technology and physics.

• Needs are the reason people do stuff, it’s burning in their guts to do something.
• Technology is what enables the process of fulfilling the need.
• Money is all about using others’ needs and transforming them into new needs of your own using the right technology.
• Physics is the realm, it’s where everything happens.

Blocks are the specific characteristics of the foundations. There are many needs – hunger, pain, friendships, love, lust… many technologies, many ways to make money and things occur in different locations.

Smart sentence

Some one must have said that before me – innovation is all about taking two elements and create something new out of them.

If you could take blocks from different foundation and stitch a story for them – you’ve got something new.

Innovation – how does it work ?

Lets give the system a try on a specific domain – Mobile & Internet Applications (easy, I just talked about it yesterday).

So, what are the foundations ?

• Needs – mostly relationships and social interactivity. I’ll just call it Social.
• Technology – well, it all relates to smart phones and headsets. Call it – Mobile devices.
• Money – true, people actually buy applications; but I’ll focus on advertising as the major money making mechanism.
• Physics – is everywhere, that’s the beauty. I’ll call it – Real World.

Here are the 4 foundations of mobile applications:

What about the blocks ?

• Social – people look for either friendships, love or business
• Technology – what so special about mobile devices ? what are the derived technologies ? GPS, Camera, Music, Touch screens and applications.
• Advertising – there are many faces to advertising, usually they are divided into: Geographical, Contextual, Demographical, Behavioral, and now - Social.
• Real world – mobility is charming, it’s everywhere - Cities, Country Sides, Roads, Malls, Home, Restaurants. Anywhere!!

If we put it all together, we get:

This is just the beginning, it can be easily extent.

Now, lets have a fun game: pick 2-4 blocks from different foundations and see what comes up. See how innovation rises.

Here are some examples:

• Social + Demographic advertising = facebook
• Restaurants + Friendships + GPS = foursquare
• Roads + GPS = waze
• Camera + Search = Google goggles

Isn’t it fun ?!

Conclusion

Innovation is all about creating new stuff from existing parts.

I believe that innovation can be a technical process rather then a magic. If you can modulate and structure it – it’s half of the way.

Nothing here is a rocket science, it is just aimed to present the way I think when I’m in a mood of inventing something new.

If you liked it, great. If not, why are you still reading ????