Innovation comes in all shapes and sizes and defines an era today. Fields across all industries have probably been touched by this trend, for without which they are as good as stuck in the Stone Age. These days, it’s easy to hear “innovation” attached to big-wig terms like “technological” and “scientific” but the truth is, even the most random thing you can spot in your room can be considered an innovation. If you try to guess how they came about, you could probably trace it to some similar but outdated ancestor; take for instance: portable lighting went from candles to oil lamps to flashlights while the simple chair went from wooden to ornate to wheeled and swiveling. Let’s admit it: props to the guy who challenged stationary furniture and gave us the gift of the execuglide (sniglet meaning "to propel oneself about an office without getting up from the chair")[1]. But that’s what an innovator does – create something totally new or tweak an existing thing to take it a step further so that what comes out is something more useful, more helpful or at least more pretty-looking than the original.
Unfortunately, if you were an innovator, you could find that you and your product are just one and the same thing especially to a big, commercial market (does anybody know who invented the swivel chair? Check it out, he turned out to be quite an interesting fellow). While a successful innovation means more users and more users mean a bigger ego boost and/or paycheck for your ingenuity, you might have to wallow in the pool of the underappreciated until you found a revolutionary company or win the Nobel Prize or something. After all, from the point of view of consumers, it is really easier to see nothing more than the end product, that which we directly consume and interact with.
However, it is worth remembering that each thing we buy, whether a simply broomstick or a complex music player, was created by someone who put careful thought and hard work in bringing it to us. Society will always have more to need and innovators, by job description, will be a couple of steps ahead to meet them in new and better ways. Look at your grandparents then look at us: the hands of innovators did much to give us an experience so different that a generous percentage of things they used are but antique and novelty to us. So let’s celebrate the innovators we know and love as well as the underdogs who could use some knowing and loving. They have the spark that saw past what was there and the guts to see though making it better even when it involves a vision no one has seen and can thus easily accept. And they turn out to be the foundation of growth of many groups and industries, and we find we both consume and stand on innovation[2]
[1] http://bertc.com/subfour/truth/sniglets.htm
[2] http://innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-innovators-are-never-most-popular.html
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