Preface: Understanding the power of the ideas makes all the difference. Not matter what your marketplace, innovation will improve the landscape in the future. How can you capitalize on this fact, first, with awareness of how innovation has worked in history.
Where Will Ideas Lead Your Marketplace
Innovation will always be with us. Eureka insights leading to extraordinary developments in civilization have been occurring before the day a group of men built a truly preposterous boat called the Ark. The Ark was a fabulously good idea in it’s time, but so innovative that it seemingly had to draw significant ridicule towards those implementing on the idea. First lesson from history, when innovate ideas seem ridiculous to you, don’t ridicule them. Instead say something like, “that’s a very unique”.
Good idea’s take time to become great ideas. In 1799 Sir George Cayley presented the first design for a fixed-wing aircraft. Numerous attempts were made to implement on Sir George Cayley’s idea during the next century; and on December 17, 1903 in Kitty Hawk, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first controlled, sustained power flight. This led to the development of aircraft into a marketable mode of transportation. There are many acclaimed aviators who competed with Wilbur and Orville. The builders of the Ezekiel Airship for the Reverend Burrell Cannon, claim in 1902 to have made the first flight. Nonetheless, airplanes have developed significantly in since 1903. Today Donald Trump fly’s in a Boeing 757 with a $100m price tag; and if that isn’t surprising; Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal owns a everything gold Airbus A380 with supposed elevators for $500m. Sir George Cayley’s idea in 1799 has followed a path of incredible innovation to today. Where will innovation lead in the next century for your marketplace?
Let’s bring this to a practical level. Most good ideas are the result of building on other ideas or working together to develop ideas collaboratively. Good idea’s take time to develop; and energy to develop. Good ideas lead to great ideas. The idea for the Ark came to Noah for a reason, and he put all his energy into implementing on that idea, just like Wilber and Orville Wright put all their energy into their building and flying an airplane.
Microsoft isn’t a business developed from a flash of insight. Years of incremental tinkering with mainframe computers at high school led Paul Allen and Bill Gates to see what computers could do in a developing world. A vision that developed over time — a computer on every desk and in every home, with Microsoft software, of course. Microsoft was incorporated on April 4, 1975.
In 1977, Ken Olsen is famously quoted as saying “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” An engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957, Ken helped build computerized flight simulators and was an accomplished pilot; a very intelligent entrepreneur and engineer. Ken was named by Fortune Magazine as America’s most successful entrepreneur in 1986; avoiding fancy trappings, he kept a simple office in an old mill building, and when his staff built a modern and lavish office he refused to use it. In 2011 he was listed at #6 on the MIT 150 list of top innovators and ideas from MIT. However when you think about innovators in the computer industry, Olsen probably isn’t a name that comes to mind, but his idea’s where key to developing the technology innovation that spurred Microsoft’s vision.
Microsoft believed in ideas such as flight simulators being so common place that they could be for say young people’s entertainment. Microsoft developed on the ideas that people like Ken Olsen engineered year’s earlier; and they in turn were building on the ideas and purposes of innovative forerunners.
Where will current future ideas lead your marketplace? Consider the innovation in communication (mobile phones) or the agriculture industry (from plow shares to no-till drills) in the recent century; and yes, there is more innovation in process at science laboratories and on CAD software files.
For sure, have a great vision and purpose for your business, and strive to further that purpose and vision everyday; because future innovative ideas are sure to take your marketplace where you may think today impossible.