Let's innovate

Each time when politicians or economists speak about the future of the economy, you can be almost 100% sure that they will use the word innovation.

What is innovation?

Let me quote the wikipedia entry for innovation:

Innovation in its modern meaning is "a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". Innovation is often also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs...

Why we can all innovate

To innovate we don't need an R&D department. We don't need much funds. Everybody can innovate. The only thing we need is creativity.

How the complexity of the world can offer huge potential for innovation

Many think that innovation automatically means inventing new products or services. It is actually very difficult and expensive to create a completely new product and to bring it to market. The easiest and most successful innovation comes from taking existing things and to combine them together to create something new and better.

When we look back at the history of human kind, when people settled the west of what is today the USA, they were on their own. They had to build their houses, tend their fields, defend against indians, dig pits for their water supply, sew their own clothes. They needed a big variety of knowledge and skills to survive.

Today we have delegated big parts of these tasks to other people. We have restaurants that prepare us food, shops that provide us with everything, we buy houses from constructors and we often don't even know how to grow tomatoes ourselves. We have specialised a lot we have become very good in a very restricted field.

How can this be a potential for innovation?

We have not only specialised in the professional field, we have done the same with our interests and our time on the internet. There are millions of websites available on the internet but most of us only use about 10 to 20 sites. In this community, we have become very good at creating content on a blockchain but there are so many people out there that have no idea about blockchain. They ignore that you can actually get paid to create content and that you can reward others for their content.

The innovation comes if we step outside of what we are familiar with. If we open our mind for another community and bring them the knowledge of what we know, we are actually innovating. We merge two different knowledges together to make something better.

A great example for innovation

Maybe you are familiar with the CTP community on steem/hive. The founder @jongolson was into affiliate marketing for many years. Because he is very open minded and was searching for new opportunities, he discovered this blockchain based content creation. He saw that this type of content creation could actually help his community of affiliate marketers. He brought both communities together to create something better. Even if he didn't create his community, the fact of transfering knowledge between communities is already innovation. This type of innovation is within the possibilities of everyone among us.

We can all be innovators. We simply have to go outside of our confort zone and discover new things, new communities, new projects. With a bit of creativity, we can combine different skills together and create something new and better.

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