Innovation – a profitable business
Recession and Innovation
With a recession often comes innovation. Second hand stores become profitable, second hand motor dealerships thrive and workers laid off need to learn new skill sets. I’m in the computer industry, not IT. I leave IT for programmers and people making their fortunes out of innovation through the use of data exchange, data banks and communication networks.
Sinclair ZX80 – Attribute: By Daniel Ryde, Skövde – Originally from the Swedish Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0
I think to a large degree IT is a word used broadly and incorrectly. A person fixing computers is not IT, he is in the repair or service business. Because the plumber fixed your computer does not put him/her into IT, he/she is still a repairman. The plumber then finds a way to control the geyser so it uses less electricity when the electrical element is on, in so doing lowering the averaging out of your domestic electricity draw then he becomes an engineer. He uses the information he gets from one house and then applies it to a hundred homes, saving thousands of dollars – now he is becoming innovative. He writes a program to control the current using Kirchhoff’s Law, logs the data extracted from these 100 homes and now because he is using the information to his own benefit (or ours) i.e. managing his data I would put him in the IT sector.
What's your title?
The above point is strictly moot because I don’t care what people call themselves – it’s stressed rather that here we have a plumber that uses his knowledge and subsequent gaining of knowledge in technology to reduce running costs to 100 homes. How many plumbers go to work daily thinking about that exact same scenario – in most cases it’s a pipe dream, he or she has no interest in reducing running costs as long as the home owner pays his bills. Steve Jobs was an extraordinary man yet he had a simple vision – a computer for everyone. Bill Gates had the same vision. IBM didn’t share that vision, although they are still one of the most successful companies around.
Forbes List of Innovational Companies
Innovational products or services are often the result of trying to make things easier and hopefully less costly for the user. A company without innovation may end up dead in the water because they aren’t offering anything different to the next company. What makes one second hand car dealership more profitable than another? A company only generating profits through sales often has one or two highly innovative sales personnel. We may call them lateral thinkers. Ever note how staff working for a company selling the same stuff day in and day out lose focus and morale is usually bad. What are our top innovative companies in the world today. Thanks to the Forbes listing the results may or may not surprise you.
When one continues to dream or think about working for a company that is known to be overwhelmingly innovative most of us may set our sights on companies such as 3M, LG, Samsung, Sony but yet according to Forbes the companies that lead the field are for starters, Salesforce.com, a provider of enterprise cloud computing applications and in second place, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Alexion), a biopharmaceutical company that provides life-transforming therapeutic products for patients with rare disorders. With technology in most cases being driven by electronics one often forgets that the pharmaceuticals industry is a mammoth alongside petro-chemicals, mining and agriculture. A sure bet that that these are profitable ventures to get into – if one had the right schooling and mentoring.
In third place, not surprisingly is Amazon.com. Fourth, surprisingly is Red Hat. Now you all thought that Linux was gone. Interesting fact, an IT guru told me that Linux was done and dusted. Yet don’t most web hosts use Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP more commonly known as LAMP? Red Hat’s position here shines a light on this ridiculous claim. In 5th position is Baidu an international language search engine in China. To see all the entries go here.
Nice to see ARM listed in 10th position. UK firm, believed to be so strong because Intel decided not to assist them with 286 processors for the Acorn Computer. Like old rivals Coke and Pepsi, this was a powerful boost for ARM to restrategise and become Intel’s nemesis in many ways.
To jump through a few: Infosys (recently a very good article in Time Magazine) – India lies in 19th position. Time magazine has something similar here.
Here's some more...
- 21st – Starbucks
- 24th – Google
- 26th – Apple
- 29th – Tata Consultancy (India)
- 45th – Nintendo (Japan)
- 61st – Unilever NV (Netherlands)
- 84th – Atlas Copco
- 90th – General Electric
The above I found of interest but do go to the Forbes list. What is evident is the amount of companies producing pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. Where do we at Parts-Ring feel innovation is most required and where are we heading?
New Technology or Old stuff and New casings
It’s oft been told that hardware technology drives the software. Cloud computing is driven by our current desire to own tablets, cell phones and ‘share the cloud’ which may be in the form of storage or apps. I’m not a big lover of this idea due to the security problems now and to a greater degree when it becomes even more popular. Technology has also become a trend-setting industry where users are buying devices more for their cosmetic appeal than actual functionality. Remember PDA devices Trio and US Robotics in 1999 – 2002? At risk of being called totally dysfunctional what ever did happen to Trio – it carried hardware to run as a GPS, a telephone or communicator, calculator – all those things now associated with Smartphones. Maybe we aren’t as smart as what we think. 99% of the people I know are buying hardware for what it looks like and keeping up with the Jones’s. 100% to the marketing gurus behind these ventures. Is this technology changing people’s lives. Oh no, this technology has been around for a minimum of ten years already and it’s fuelled by the financial returns. The race should be on to find a cure for diabetes and cancer and the millions of other diseases out there – Malaria and Diarrhoea – both with deadly consequences can be prevented but our celebrities bounce around Haiti and AIDS. In many cases sadly there is no cure – it can be controlled however because a cure means no further remuneration.
The Dreamliner has been grounded because of a battery problem. Remember the Sony recall, also a battery problem. Part of the syllabus for any marine engineer 50 years back was accumulators – Lead Acid, NIFE and what ever else was on the market in those days. Ni-Cads bounced into favour in the 70s and 80s, LI-ION in the 90s and is still around today. Alkaline cells have been around since Noah took his Ark on it’s first voyage. We are moving at a very slow pace in this regard. Most of the top companies are pharmaceuticals, IT, cosmetics, Medicare – very few on renewable energy and cheap housing. So are the top innovation companies only listed because of their ground breaking money making capacity? I was surprised not to see 3M listed. I was not surprised to see Samsung or LG not listed. I think it’s great to be able to control all your appliances through a central hub but that’s not innovation. Where is Sir Clive Sinclair now that we need him?
I live in a country (RSA) where informal houses are popping up faster than we change our underwear. The public transport sector is a disaster. There is no innovation in government. There is no innovation because we also lack the vision to understand. Our top politicians in this regard are chiefly Indian – they have the acumen and vision. They therefore lack the tools needed to explore their ideas. Likewise the Afrikaner with his ‘Farmer always makes a plan’ mentality. On the other side we have the Australians, indeed a highly innovative bunch. In the USA President Obama is taking a stand against the outsourcing of work which is causing a lack of innovation on his own shores. He stands behind ‘Mythbusters’, Science and Mathematics. The Popular Mechanics magazine should be made compulsory reading in schools.
Foundation of Innovation
Is there a Foundation which assists pupils, students, engineers and dreamers to put their far-fetched ideas into practice? Gosh, thousands. Google it.
Our Parts-Ring wishlist:
Batteries – the race is on with regards to rare earth elements yet water can be used as a fuel. Wiki: China had produced over 95% of the world’s rare earth supply, mostly in Inner Mongolia
Building – clay bricks are very popular. They are abundant. They are expensive. Sign up to Smart Planet. How about e-inventing the clay brick?
Sun's Energy
Using sun’s energy – are our solar fed photovoltaic panels cheap enough? Not at all – are there alternatives? Must be. If thermal panels are more efficient (and cheaper) than PV panels is there a way to convert this heat into electrical energy. Must be. So off to my most favorite place on Sundays: How Stuff Works or more to the point, ‘how to get heat after the sun has gone down‘. Clever people, these Spanish.
Membrane Pump Theory
Moving with the times, why are we so slow to make big changes? Well I have always been intrigued by biochemist Gilbert.N. Ling’s (PhD) theories or rather his disproving of the Membrane Pump Theory which medical students are still taught today – one link is here. Many links to his works to be found here. I am in no way near the same league as Mr. Ling but his work and theories gives us food for thought. Many years back whom would have thought that scientists would split the atom. Many scientists said it could not be done. So be sceptic when it comes to science. Like a true scientist Mr. Ling does not always believe what others hold to be plausible. We are in the same position when it comes to solar energy and PV Panels. Over the last 40 years solar panels have gradually come down in price but it still remains exhorbitantly expensive.Why do we continue taking this route when other paths are also available for us to explore?
Lemmings to the Rescue
MIT has possibly the brightest young students in the universe when it comes to engineering. We are also lemmings, not because we run after the same prize but because we follow the same path. MIT engineers are often out of box thinkers, yes I give many learning institutions credit here as well, German engineering likewise. Have we run out of ideas? We have water and we have salt. Sea water to be precise.
- Water can burn: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/canWaterBurn.php – QUESTION: how much power from the frequency generator would be required to produce enough energy to be useful?
- Here, like Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin was by chance. No matter how crazy this entire experiment may sound it is an interesting variant to what we as lemmings have been following.
- Maybe in years to come John Kanzius will also go down in the annuls of history like Fleming and Curie. Complete right up found here. Note chlorine gas (NaCl) and efficiency factor.
Sadly Mr. Kanzius passed away in 2009. His main footprint was in cancer research and using radio waves to kill cancer cells. What I like about this man is the fact that he was just one of us – many readers of Parts-Ring are amateur HAMs, hopefully also innovative and have a thirst for new ideas and dare I say it, be a first.
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