Do the best innovation (Li Kaifu)

Best Innovation (13:48:49)

(From)Http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_475b3d560100dnjy.html

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I have mentioned in my book "Be the best myself" that "innovation is important, but useful innovation is more important ". In this age of rapid technological development, everyone is talking about innovation. But what is the best innovation? What is a useful innovation that can truly change people's lives? How can a person and an enterprise get the motivation for continuous innovation and increase their comprehensive strength in innovation, especially in valuable innovation?

1. What is the best innovation?

Many people only regard innovation as an innovation in the field of science and technology. In fact, there are many kinds of innovations. Innovation can be a novel and effective business model, a new management model, or a ground-breaking practice in the field of literature and art, it can even be a fresh and interesting idea in home life ...... Simply put, innovation is a creative activity that is generated by a novel idea on the basis of knowledge accumulation, life, and work practices. It is useful to people and is feasible at the same time.

Therefore, novelty, usefulness, and feasibility are three major elements of innovation.

Novelty is an essential element of innovation. However, novelty does not mean that every innovation is a groundbreaking revolution, or a complete disruption to the existing knowledge field. Theoretical Achievements with revolutionary significance like the theory of relativity are indeed a kind of innovation, but in fact most of the innovations are in a small scope, using novel ways of thinking, we can observe and solve the problem from the perspective that our predecessors did not pay attention. This novel way of thinking is not unprecedented, but may be borrowed from other fields. Such innovation is closer to our lives, and its value cannot be underestimated.

For example, the microwave oven was invented by American scientist Spencer. He was originally an expert in the field of electronic tube technology. During World War II, Spencer accidentally found that the chocolate in his pocket would melt due to the proximity to the control. This seemingly unexpected thing reminds Spencer that, if the microwave heating principle of the control can be applied to the home, can we use a similar device to achieve rapid food heating? Microwave Oven was born by such an accident. Apart from admiring Spencer's sensitive technical insights and leaping ways of thinking, we should also think that simply by applying the experience in one field to another unrelated field, it is entirely possible to get an outstanding idea and complete a great innovation. We can call this innovation experience-transfer innovation.

For example, the principle of a self-baking toaster for a household is very simple. It is a pot that can hold flour and water, a mixer that automatically stir flour, and a baking furnace with a timer device. Cookers, bleners, timers, and heating and baking electric furnaces have nothing to do with each of these things, when Panasonic engineers combined these seemingly simple devices, an innovative home appliance was born. We can call this innovation a cross-domain combination innovation.

Many people will think that the most important element of innovation is novelty, but I think the practical value of innovation should be more important. I once had a novel but less practical experience of innovation. When I was working in SGI, I once led the development of a 3D browser product. From the product itself, or from the technical point of view, almost everyone thinks this is a very cool product. Imagine accessing the Internet in a 3D view, like playing a game, linking a website to another website is as lifelike as walking from one room to another. At that time, what a creative product it is! But unfortunately, such products are not developed based on user needs. In fact, when people access a webpage, they are most concerned with the richness of Information and the efficiency of information retrieval. A three-dimensional view cannot bring more information to users, it will seriously impede the efficient transmission of information and make it impossible for users to obtain the most valuable information in the shortest time. Such an innovation that is useless to users can only end with failure.

Therefore, I think that practical value is the purpose of innovation. I deeply believe that "demand is the mother of innovation. Many amazing innovations come from actual needs, and the innovations that solve the needs must be valuable. For example, Yuan Longping experienced a food famine around 1960, so he decided to use agricultural science and technology to combat hunger. In this case, he successfully cultivated High-Yield Hybrid Rice, solving the problem of 1/5 of the world's population. As mentioned above, the Matsushita toaster was invented by Japanese women who started to work abroad and did not have time to cook traditional breakfast, however, the husbands still expect the new breakfast to be invented under the "need.

The third element of innovation is feasibility. Any innovation should take into account the implementation issues under the existing conditions. If all the resources and conditions that can be used cannot be used to make an innovation a reality, a novel and beautiful idea can only be a castle in the air. We still use the toaster as an example. If we use the shoot method to develop requirements for the toaster, for example: I want a machine that can cook, stir-fry, sweep, fl, do homework, and write papers ...... Can such idea become a reality in the short term? If there is no feasible idea under the existing conditions, it will only waste the innovator's time and energy. Another example is my doctoral thesis. At that time, this was an important scientific research result and was invented as the first continuous speech recognition system for non-specific persons in the world. From a novel perspective, this innovation can score 99 points. Speech recognition is also very useful. It can be used in the "sci-fi" products such as voice control appliances, dictation and typing, human-computer communication, and automatic translator. It can also score 99 points in practicality. However, I did my research in the lab when I was doing my thesis. I did not expect that such an innovation would encounter various "feasibility" Problems in the real environment, such as noise processing problems, how to separate all kinds of speech at the same time, the microphone is too far away, and it is inevitable to identify errors. Because of these problems, the feasibility of this innovation can only reach 59 points. Until today, the popularization of this innovation remains to be addressed by more researchers.

The value of innovation depends on the comprehensive performance of an innovation in novelty, usefulness, and feasibility. The best innovations are innovative ideas that are most useful to people's work and life and can be realized in real life. Correspondingly, a good innovator should be a person who has both novel ideas and understands the needs of users and can turn creativity into reality through practice. The first is like a scientist, the second is like a market engineer, and the third is like an engineer. Once these three qualities are combined, making the best innovations is no longer a daunting goal.

2. New Role of Innovation in the 21st Century

Throughout the history of human civilization, innovation plays very different roles. Here, let's review the history of communication technology.

It is said that more than 5000 years ago, ancient Egyptian people used pigeons to deliver letters. Before October 4000, from the beginning of China's Business Week, beacon fire was a very effective means to deliver War warnings. Before December 31, 2500, the ancient Persian people established a postal station for sending messages by email with a letter of confidence. More than 300 years ago, in the middle of the 17th century, France set up a mail box in the streets of Paris, showing the prototype of stamps. 100 years ago, in 1840, the first modern stamp was born in Britain. It can be seen that before the industrial revolution, the innovation of communication technology was very slow in the time process, and the replacement was carried out in the unit of Millennium and Centennial.

With the completion of the 19th century industrial revolution and the rapid development of science and technology, new and efficient communication technologies have emerged at an unprecedented speed. In 1832, the telegraph was born. In 1850, the first submarine cable was set up between Britain and France. In 1875, Bell invented the phone number. In October 1895, markeni implemented remote wireless communication through wireless means. In 1925, TV was invented, and television broadcasting soon became popular. In 1963, the United States and Japan successfully used satellites for active relay communications across the Pacific Ocean. The earliest mobile phone and email appeared in 1970s. In the middle and late 1980s S, mobile phones appeared in people's field of view. Every 10 to 20 years, communication technology has an important innovation. In the past 20 years, Internet and mobile phone communication have rapidly developed and popularized around the world. Regardless of the calculation, the innovation speed in the communication field in the past 100 years has been significantly higher than that before the industrial revolution, one by one innovation that changes the face of human life appears in front of people every several years, every year, or even every month. People in the 21st century are used to the fact that, in the face of rapid technological innovation, any vision of the future may become a reality in the short term due to an innovative tomorrow.

In addition to shorter cycles and more frequent updates, innovation has become more applied in the 21st century. If ancient innovations were not so important to people's lives, almost every valuable innovation in the 21st century may rapidly and effectively change one aspect of people's lives. In the past, more inventions and discoveries were based on a new understanding of nature. Today, most innovations aim to solve practical problems encountered in real life, such as the invention of personal computers, internet inventions and so on, all of which have changed people's lifestyles to the greatest extent possible.

In the 21st century, innovation is the only sustainable enterprise competitiveness, and the competition caused by innovation is becoming increasingly fierce. More and more enterprises have realized that "useful" but non-innovative products are easily copied in today's fierce competition. Only innovations can increase the differentiated features of products, only by using new technologies that are difficult to replicate, or using patent protection and other means to increase the intellectual assets of enterprises can they seize the lead in the market and have a truly sustainable competitive advantage. Therefore, a 21 st century high-tech enterprise must constantly innovate to maintain its competitiveness and vitality. For example, several years after Google launched a PageRank-based text web page search, many other companies have achieved similar technologies. In this situation, Google continues its R & D and integrated search, allowing search results to include text and other diversified information, such as videos, images, news, and weather. Just a few months after Google launched its first map that allows users to drag and drop, many other companies made similar products, So Google launched Google's Google Earth, allowing people to browse satellite maps in an approximate three-dimensional way.

Compared with the traditional high-tech industry in the past, we will find that innovation in the 21 st century high-tech industry is faster and more diversified. For example, Boeing and Airbus represent traditional high-tech industries in the civil aviation field. The innovation period is about ten years, and the difference is often not great, in the new Internet industry, new products may be launched in a few months, and they are often revolutionary.

In the 21st century, innovation has become an inseparable part of our lives. Enterprises and individuals cannot ignore the influence of innovation on our work and life. Only by embracing innovation can we integrate into this new age and better meet the challenges.

3. How to Make the best innovation?

Nothing is more exciting than walking on the road to innovation. But how can we continue to get the best innovations? We suggest you think about and practice the following five innovative principles:

• Insights into the future
• Break conventions
• Pursuing simplicity
• People-oriented
• Bear risks

Understanding the future requires innovators to understand the future user needs, so as to develop products or technologies suitable for the future. To gain insight into the future, although users should be valued, they should not be able to fully listen to the user's opinions, because users cannot have enough foresight or fully understand the development rules of technology. Therefore, Innovators need to have insights into the future and be able to make correct predictions and judgments for the future based on current market conditions and user needs and the laws of technological development. This is like playing football. A good player wants to reach the place where the ball is to be reached, rather than the current position of the ball. At the early stage of the development of the Internet, users did not accurately propose the requirements for search engines, because they were used to using classification directories to find their desired web pages. At that time, users may not know what a search engine is, whether they really need such a function, or whether it is technically feasible. However, innovators who have insights into the future can speculate: as the number of web pages continues to grow, one day, the category directory will not be able to better accommodate more new web pages. At this time, innovators will come to the fore of users, and their future user needs will surely turn to a more convenient way than category directory browsing. For example, can users use any keyword to query and obtain webpage results? Technically, can I automatically create indexes for massive web pages and obtain the best sorting results? The founder of Google understands the potential needs of this user and is devoted to the development of search technology. When users' demand for online search becomes more and more obvious, the search engine represented by Google naturally goes to the front-end, achieving great success and directly driving the rise of the online advertising industry.

The second criterion for the best innovation is to break the conventions. In fact, the biggest obstacle to innovation is the inability to break away from the inherent mindset or framework of thinking and always turn around in the existing methods and methods. If you cannot break the conventions, no matter how clearly you understand the needs of future users, innovators cannot come up with the most effective and innovative solutions. An example of failing to break the conventions is that when an inventor invented a car, he still wanted to operate the car with the manipulation of the carriage. As a result, instead of using the steering wheel, he planned to adjust the direction of the car with the reins! In the history of science and technology development, there are countless examples of valuable innovation by breaking the conventions. When wireless communication was just invented, almost everyone agreed that the ultimate goal of the evolution of this technology was that everyone would have a wireless communication device that could become a "wireless" phone. However, under the current technical conditions, wireless communication devices were divided into two parts: wireless transmitters were bulky and expensive, but wireless receivers were small and cheap. Therefore, a long-term plan is required to achieve this ultimate goal. At this time, an innovator who broke the conventions thought whether it was possible to separate the transmitter from the receiver so that everyone had a very cheap receiver to receive the signal from a center transmitter. In this way, broadcast was born as the first mass communication method that relied on radio technology.

Pursuing simplicity is also the only way to innovation. In many cases, complex things are not necessarily effective. Only the simplest design and combination can play the most effective role. At the beginning of the search engine, the researchers found that if users enter more words during the search, the search results would be much more accurate. Is there any way to prompt the user to enter more words? At that time, some people thought, could we build an intelligent Q & A system to guide users to raise long-standing questions? However, the feasibility of this solution will face many challenges. Some people think that we can tell the user whether to enter a longer sentence or suggest a longer search term based on the user's input? However, this seems to interfere with the user. Finally, a technician came up with the simplest and most effective idea: to increase the length of the search box by half. As a result, when you see a long search box, you are more likely to enter more words. Today, the long search box on the search engine is like this.

People-oriented is the key to sustainable innovation. 21 st century talents are the most important. In an ordinary factory in the 19th century, the productivity of the most competent workers is at most doubled compared with that of ordinary workers. However, in the 21 st century it enterprises and R & D institutions, one of the most creative R & D personnel is compared with an ordinary engineer, however, their productivity may differ by dozens of times, hundreds or even thousands of times. If your company is able to attract, use hundreds or thousands of Talented Innovators, it will surely stand out in the most competitive environment. To attract and retain talents, we need to create the best working environment for talents, give them the greatest trust, and grant them sufficient permissions. At Google, every engineer can use 20% of his work time to do what he is most passionate about. This is an effective way to build a bottom-up innovation atmosphere. In fact, many of Google's innovative products were first born in 20% of the time. It is precisely because of the many initiatives that encourage innovation that Google has been maintaining technical advantages in the Internet field for more than 10 years, constantly improve the user experience of Internet users with the best innovations.

Being at risk is also an important part of the innovation process. Any innovation is risky. In the process of innovation, we must treat failure with a correct attitude. Failure is not a punishment for us, but a best learning opportunity. When Edison invented the lightbulb, it was successful after 6000 failures. At Google, many innovative jobs started in 20%, but most of them failed. Without these failures, it is impossible for a successful innovation to stand out. Without the ability to accept and take risks, it is impossible to create an environment that truly encourages innovation. When I was in charge of research, my supervisor once told me that if you succeed in every project, you actually fail. Because you are not doing research, but avoiding risks. You only choose projects that are stable and have no innovation value.

4. How to Cultivate innovation?

Finally, for individuals, especially those eager for innovation and success, how can they cultivate their own quality and abilities in innovation?

My first suggestion is to know what you want to learn. For example, when a middle school student learns the Triangle Area Theorem, everyone may recite the base multiplied by the height divided by the two formula. However, apart from the formula, smart students will remember how this formula is deduced and why the Triangle Area is calculated in this way. Only by understanding the principles behind knowledge can we take the opposite three in the face of new problems, so that we can flexibly put the knowledge we have into practice when we need innovation.

My second suggestion is to try to think from different perspectives when encountering problems. A good example is the instant sticker invention. A researcher at 3 M Company in the United States once tried to invent a very strong adhesive force, but for various reasons, he failed, the experiment only produces a liquid with poor adhesion and cannot be used as glue at all. However, after a while, he found that people had such a requirement: to paste the note or book sign on the table or on the wall, when necessary, you can reveal it at any time-can the liquid with poor adhesion found by him come in handy? In this way, because of different perspectives, a dangerous and obsolete technology has contributed to the invention of "instant Stickers.

The third suggestion is to ask more questions for a deeper understanding. When I was studying the index, my daughter did not understand what the index was, nor did she believe what the index was for in real life. She asked me. I instruct her to calculate bank deposits. For example, if the annual interest rate is 100 for deposit of 10% yuan, what is your deposit 10 years later? Through such a calculation, she finally realized that the original exponential knowledge is closely related to daily life. Therefore, you can learn useful knowledge only when you do not understand it.

The fourth suggestion is hands-on practice. No innovation can be imagined out of thin air. Only by hands-on can you understand the feasibility of a idea and turn innovation into reality. I remember when I was a child, my father asked the children to answer the following question: 6 matches are combined into four normal triangles of the same size. Through hands-on practice, we have found the correct answer. This practice makes me deeply aware of the relevant geometric and spatial knowledge, and also trains me to use new ideas to solve problems.

The fifth suggestion is to follow your interests and hobbies. Only what you really like can you do the best. At Google, we would rather let employees do a passionate project than force employees to do things they are not interested in because of the urgency and importance of the project.

 

Innovation is not difficult in an educational environment that encourages exploration, supports interest, and attaches importance to practice. As long as you cultivate a flexible mind and solid basic skills, you can combine the characteristics of scientists, market personnel, and engineers and love your work, you will surely be able to make the most innovative, useful, and feasible innovations!

Note: This article is from one of my lectures-the conversation program we recorded on CCTV, in this special class, I have discussed the topic of innovation with nine students from different schools. To view the transcript and video, please go to our learning network and click《Let's talk about innovative thinking by Dr. Li.