What is Innovation?

With the advent of mass consumer smartphone technology, phone manufacturers compete aggressively in becoming a more, if not most "innovative" company.

Apple, being the company that brought to the world a game-changing, life-changing revolutionary smartphone, is being challenged aggressively in this area.

How do I define innovation?

In my view, innovation involves having a new concept.  It can be evolved from old ideas.

The most important factor for it to be claimed as real innovative is that competitors try to follow suit and start copying.

Here's one that I consider an innovation.  Back in the days of resistive touch screen smartphones and PDAs, PalmOne was the leader.  However, there was a major issue in all those devices.  When they went out of battery juice, the data will be gone. A restart of the device by recharging will not bring back the data. You can only restore from the desktop.

Figure: The Palm Tunsten T2 with Resistive Screen

To resolve such shortcoming, PalmOne introduced a new way of making the data persistent even when the battery is flat.  They introduced NVFS, "Non Volatile File System" and implemented in their then flagship Palm Tunsten T5 PDA in 2005.

All was good. And competitors saw it succeed and copying began.

And sure enough, Microsoft followed not long later and came out the "Persistent Storage" in their Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system.

And all devices following that have persistent storage that stay beyond battery flat.

This is innovation.

And then in 2007.  Apple introduced a new way of interacting with the phone and the copying begins.

This is innovation.

Now, most recently, a certain smartphone company came out with many new features.

One of them allows you to pause your video by looking away from the screen.  Another one allows you to scroll your screen without touching the screen.  And then they tried to bring back the "stylus" from the dead.

What seem to others as innovation for the above three features do not fall under my definition of innovation.  They obviously did not arouse enough interest or mass market appeal for their competitors to copy these features.

2014 is a year which I really think new innovations are imminent.