What does innovation mean in today’s world?

Definitions are crucial for creating utility and building strong structures. If you understand very well, what is it or not, you act more consciously.

Nowadays, everyone talks about innovation, and it has become the buzzword of today’s business world. This leads to a decrease in the word’s meaning. Moreover, we begin to think that it is a useless or overrated concept. Therefore, I try to make a clear definition for innovation as much as I can and try to clarify it by supporting current examples for the purpose of rescuing you from this information confusion.

Dealing with today’s complex world is getting more important day by day. We must create an innovation-friendly environment to manage quick changes and differentiate ourselves from others. Also, new technologies influence our work life.

Not all novelties are innovative. Moreover, there are few subtleties between innovation and invention.

Thus, these words should not be used interchangeably because they are not equivalent. While invention refers to a device, contrivance, or process which must be unique, innovation means to improve or to replace something because innovation is a process itself. According to the dictionary, inventing means discovering a new thing whereas innovative means using the new idea or method.

As you can see, ​“new” is the keyword for both innovation and invention. But the main difference is that inventors create something completely unique.

On the other hand, some inventions might be innovative at the same time, but they are very rare. For example, iPhone is great innovation we could not consider just like ordinary inventions. It has changed our telephone usage habits completely. Also, I want to specify inventions’ importance because you must know they are important, my goal is not to downplay the importance of inventions.

Innovation is a difficult concept because when you create it there are a lot of external and internal factors in life and technical skills which are used when making invention are not enough for successful and sustainable innovations.

Innovation is an important concept for companies the reason why we hear it so frequently. Innovation refers to progress so if there is no innovation, they cannot stay relevant in the competitive market and they fail.

If you think about how we can do that unfortunately there is no one specific path to innovation. Everybody creates or finds their own way.

Trust yourself and your competencies! A good beginning is half the battle!

(I wrote this article thanks to Akbank Experience Camp’s encouragement. I thank them for their effort.)