Innovation, Ict and Sustainable Development

Innovation, ICT and sustainable development

How innovation takes place?

First of all we must make the difference between innovation and invention. According to Merton Flemings, invention is a focused application of the human mind to the world that yields an original creation with practical use. If you make an invention you could patent it, nevertheless, a patent is not necessary to come from and invention. If invention is the original creation, innovation is the work to put all these inventions into a widespread sense, a wide usage range, thanks to a creative thinking, investment, and marketing, innovation is to make and idea tangible, is bringing to reality something that once only exists in someone’s mind.

We could say that the invention is the beginning of the large chain which brings someone’s idea to a market product ready for the consumers. As Einstein always said “imagination is more important than knowledge”.

Although rich countries have a lot of investment in R&D in order to achieve new products and technologies, we can see three different national ways for poor countries to innovation and invention in order to be richer:

Copycat. Nations not only imitates but also improve what they are copying. Clear examples are the US after the Industrial Revolution, they took all they knowledge from France and England in order to begin his own industrial revolution. Furthermore, we can talk about Japan or Korea who copy the manufactures of US but with a low cost and nowadays we have China who is copying.

Piggybacker. Nations that are behind a rich one and make all the manufacture and service works at a very low cost. One example should be India, with telecommunications technologies and software, is replacing the US software manufacture

Leapfrog. Nations that as soon as they realised that they aren’t in the good direction, change the policies or achieving news results. One example is Finland that skipped from the soviet influence to arise as one of the...