Wharton Top Thirty Innovations Serve Six Basic Human Needs 220.0

At its barest essence, innovation means bringing something new to market successfully.

On February 18, 2009, Knowledge at Wharton, of the U Penn (Image at left has link.), in cooperation with Nightly Business Report of the PBS published the findings of a survey that identified the top innovations in A World Transformed: What are the Top 30 Innovations of the Past 30 Years?

This SYNTHESiST post seeks to relate this list of Top 30 innovations with the underlying human needs given that the two basic tools of ‘bringing-to-market,’ indeed, start with human needs.

Two elements of bringing-to-market. The Top 30 innovations, therefore, given great product development and marketing – the two elements of bringing-to-market, reflect the priority of underlying human needs.

In identifying this relationship, we are able to therefore identify great spaces for continued innovation – new things for commercialization.

• Successful product developments extracts the elements of these needs and specifies them for production via statistical processes like factor and conjoint analysis and other methods quality function deployment (QFD) and Taguchi loss function.
• Good marketing sets the product apart from competition through better features, experiences or emotional attachments – standard methods for positioning and differentiation.

Invention and paradigm shift. The Top 30 innovations, by definition, are radical and even, with the Internet, created a paradigm shift.

The Wharton study counted the Internet as an innovation from 1979. This is somewhat arguable as the roots of Internet were invented earlier to serve as alternative, distributed security communications net in case foreign missiles destroy the US military command-and-control center. Indeed, it was only in the 1990s when the decision was made to give pubic access to this Net beyond the University-based nodes.

Note that security (with safety) is among the basic human needs but is typically a public good provided by governments. Thus, the original Net was invented by the government.

The related innovation of HTML by Tim Berners-Lee and consequently of the the browser (Marc Andressen was first commercially successful with Netscape in 1995) created the World Wide Web that enabled the paradigm shift.

Enablers, component technologies and sub-systems (13/30). Seven out of thirty (7/30) of the Top 30 innovations like microprocessors, the icons (GUI), fiber optics, LCD, LED, media file compression, and flash memory are enabling basic component technologies that facilitated the rest of the consumer-oriented innovations.

The next five out of thirty (6/30) innovations like the personal computers, GPS systems, digital photography, RFID, open source software and freeware, and bar coding are enabling intermediate module technologies and sub-systems that can be commercial products by themselves but can also comprise parts of bigger systems.

Human needs served. The balance of 17/30 represent innovations that directly apply to human needs and commercially marketed as final products.

• Health (5/17). Health comes out as the basic human need most represented in the Top 30 innovations list with DNA test and sequencing, MRI, laparoscopy, stents and retroviral AIDS treatment.

  Coming after the human need of security represented by the Internet itself, this is not surprising given the huge importance and its large proportion in the total American economy.

• Communications (4/17). The social need for communications is well represented in the Top 30 innovations list with World Wide Web, mobile phones, email, and social media. Note that the underlying security need served wit the Internet is also about communications.
• Commerce (4/17). Making money from commercial transactions has been a time-proven river from which to dip for revenues. Office software, e-commerce, microfinance and ATMs networks were voted as Top 30 innovations in the last 30 years.
• Energy (3/17). As with the industry sector perpetually at the top of the Fortune 500, energy is well represented in the Top 30 innovations with 3/30 in photovoltaic energy, wind turbines and biofuels.
• Food (1/17). Food, the most basic of human needs, is represented in the Top 30 innovations by genetically modified plants.

In summary. Together with enabling component and sub-system technologies that were invented to serve one of he basic human needs, security, the five other basic human needs served by the Top 30 innovations are health, communications, commerce, energy and food.

This five basic human needs with security, I believe, will always comprise the biggest spaces for innovation in the future.