Innovation

Innovation is a new idea, or more-effective device or process. Innovation can be viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, or business models that are readily available to markets, governments and society. The term "innovation" can be defined as something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society.

While a novel device is often described as an innovation, in economics, management science, and other fields of practice and analysis, innovation is generally considered to be the result of a process that brings together various novel ideas in a way that they have an impact on society.

Inter-disciplinary views

Business and economics

In business and economics, innovation can be a catalyst to growth. With rapid advancements in transportation and communications over the past few decades, the old world concepts of factor endowments and comparative advantage which focused on an area’s unique inputs are outmoded for today’s global economy. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, who contributed greatly to the study of innovation economics, argued that industries must incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, that is innovate with better or more effective processes and products, as well as market distribution, such as the connection from the craft shop to factory. He famously asserted that “creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism”. In addition, entrepreneurs continuously look for better ways to satisfy their consumer base with improved quality, durability, service, and price which come to fruition in innovation with advanced technologies and organizational strategies.

Innovation (signal processing)

In time series analysis (or forecasting) — as conducted in statistics, signal processing, and many other fields — the innovation is the difference between the observed value of a variable at time t and the optimal forecast of that value based on information available prior to time t. If the forecasting method is working correctly successive innovations are uncorrelated with each other, i.e., constitute a white noise time series. Thus it can be said that the innovation time series is obtained from the measurement time series by a process of 'whitening', or removing the predictable component. The use of the term innovation in the sense described here is due to Hendrik Bode and Claude Shannon (1950) in their discussion of the Wiener filter problem, although the notion was already implicit in the work of Kolmogorov.

See also

References

Innovation (magazine)

Innovation is a subscription-based magazine, compiling recent developments in the area of research in Singapore and globally. The format and style is designed to be accessible to an "educated layperson", and also includes relevant fields such as patenting. The magazine is jointly published by the National University of Singapore and World Scientific.

To date, local Singaporean companies such as the Defence, Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) and academia have been featured in the magazine.

Key Editorial Columns

Aside from the cover story, each magazine generally has the following columns:

Instant

An instant is an infinitesimal moment in time, a moment whose passage is instantaneous.

The continuous nature of time and its infinite divisibility was addressed by Aristotle in his Physics, where he wrote on Zeno's paradoxes. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was still seeking to define the exact nature of an instant thousands of years later.

In physics, a theoretical lower-bound unit of time called the Planck time has been proposed, that being the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length. The Planck time is theorized to be the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible, roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as they are understood today, for times less than one Planck time apart, one can neither measure nor detect any change. It is therefore physically impossible, with current technology, to determine if any action exists that causes a reaction in "an instant", rather than a reaction occurring after an interval of time too short to observe or measure.

Instant (album)

Instant is a double compact disc by the Dutch experimental post-punk band The Ex in conjunction with many guest musicians, notably members of Holland's Instant Composers Pool for whom the album is partially named (the Dutch term for "free improvisation" literally translates to "instant composition"). Though the entire album could have fit onto one 70-minute CD, the band formatted it for a briefer listening experience with each of Instant's 35-minute discs containing 16 short tracks. The album's 32 tracks feature shifting duos and trios of musicians performing on a wide array of conventional (electric guitars, reeds, brass, etc) and non-conventional (e.g., toffee-tin bass) instruments. The Ex had featured numerous guests on previous albums, but Instant was the band's first album of entirely instrumental music and improvised music.

Tracklist

Disc 1

Devicescape

Devicescape develops software for wireless networking, based on the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard and other network protocols. Founded in 2001 as Instant802 Networks, the company was renamed in January 2005. Devicescape is a venture backed private company.

Devicescape provides embedded software for wireless client devices, and a range of services which assist devices in connecting to Wi-Fi networks.

Corporate history

Instant802 Networks was founded in the end of 2000 by Eduardo de-Castro and Roy Petruschka, in San-Francisco. Simon Barber had joined as a third founder a few months after company incorporation. In 2004 the company began development of packaged software products, including security for emerging devices and complete access point packages. The software was used in devices ranging from LCD projectors, televisions and digital video recorders to PDAs and SOHO access points. In addition the company created a monitoring software product for wireless LANs that has been used by NTT BroadbandPlatform.