K-fx2

Thought Tangents

It’s interesting how random comments throughout the day spark amazing avenues of thought.  Admittedly most of those thoughts lead off on tangents that may not be worthwhile (at the moment).  Occasionally however one of those seemingly blind alleys lead to the edge of new territory.  It’s at this edge that innovation can be found.  Today a random conversation between Wes and I led me off on a thought tangent that eventually centered on the concept of innovation and Copernicus.

Innovation & Copernicus

So what is innovation?  There are many definitions of innovation, however the concept I wish to convey can be summarized:  Innovation is a long journey to an obvious solution.  It may seem counter intuitive that innovative solutions are obvious, but that’s only because those solutions aren’t obvious to the majority of people until they gain in popularity (and therefore require people to study them).  In the time of Copernicus, for example, popular models of the universe were centered around the earth.  These theories are know generally as geocentrism.  And even today mathematical formulas based on geocentric principals are used by NASA to launch vehicles into space.  Geocentric models are complex and not obvious, therefore they are harder to understand.  Copernicus’ alternative theory, known as heliocentrism (sun centered universe) was an innovative model, and although it’s a simpler more intuitive model it was not widely adopted until after his death.  Today however heliocentrism is so widely accepted that even middle school children can build science fair models of our solar system based on it.

So what’s my point?  The point is that if we want to be ahead of the curve at Kfx2, if we want to out pace our competition, then we need to identify and implement innovative ideas before they become popular with the majority of our competitors.  If we can do this then we will force our competition to play catch up while we offer clients products that our competitors haven’t even attempted.

Moving Forward

The open source community has a number of hubs of innovative ideas.  Source Forge and Git Hub are two I can think of that have literally thousands of developers sharing open source ideas with the community at large.  There are English descriptions of most of the ideas/software.  I propose we not only use these hubs as sources of innovative ideas, but we actively contribute to open source solutions that we believe can be leveraged to our benefit for future projects.

It’s an idea,

~Lance