Necessity Is the Mother of Innovation, Too
An age old proverb says that necessity is the mother of invention. Rather than literally going by the words of this statement, if you look at the meaning it holds, the proverb extends itself to several other areas—including innovations, improvisations, or any action that is a step ahead in bringing added value to a current process.
We all know that Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates in their dormitory to stay connected with their friends. Clearly, it was their need that turned into an innovation in this case. An interesting application innovation for an alarm by a Microsoft intern also stemmed from a necessity—the need to take a nap on a bus without missing the destination stop. This application is now available for Windows phones and was developed by Peter Zieske, who apparently enjoys dozing while on the bus.
This unique need of a Microsoft intern was the mother of his innovation, Bus Alarm, which leverages public transit routes and GPS technology. Zieske developed the application while interning at Microsoft this summer, and his application was judged the winner of the Intern Hackathon, AppHack, which is an event Microsoft hosts—among many others—to encourage innovative ideas and implementations from college interns globally.
Jenni Hogan, a TV anchor-turned-entrepreneur, recently created a company named TVInteract. With ample support from Seattle-area TV anchors and reporters, Hogan created an app to address a problem that she herself faced as a TV anchor—lack of an effective solution to leverage viewer input on social media into the news streams. Her TVInteract app is now gaining momentum among potential users. In this case, integrating live content from social media into news streams is not something unheard of.
However, Hogan was driven by her own needs, knew exactly what the gaps were, and knew what could be done differently so that even reporters and anchors who are unfamiliar with the use of social media could benefit from content. At varied levels in various disciplines, people continue to invent and innovate because they are driven by their own needs. In the field of information technology you often see software engineers who created tools and frameworks mention that they created them to address their own needs given the lack of a robust solution.
While all of these stories are exciting to hear, as with any solution, an idea driven by necessity only takes the person half way. The need for a strong software engineering plan and implementation to take the whole process from ideation to a final product or application cannot be emphasized enough.
