They say that change is constant. Humans are bound to discover new ideas. People continuously look for new ideas in order to also improve the lives of everyone.
Innovation helps the economic growth, innovation of future jobs, and increased well-being. It also helps in the reduction of sickness, poverty, and hunger. Additionally, innovation creates communication and educational accessibility.
If big businesses do not innovate by shifting the use of plastic containers to custom paper food trays, climate change will become worse. Therefore, it will negatively impact the whole environment. Thus, it will impact everyone in the whole world.
One must know why and how innovation is important.
Definition
Innovation means the practical implementation of any ideas resulting in the introduction of improvements in offering the goods or services.
It plays a big role in increasing the efficiency and profitability of businesses. Thus, it also gives opportunities to businesses to improve the products and services offered to the market.
Growth In Economy
Thanks to technological innovations being a major source of economic growth. If the inflation-adjusted market value of the products by an economy is increased, it’s called economic growth.
There are two ways to increase the production output of the economy. The first is to increase the number of inputs in the production process. The second is to think of new ways to get more output given the same amount of inputs.
The latter describes a good innovation. New ideas must come up to achieve that goal. There must be new technologies that will help increase productivity and generate greater output without changing the number of input.
If a molecular sieve manufacturer increases its production by using high-technological machines, that’s an example of innovation. More so if they want to earn a step higher than their existing income.
According to a Stanford study, innovation is in charge of 85% of the economic growth. It was a great transformation in U.S. history. It was once a largely agrarian economy in the mid-19th century that emerged into an industrial economy during the First World War.
Although the farmers didn’t appreciate much of the innovations that took place, vast improvements are still relevant in the industrial revolution. The people in Europe transformed from working in agricultural work to moving to cities for industrial work.
Productivity was increased because of the shift from hand-made to machine-made products. It directly affected the living standards of the people. Before, a worker can only feed a part of their family members but with the help of innovation, he can provide enough for the whole family.
Creation Of Future Jobs
Let’s move into the second way how innovation makes the world a better place. Due to technological advancement and increased productivity, more careers are in demand today. It can also double in size by 2050.
In a World Economic Forum, it was reported that nearly 133 million new jobs can be created in 2022. The downside is that 75 million are displaced by AI, automation, and robotics. Manual and low-skilled workers will be greatly affected by it in the next decades.
This doesn’t mean that their jobs will be unnecessary but rather be polarized. Their jobs will not completely disappear. New skill sets will be required both in old and new jobs.
Another example is a butterfly valve. It’s been used since the late 18th century. An innovation like giving a 2-year warranty for a Dombor concentric butterfly valve is very much helpful for customers especially when proven that they got a non-working one.
The company immediately assign its team to check on it.
Improved Well-being
The living standards also rise with innovation and economic growth. Brookings Institution mentioned that countries with greater GDP per capita have higher average life satisfaction. Research also said that there’s a link between innovation and subjective well-being.
However, the benefits of innovation and growth aren’t evenly distributed. The rise in GDP often means greater income and wealth inequality. There is no indicator for how much inequality is too much but socioeconomic brings consequences.
It’s not a problem if people have income inequality. It becomes a problem when their purchasing power decreases.
Reduction of Sickness, Poverty, and Hunger
Digital technologies and innovative solutions have lessened the worse impact of diseases, poverty, and hunger that are mostly found in the poorest region of the world. They created an opportunity to continue to fight all these three for decades.
Developing countries are challenged by their growing populations. Their way to reduce hunger is to develop agricultural activities, enough to provide for the whole country. Smallholder farms are very important as they complete 80% of the whole food production for the communities.
Innovations like knowing the information about the weather are a good development for the agricultural sector. It’s a proven efficient way to help farmers stay in business.
Accessibility to Communication and Education
The World Wide Web celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2021. There has been a huge technological revolution in communication and education. It will continue in the future.
In 2016, the World Bank Annual Report mentioned that there is 7 out of 10 of the poorest population have mobile phones. A mobile phone now is more necessary than sanitation or clean water.
It was manifested that the mobile worker population will have grown from 96 million to more than 105 million by 2020. This innovation in mobile technology like voice control and augmented reality are workers in completely new ways.
Conclusion
Innovation is an important part of society as this is what allows us to achieve greater heights and improve the standard of living of the citizens of the world.
We should make sure that this culture of continuous innovation continues as this improve the world in many ways we wouldn’t think possible. Innovation is not really that hard. You just need to think outside the box always.