The Importance of Innovation In The Modern Business World

As an entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial business, there is nothing better, than creating a new product or service, that no one has ever seen before, and turning it into a blockbuster commercial success.
There is however another path to success, and this is called, the “fast follower”:
There are a lot of organizations who are successful, through the ability to see what others have done, and then moving quickly to do the same thing; this is the “fast follower”.
If you look at great companies like Microsoft or Apple, they are not necessarily the first to come up with a new idea. They are “fast followers”; if they see someone doing something, that has potential, they either buy it or build something similar; only they do it better.

Our company did not invent “Mobile Money” (Ecocash), it was invented in Kenya, by Safaricom. As soon as I heard about it, I did two things:
-first I checked to see, if there was a patent protecting the idea. It turned out they had not protected it.
-I then put a top team to research the concept.
The key to being a “fast follower”, is the ability to move with lightening speed.
The Chinese are masters of the “fast follower” model:
When they see something in the West, like Yahoo, Facebook, Uber, Google, their entrepreneurs quickly follow, to build their own.

A Fast Follower, never allows a competitor to settle in, on a new innovation without a response. I can tell you, that if we do not respond, it is usually because we do not think much of the new product or service. Otherwise, we try to respond hard and fast, using better management and execution skills than our competitor, with devastating efficiency. It’s part of the game.
So next time you see a new product or service, in another market, don’t just admire:

Be a “fast follower”.

By Strive Masiyiwa

Young man turns scrap into satellite booster

A self-made inventor from Namibia has invented a satellite dish booster from scrap material to boost internet connectivity through radio signals for people in rural areas or in areas that have weak network signal.

Josua Nghaamwa said he is inspired by Alexander Graham Bell who invented the modern telephone that has presently become a daily necessity.

he initially made his mark at the age of 18 when he created a cellphone using discarded radio parts and old toy cellphone scraps and other junk material.

His first invention could reach a cellphone of the same altitude over 1000km using radio signals.

After four years since his first invention, he is back with a home-made foil satellite dish booster, which aims to deliver fast internet access to the widest population at the lowest usage and capital cost and create a strong competitive business.

he says the dish is designed to fit in a laptop bag and has a USB serial port that enables users to plug in their modem, router or cellphone into one of the ports to increase the internet connection speed and it is also a wireless device that supports Bluetooth and wireless (WI-FI) technology.

“The prototype satellite dish is a device which is built with foil, designed to improve internet speed and poor availability of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) signal, especially in rural areas were digital communication is at its fancy.” According to Nghaamwa “the products target farmers, as well as anyone with internet access to a GSM device anywhere in the world and want to have a faster and more reliable connection.”

Apart from its distinctive radio signal usage, the dish is designed in a small package with user-friendly satellite terminals that could be used by anyone depending on the wavelength and the location from where the recipient is using his amazing gadget.

Besides the great inventions including the unfortunate incident in which he half burnt his uncle’s house after a mixed-herb experiment went out of hand, he says many promising inventors will continue facing the sad reality of having to store their work at the back of their garage instead of being transferred into something usable by society.

According to Nghaamwa, the inventions bring a lot of excitement, however, there needs to be complementary encouragement in terms of state funding to make the projects usable.

“Many of these social networks that we use today were experiments from other young people in other countries,” related Nghaamwa.

Nghaamwa said that there is much to be desired for young inventors saying it is about time that Namibia creates a manufacturing company of its own.

Despite the insurmountable challenges he faces Nghaamwa encourages his peers to invent things that could make life much easier. At the moment Nghaamwa is hopeful he would find sponsors to patent his invention for commercial use.

The young innovative man has a patent certificate issued by trade and industry.

Source:

New Era Namibia

Lifesaving straw that purifies water...

Sometimes, it’s the simplest technologies that have the greatest potential impact on people’s lives. Take the Vestergaard Frandsen Group’s mobile personal filtration system, otherwise known as LifeStraw. LifeStraw makes previously contaminated water drinkable by removing bacteria and viruses. It is a powder-blue plastic tube—much thicker than an ordinary straw—containing filters that make water teeming with typhoid-, cholera- and diarrhea-causing microorganisms drinkable.

LifeStraw with integrated water filter does not use chemicals, does not require batteries, and has no moving parts. It effectively removes 99.9% of waterborne parasites and bacteria. The filters, made up of a halogenated resin, kill nearly 100 percent of bacteria and nearly 99 percent of the viruses that pass through LifeStraw. A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill evaluation tested the device’s performance in water containing Escherichia coli B and Enterococcus faecalis bacteria and the MS2 coliphage virus as well as iodine and silver. The results indicated that LifeStraw filtered out all contaminants to levels where they don’t pose a health risk to someone drinking the water.

But the device does not filter heavy metals such as iron or fluoride nor does it remove parasites like cryptosporidium or giardia, although the Switzerland-based company’s CEO, Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, says there is a version of LifeStraw available to relief groups in Bangladesh and India that can filter arsenic.

Source:

Vestergaard-frandsen.com