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.

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 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: