This document provides information about an assignment for a Mining and Mineral Processing student named Donald Dhliwayo at Midlands State University. The assignment is for the module HMIE 212 Innovation, and is due on April 19, 2017. The assignment asks students to review how innovation has become a solution to modern problems and discuss the historical development of innovation as a category. It suggests students consider where the idea of innovation originated, why it came to be defined as technological innovation, and why it is generally understood as commercialized innovation.
This document provides information about an assignment for a Mining and Mineral Processing student named Donald Dhliwayo at Midlands State University. The assignment is for the module HMIE 212 Innovation, and is due on April 19, 2017. The assignment asks students to review how innovation has become a solution to modern problems and discuss the historical development of innovation as a category. It suggests students consider where the idea of innovation originated, why it came to be defined as technological innovation, and why it is generally understood as commercialized innovation.
This document provides information about an assignment for a Mining and Mineral Processing student named Donald Dhliwayo at Midlands State University. The assignment is for the module HMIE 212 Innovation, and is due on April 19, 2017. The assignment asks students to review how innovation has become a solution to modern problems and discuss the historical development of innovation as a category. It suggests students consider where the idea of innovation originated, why it came to be defined as technological innovation, and why it is generally understood as commercialized innovation.
The review looks at how innovation has become a solution for resolving many problems in our modern day society. It suggested three questions. Where precisely does the idea of innovation come from? Why did innovation come to be defined as technological innovation? Why innovation is generally understood as commercialized innovation? The paper looks at innovation as a category and at its historical development. The representations of innovation and the discourses held in the name of innovation are discussed. Every individual is to a certain extent innovative. Artists are innovative, scientists are innovative, and so are organizations in their day-to-day operations. Innovation has always existed. Hypotheses exist in order to guide a genealogical history of innovation as a category. Firstly, innovation arises from human creativity as dictionaries and history suggest. The second hypothesis defines innovation as creativity through Imitation → Invention → Innovation. The third hypothesis is about innovation as a break with the past. It is a break with the past in the sense that it suggests that invention alone is not enough. There has to be use and adoption of the invention, namely innovation, in order for benefits to result. The first two parts i.e. imitation and invention are based on secondary sources. The third part (innovation) is composed entirely of original research and constitutes the core of the paper. Innovation gradually came to resolve the tension between imitation and invention. The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in the late nineteenth century, made widespread use of the term innovation and novation as novelty. Tarde’s theory of innovation was threefold: invention → opposition → imitation. Inventions give rise to imitation. Invention is the driving force of society, but society is mainly imitative in custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience and education. From the 1920s onward, invention came to be understood as a process. “Without the inventor there can be no inventions” (Gilfillan, 1935: 78), but “the inventors are not the only individuals responsible for invention” (Gilfillan, 1935: 81). Social forces like race and geographic factors, and cultural heritage play a part. Even technological invention is social since it is the modifications, perfections, and minute additions over centuries, rather than a one-step creation. Above all, innovation is, to a certain extent, continuity with the past, in the sense that more often than not it refers to technological invention. The OECD Oslo Manual itself, in its latest edition, has broadened the definition of innovation to include organizational and marketing innovation, although this is limited to firms.