A Community is a system of people who interact within an agreed set of rulesconventions.

A Convention defines a way the community expects its members to behave in a given situation.

A Context is the environment in which a community lives. To survive, a community must have a stable relationship with its environment. Maintaining that stable relationship is the purpose of conventions.

Community agrees on and is shaped by Convention, which maintains relationship to Context.

One convention can be superseded by innovation as it diffuses becomes another convention.

Innovation can be defined as the application of new ideas to the products, processes, or other aspects of the activities of a firm that lead to increased value.

Two important definitions:

Product Innovation:The introduction of a new product, or a significant qualitative change in a existing product.

Process Innovation:The introduction of a new process for making or delivering goods and services.

Innovation requires preparation and aids insight, which comes from individuals drive.

Why does innovation matter?Innovation matters because you cant compete on quality alone, whether as a business, a community, or a society. Organizations have become much better at managing quality. Quality has become a commodity. Quality is largely about improving efficiency, whereas innovation is largely about improving effectiveness. Improving quality is decreasing defects. Its about measuring. Its making processes more efficient. It works within an existing paradigm. Innovation is creating a new paradigm. Its not getting better at playing the same game; its changing the rules and changing the game. Innovation is not working harder; its working smarter.

Innovation model:

The model is built on the idea that innovation is about changing paradigms. The model situates innovation between two conventions. Innovation transforms old into new. It is a process in which insight inspires change and creates value.

The process begins when external pressure or internal decay disturbs the relation between a community and its context, a relation maintained by a convention.

External pressure and internal decay of a firm inevitably lead to change (disturbance), which disturbs relations creating misfit (pain). When the misfit is large enough, it gains recognition (definition), which frames possibilities for insight (seeing opportunity). Insights must be shared through articulation (prototyping) and it must be proved through demonstration (testing). Demonstration reduces risk and encourages adoption (counter-change) which reforms relations creating fit (gain).

The existing convention no longer fits. Perhaps the context changed. Or the community. Or even the convention. Someone notices the misfit. It causes stress. It creates enough friction, enough pain, to jump into peoples consciousness. Perception of misfit almost simultaneously gives rise to proposals for change, for reframing. These proposals compete for attention. Most fail to inspire, and are ignored, and fade away.

The changes that survive are by definition those a community findsEffective. They spread because they increase fit (gain) and lower pain or cost (delivering value).

We rarely recognize innovation while its happening. Instead, innovation is often a label applied after the fact, when its value is clear and a new convention has become established.

Radical innovation emerges if the technological knowledge required to exploit it is very different from existing knowledge, rendering existing knowledge obsolete.

Incremental innovation appears when knowledge required to offer a product builds on existing knowledge. Another distinction is based on whether innovation preserves or destroys technical and market capabilities

Regular innovation is when both technical and market capabilities are preserved.

Architectural innovation is if both the technical and market capabilities are destroyed.

Niche innovation is when technical capabilities are preserved and market capabilities destroyed.

Revolutionary innovation is when technical capabilities are destroyed and market capabilities preserved.

Modular innovation is when component knowledge is destroyed and architectural enhanced.

Autonomous innovation can be pursued independently from other innovations.

Systemic innovation can be realized only in conjunction with related, complementary innovations.

The first innovation model was a so called "technology push" model. The technology push model represents the first generation of innovation.

Rapid increase in competition and customers no longer satisfied with standard products influenced the new approach toward innovation called "market pull", i.e. the second generation of innovation.

The third generation, or "coupling model", was recognized necessity for creating the innovation by employing both approaches -technological readiness of companies and true customer's needs.

The fourth generation model is a so-called "integrated model", meaning that parallel development with integrated development teams should exist in a company.

The fifth generation model networked model is to decrease time to market of new product development and at the same time to reduce new product development costs.

The 4G and 5G models are performed by organizations which in pursue of innovation have opened their organizational boundaries to other participants in the value chain. This way of innovating has been name given and conceptualized as open innovation.

Innovating the oil tankers

Designed in Gothenburg in 1878 for the Brothers Nobel oil company, Zoroaster was the first oil tanker carrying oil in two iron tanks joined by pipes. Later in 1880 the first single-hull tanker Moses was ordered where the oil tanks were part of the ship hull structure. In 1883 tankers design advances and the liquid in tanks was divided in smaller compartments to eliminate instability due to free surface effects. The single hull tanker design for the tankers of about 10000 DWT (dead weight tons) remained almost unchanged until the WW II. After the WWII due to economy expansion the demand for energy increased and crude oil had to be transported in large amounts from distant sources. The tankers fleet multiplied several times and the size grew to about several hundred thousand DWT during the period 1950-1975 and in the late 1970s giant ships appeared exceeding 500,000 DWT. The design was appropriately scaled so that the main dimensions of the vessel, comparing e.g. a Panamax to an Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC), have roughly doubled. In addition, propulsion (novel technical solutions for giant propellers powered by large engines) and maneuvering issues had to be considered.

The first significant change in design of tankers took place when double hull requirement was introduced at the end of the 20th century. This innovation was a direct consequence of the emergence of the environmental friendliness. The green competitive priority was imposed by the maritime industry regulatory bodies after the series of environmental catastrophes.