Creativity at the heart of business
Innovation is something that we at Cocoonfxmedia love to do, it's sometimes easier for a company like ours to innovate or seem to innovate new ideas and develop really cool websites and web applications.
You are an innovator!
In-fact every business is an innovator possibly without even knowing. The definition of innovation is to rework, improve, enhance and develop a process. That could be a quicker way to solve a problem.
When I thought about writing about innovation I thought where do I start, what to talk about. I then thought of 'Innovation Britain' (https://www.greatbritaincampaign.com/) stamped over the Blood Hound supersonic car and McLaren F1 has it stamped over their car. Britain has always been a place for innovation from the days of the Beagle to steam trains and everyone forgets that here in Blighty the internet was born.
Innovation in Web Design
Web design is a good example where innovation of processes has helped the users interact with websites. When I first started in web design the users didn’t expect much it was relatively easy to put together a website and you were pretty much limited to static sites. You basically created a table behind the scenes like in word and then you put the content into this.
My first website was actually an advertising website which I published in 1997 or 1998 it had the same principles of Ebay but it was more a half hearted attempt to see if I could build a website. E-commerce wasn’t really that good back then as well.
The internet then started to innovate and the speeds improved from 13kb to 56kbs which meant you could use bigger graphics, code started to innovate and software become more advanced. For me one of the biggest innovations for web design was Macromedia created Flash. It made it that you didn’t need to have studied computer programming to make a very visually pleasing and interactive websites. I remember the first website I created in flash was for a band. You could stream music at a decent quality and have animation like lights turning on and off. You could also test the sites in developer mode to see how it would perform on 13KB and 56KB dial up.
Innovation in Code
The wonderful thing about the internet is that the web design and development community wanted to work as a collective to make the “Internet” work. This loosely formed “Open Source” which then allowed websites and web applications to be developed over time for free.
As user demands start to increase for more visual appealing and interactive websites the code did need to enhance variations of Java Script start to emerge and new coding languages such as PHP where developed.
With PHP being open source then this lead the drive and innovation, the code itself is a lot lighter and in my opinion to Microsofts equivalent ASP.NET.
The way PHP has been developed and the HTML itself has radically changed the ability now to pretty much do what you like online clearly shows that the code has developed.
Now Back to Web design.
If we took 5 years ago businesses where thinking oh ok we will have a website, I can’t see the value in them. Now it’s an absolute must and the design and innovation of a website can make or break a website.
More and more best practices are being forced by user experience and design a few years back mobile responsiveness was a nice to have. Now pretty much everyone has a smart phone, code had to evolve to allow the detection of such devices. This then lead to way users want the information provided to them. Flash from the old days with cool little animations, users don’t want that. The user themselves have innovated their own user habbits to say… Sod this I can’t be bothered looking at this bounce icons and things flying in every where. I just want to see what I am looking for and how to do I buy, share and read this information.
The internet has also lead businesses to innovate their own business process. Let take the Cloud… before the Cloud businesses would want expensive hardware to manage processes however now it’s all in the cloud, running on the internet. Often old paper trail of people having to fax documents and then have mass filing cupboards to store stuff. The internet now take care of all of this.
The questions I ask you the reader of his blog. Is there something you’re doing in your business which could be done quicker or more efficiently? If there is that’s the start of your innovation and this could be the next big thing your business and you personally can innovate to help improve how your business works.