Innovation is what keeps an organisation vibrant, your customers connected and engaged, and your business growing.

You must be creative and willing to explore and take chances to be successful in today’s cluttered marketplace. You and your team have plenty of ideas but the reality is that you cannot address them all… and the secret to success is that innovation success is only possible if teams are given enough chance to fail to be able to identify the real opportunities.

Being innovative does not necessarily mean re-inventing the wheel; to make innovation happen you have to take an idea and effectively incorporate it into a process in the real world. What could be a better start than first communicating your Eureka moment to other passionate people just like you? But remember, people won’t listen to you until you give them a good reason to do so.

Communication is our greatest asset and most of the time it costs nothing. We haven’t had all these fancy gadgets, tools and apps since the beginning. So let’s have a look at some early innovators and see how communication has evolved over time.

The Noble Caveman – he used the closest devices at his disposal, HIS HANDS, to create cave drawings. He successfully found a way to communicate his existence to his descendants across the ages.

Then, things got a bit more complicated. Unlike oral language, the written word is more permanent. Plato and Aristotle were two of the historical figures to turn a story told orally into a manuscript that would last for centuries.

Thomas Edison was driven by passion and countless ideas to prove that communication was one of the most advanced technologies; he developed several inventions that powered the future and two of them were the telegraph and the phonograph.

While the telegraph seamed more like a jigsaw for everybody to solve to get the right message, the radio, which came about in the 1920s, was a luxury for people to hear the news as it happened for themselves. We are grateful to Edison for his sharp mind, but of course humans will never say NO to an upgrade to first class. It is not just a matter of convenience and enjoyment, but also of time. Over the generations, people have started to perceive time differently and they have become very impatient to try new discoveries that could speed up their old routines and give them information faster than ever before.

Oh, but what happened to the newspapers and all the magazines that were printed every day? Of course, they were still in vogue at that time (we’re not sure for how long they’re going to survive though), but for literate and illiterate people in fact, the radio was a fantastic build on print news. The radio rivalled newspapers because people no longer needed to get the paper and spend time reading the news to learn the facts. People could simply turn on the radio and hear the latest information broadcast to those fortunate to have a radio before the newspapers were printed and distributed.

Perhaps your great great grand parents felt quite happy and content with the idea of having a radio in their households back then. And they had good reason to think this way until twenty years after the radio when television made its debut. By the end of the ‘60s, television became the primary new source of news consumption for families in civilised societies across the globe. And since then this loud, visual box has bewitched more eyes than anything else before it. Newspapers give you the freedom to choose what you want to read anywhere. Radio made the news more intimate. And finally, television unified these two communication methods into a combined engaging experience.

At the dawn of the new millennium, a new technological era has arisen – the World of Digital. Mobile phones, SMS messages, instant messaging, social networks all driven by the power of the Internet, whose father Tim Berners Lee had the foresight to make it free and accessible to all. Of all these inventions, none have changed our habits quite as much as what the Internet has enabled in every aspect of life. Companies such as Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook and WhatsApp have taken communication to the next level. And when your company becomes a verb, you know you’ve made it.

Today’s trends show that tablet computers and smartphones are exceeding personal computers for Internet usage. Mobile marketing is expected to be the new fashion and top of every marketers agenda in 2016 and it won’t be long until the robots will take over the red carpet as celebrities in their own right and evoke everybody’s curiosity.

These great innovators that you see in this picture together with many more throughout the ages were confronted with the same challenge that every company has nowadays – How to create something tangible out of your ideas that people will use?

Scientists have picked their brains across generations to add a new page to this story. It’s now time for you to write this story further and create a world where everybody stays connected.

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Diana Florescu

Latest posts by Diana Florescu (see all)

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