Innovation Multiplier: Building on other Innovation & Invention Bricks

Innovation multiplier is something quite obvious to me. Yet, I am writing on this because I have seen several ideas and prototypes which do not leverage this simple concept.

Many attempts at Innovation start with the technology or concept with which the idea owner is comfortable with. He/she ignores what is state of art in both technology and does not incorporate the same. As a result, the demonstrator or MVP fails to 'Wow' the audience and investors.

For instance, an idea around Augmented Reality using cameras which use the older technology of depth sensing. It constrained the form factor and the quality of the results. 

A solution deployment proposal still leveraging the big black server boxes when the small and sleek computer sticks would suffice.

Same goes for business approach as well. Ideas built on older business assumptions are bound to have average market success and find poor traction with investors. For instance, a detailed proposal on a B2B solution attempting to build an industry data standard for entry barrier. But today when the data can be easily converted into different formats and shared across platforms, creating a data standard would be a futile exercise.

An innovation should leverage all the leading (state of the art) technological and business developments. Even if the underlying technology bricks are yet to mature. Technologies are maturing very fast today, especially when their is a specific business application. And in worst case, its always easy to scale down on technology rather than scaling up.