Innovation has many connotations. However, in The WAVES, we refer to innovation as improved or new products (often, connected as a system) to get our job done better at less cost, so that our quality of living standards keeps improving. It takes place through generating, selecting, refining, and adding ideas to products, and also processes to produce them.
In the market economy, ideas for offering higher quality products by consuming fewer resources, thereby at less cost, offer profit-making incentives to competing firms. On the other hand, consumers keep getting better products at a lower price. Hence, innovation is at the core of our ability to offer increasingly higher quality living standards to a growing number of people with the help of depleting resources.
Such a role of innovation has placed the capability of generating and trading ideas at profit as the most important capacity for driving sustained growth. Although acquiring the capacity of science and technology knowledge and idea generation within easy reach, however, trading them at profit in a globally connected market economy is a highly challenging one.
