If you do not know where you are going - any road will do..

If you do not know where you are going - any road will do..This springs to mind when witnessing the plethora of alternatives created by today's technology and fragmented doings of both natives and immigrants on the Internet and in general.

Innovators are well aware of the growing NEED to innovate both for enterprise survival and for national competitiveness. Innovation does not have to be about inventing new technologies - it can - and should more often - be about using existing technology for new purposes. It should definitively build on acquired habits - economy of repetition - whenever possible (prime example - use of bank codes for logging in to public and other sectors where strong e-id is needed - huge case of economy of re-use and economy of scope).

So what should the innovator do? To start with - get a clear mandate for driving change. Then create a strong vision - know where you are going. If it is a good-for-society-at-large vision it has a better chance to become a passion of many - and then also get the market making support needed to survive the first years of slow adoption (it ALWAYS takes time..). A widely shared passion is often needed to cut through, get going and keep going.

Get going means that less time is spent on trying to predict the future - more time on testing out with small steps and much more on communicating (to make the markets). This is demanding as we live in the age of "Everybody writing and nobody reading". Pressing send is not enough - much more of real co-innovation work is needed. The it should always be easier to remember that only the simple-enough is good enough in the user interfaces. It is so easy to make it difficult - and so difficult to make it easy.