Journey of Innovations

There are several substantial and significant upshots, happenings and events that occur from the early beginnings of man until now that bring forth the innovations of technology. This may include natural disaster, man-made catastrophes, international calamity and tragedy, cataclysm, worldwide warfare and some others. Eventually, innovations and excogitation of technology emanated from the necessity and essential of man.
One important event is the World War II because at this time countries that partake in this war have been developing eminent machineries and devices in order to win. According to Wikipedia.org, a free online encyclopedia, “World War II was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all of the great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis.” The war involved the mobilization of over 100 million military personnel, making it the most widespread war in history. In a state of "total war", the major participants placed their complete economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Over 70 million people, the majority of them civilians, were killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. After the Treaty of Versailles the Western democracies were satiated powers and expected a general peace. Their political environment was one where the aim was disarmament. (In Britain there was the Ten Year Rule.) Consequently they conducted very little military R & D. On the hand Germany and the Soviet Union were dissatisfied powers that for different reasons cooperated with each other on military R & D. The Soviets offered Weimar Germany facilities deep inside the USSR for building and testing arms and for military training, well away from Treaty inspectors' eyes. In return, the Soviets asked for access to German technical developments, and for assistance in creating a Red Army General Staff. The first German officers went to the Soviet state for these purposes in March, 1922. One month later, Junkers began building aircraft at Fili, outside Moscow, in violation of Versailles. The great artillery manufacturer Krupp was soon active in the south of the USSR, near Rostov-on-Don. In 1925, a flying school was established at Vivupal, near Lipetsk, to train the first pilots for the future Luftwaffe. Since 1926, the Reichswehr had been able to use a tank school at Kazan (codenamed Kama) and a chemical weapons facility in Samara Oblast (codenamed Tomka). In turn, the Red Army gained access to these training facilities, as well as military technology and theory from Weimar Germany. In the late 1920s, Germany helped Soviet industry begin to modernize, and to assist in the establishment of tank production facilities at the Leningrad Bolshevik Factory and the Kharkov Locomotive Factory. This cooperation would break down when Hitler rose to power in 1933. The failure of the World Disarmament Conference marked the beginnings of the arms race leading to war. In France the lesson of World War I was translated into the Maginot Line which was supposed to hold a line at the border with Germany. The Maginot Line did achieve its political objective of ensuring that any German invasion had to go through Belgium ensuring that France would have Britain as a military ally. France had more, and much better, tanks than Germany as of the outbreak of their hostilities in 1940. As in World War I, the French generals expected that armour would mostly serve to help infantry break the static trench lines and storm machine gun nests. They thus spread the armour among their infantry divisions, ignoring the new German doctrine of blitzkrieg based on the fast movement using concentrated armour attacks, against which there was no effective defense but mobile anti-tank guns - infantry Antitank rifles not being effective against medium and heavy tanks. Air power was a major concern of Germany and Britain between the wars. Trade in aircraft engines continued, with Britain selling hundreds of its best to German firms - which used them in a first generation of aircraft, and then improved on them much for use in German aircraft. In fact, Mountain Bikes emerged from among a group of passionate bike riders who wanted the challenge of riding on Northern California mountian trails. They built clunkers for one another adapting old bike frames, experimenting with tires & breaks. As these prototypes grew more refined, one of their number saw a commercial opportunity & began to manufacture them. Radical innovators are deeply empathetic; they understand – and feel – the unvoiced needs of customers. They recognize needs that customers don’t even know they have yet. Or they solve some common frustration in a way that people could never have imagined – which is precisely why they are not articulating the need, or asking for a specific product, service, or business to address it. Unfortunately, most companies define themselves by what they do, rather than by what they know or what they own. Usually they find it difficult to see things like skills, processes, technologies, assets and values as distinct, stand-alone entities because they are completely embedded in the company’s current business model. But radical innovators have the ability to decouple particular skills and assets from the existing business, and then leverage them in new ways or new settings to generate growth opportunities. The fact is, radical innovators tend to think of the whole world as a LEGO kit of different competencies and strategic assets, owned by different companies, which can potentially be reconnected like building blocks or used in a new context to invent novel products, processes, services and business models. Actually, some of the biggest opportunities for innovation can come from bundling your company’s competencies and assets with those of other companies to produce radical new solutions. Innovation in generating deep change might come from Pull: the creation of active platforms that call together a newtork around an irresistable desire to create. draw needed resources, learn by acting, & so build know-how & shift expectations. Another excellent way to discover new opportunities for business innovation is by harnessing trends and “discontinuities”. What exactly is a “discontinuity”? It’s not just a single trend, invention, or technology. Rather, it’s a cluster of trends – for example, in technology, demographics, lifestyle, regulation, geopolitics and so forth – that has the power to substantially change the competitive rules, or the structure of an industry. Trends and “discontinuities” are often the launching pad for radical innovation. Orthodoxies tend to become embedded in the way we do business. After a while, they form the dominant logic about the “right” way to compete, price, organize, market, and develop products and services. Orthodoxies are not by definition “bad” or necessarily wrong. In fact, they are often essential for creating a common understanding across a dispersed organization, allowing teams to work smoothly and efficiently. The problem starts when orthodoxies start to stifle rather than foster progress – they are potentially limiting if you can’t see beyond or around them. If left unchallenged, they may blind you to the possibility of new industry rules, new offerings, and new competitive space. Time and again, the strategy innovations that radically change customer expectations or industry structures come from questioning beliefs that everyone else has taken for granted.
Eventually, technological escalation during World War II was more profound than any other period in human history. More new inventions, certainly as measured by such means as patent applications for dual-use technology and weapon contracts issued to private contractors, were deployed to the task of killing humans more effectively, and to a much lesser degree, avoiding being killed. Unlike technological escalation during World War I, it was generally believed that speed and firepower, not defenses or entrenchments, would bring the war to a quicker end. Military operations were also conducted in order to obtain intelligence on the enemy's technology e.g. the Bruneval Raid for German radar and Operation Most III for the German V-2. The introduction of new weapons was so much a feature of the war that German propaganda featured wonder weapons in the pipeline as a reason why Germany would eventually win the war. In that sense, technological advance prolonged the war. Depending on one's frame of reference, one can reasonably assert that World War II began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, or as late as the last declarations of war between the United States and Germany in December 1941. Quite a bit occurred during this time to escalate technological conflict, most notably the upgrading and deployment of aircraft carriers by the U.S. and Japan in the Pacific, and invention of carrier-type aircraft such as the Mitsubishi Zero, largely considered the best plane of its time. Horrifying city battles (Stalingrad, Berlin) and sieges (Leningrad, London) from ground and air.
Time does not mean it changes everything. However, this brought to us to where we now and where we should be in the near future. Innovations and technologies are essential things for us humans and other living.