The Innovative EntrePinoy (Part 2): Innovations That Changed Lives

It is the innovative drive of the entrepreneur that continuously improves daily living. If we compare the way we live with the way that our grandparents and great grandparents did, wouldn’t we say we’re better off in the sense that we enjoy more and better products and product choices, equipment, appliances and gadgets that make us feel more comfortable and let us perform our work better, faster, and with less mistakes?

Here are examples of innovations which have changed our lives:

From the traditional clay stoves using wood fuel, we now have:

· Kerosene stoves

· Gas stoves

· Electric stoves

· Stoves that can alternately use gas and electric power

· Multi-purpose cooking ranges that can roast, grill, and bake

· Turbo broilers

· Convection ovens

· Microwave ovens

· Specialty cooking devices like shabu-shabu cookers with side grillers

· LPG-fueled grills

· Crock pots or slow-cookers

· Rice cookers

From mats, wooden beds or papag, we now have:

· Mattress beds

· Brass beds

· Canopied beds

· Double-deck beds

· Pull-out beds

· Sofa beds

· Folding beds

· Water beds

· Hospital beds (that can be cranked up and down)

· Beds equipped with air compressors guaranteed to prevent bed sores (for bed ridden persons)

· Orthopedic beds

From the industrial revolution to what is now known as the IT age, entrepreneurial innovation have been making profound changes in the quality of lives and life styles.

Innovations in Information and computer technology or ICT has wrought the most recent and most pervasive changes not only in industry, commerce, and the management of the workplace but every conceivable dimension of human life such as education, communication, recreation, music and the arts. Paperless offices, strictly no cash transactions, robotronics, voice recognition in computing – these may still be in the experimental stage but loom large in the foreseeable future.

If Steve Jobs and his partner didn’t put together the first Apple personal computer in his garage and if Bill Gates didn’t spearhead development of computer application software and other tools, can you imagine how differently we would have been leading our everyday life? You couldn’t have been reading this blog piece on entrepreneurial innovation, in the first place, could you?

Next: Filipino entrepreneurs who cashed in on their innovative drive.

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About the Author Annamanila is Myrna Rodriguez-Co, a professional writer and editor who has over 50 books and periodicals on entrepreneurship and small enterprise management to her name. The latest of these are the four-volume Dreamers, Doers, Risk-takers entrepreneurial case story series of the UP Institute for Small-Scale Industries, a two-volume series on technology-based entrepreneurs of the Department of Science and Technology, and a two-volume series on agrarian reform programs and beneficiaries of the Department of Agrarian Reform. She edited the Small Business Entreprenews magazine which won an Anvil Award as best external publication many years ago. She had a four-year consultancy stint with the Development Bank of the Philippines, handling communication and promotion for its ISSEP lending project. Recently retired from the ISSI, she was retained by the office as publication and publicity consultant even as she contributes regularly to the Philippine Daily Inquirer small business features section and occasionally to the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She is mom to six grown-up children and grandma to a toddler. She maintains a personal blogsite at http://ode2old.blogspot.com whose theme-philosophy -- "the best is yet to be" -- she tries to keep faith with with blow-hot-blow-cold fervor. Read more from this author

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