IDEAS and INNOVATION

Ideas nowadays never seem to be original, and nothing ever really comes from true inspiration. Innovation (in my personal opinion) is bringing something completely new onto the market, something that no one has seen, something people will say "wow!" to. As my professor once said, the most interesting thing, and possibly the most challenging thing with innovation is that  humans typically tend towards the things we are most familiar with.

Take the segway for example. The design is brilliant- who wouldn't want to "just stand" and go places? The segway is possibly the greatest personal electrical transport system available. You would really think that the segway would be taking over the streets by now. However, there is nothing familiar to us about the segway - which is the reason why people never really got into the fad. The segway is definitely innovative, don't get me wrong, but to have a product that is both successful AND innovative is the ultimate challenge.

With the upcoming release of the RIM's Playbook, I feel like this topic is most appropriate for discussion today. RIM is receiving criticism for their lack of innovation, due to competition in the industry (i.e. Apple, Google Android) and I personally feel that although the Playbook is not up to par with the tablet industry, I wouldn't so easily dismiss the things that RIM has done quite well. If you don't know much about the upcoming Playbook, you can find the specs here.

Innovative:
The innovative things I personally found working as an intern at a blackberry developer partner is that the playbook's 7-inch form is definitely the way to go. I love the idea of being able to put a tablet in my pocket (or purse, because I am a woman). The fact that it will be able to run androids apps is also huge. I imagine that another company, say Apple for example, has never even thought about running android apps on their devices.

Although the playbook does not necessarily appeal to the everyday consumer, I imagine for large corporations this type of tablet is exactly what is needed. For example, imagine if all corporations who currently have SAP ERP systems, invested in playbooks and was able to manage their SAP services, whether it is banking, supply chain and etc. on-the-go on these portable devices. The Playbook has definitely won the corporate world in that aspect.

Success:
Who knows if the Playbook will be successfull, but by the looks of it, the Playbook will not do as well as RIM has hoped. The fact that the Playbook is currently missing key features such as mobile connectivity, email client, bbm, all which were natually expected to be there upon release date is a big mistake. As of now, there are still five days before the big release so let's all hope RIM will be able to step up it's game but by the looks of it, Bloomberg seems to be dissapointed by RIM's playbook.



Ideas:
I think in order for RIM's Playbook to be successful, RIM would definitely need to fill in on those missing feature pronto. The fact that the second version of iPad has already been released, RIM's Playbook should be bringing something even newer to the market. I think something like Facetime over BBM, or support for Video Conferencing from device for LiveMeeting could definitely help. Some sort of sync between BlackBerry and Playbook which allows the BlackBerry keyboard to sync with the screen on Playbook to allow for quicker typing, or even attaching it to a collapsable external keyboard to become a netbook (similar to the EEE Pad Transformer) would definitely help it's dominance in the corporate world. Laptops tend to be too big nowadays, and most corporate users are looking for something more portable. I, for one, hate carrying my laptop everyday to work.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any ideas that you think would help as well!
I would love to hear what other ideas people have to say, so feel free to drop a comment.