In"The Way Forward for Samsung, and Innovation", it speaks at length about finding a manufacturer's own 'experience'. The example that the author used was Apple. Every Apple device works in the same way. The touchpad on an Apple laptop navigates the monitor in the same way that your finger would on an iPhone, and those same motions on the iPhone remain true for the iPad. The fonts are all the same, the way in which one would access information is the same, even something as simple as the ratios used (the Golden Ratio) for the dimensions of the device are the same. The 'Apple Experience' pervades through every single one of its products. When you buy an Apple device, you know that it will be just like any other Apple device (obvious product differences aside).

With Samsung, as the article discusses, this is not the case. The Samsung phone that I had when I was younger was different that the Samsung phone that my friend had. Obvious differences aside, such as a flip phone to a full keyboard, they were two entirely different things. The way I got to messages was different, if I pressed the left menu button on his phone I got taken to contacts, rather than recent calls. This issue pervades to this day, and it prevents Samsung from attracting 'true loyalty', of the almost cultish variety that Apple has.

With regards to ourselves, I feel as if the lesson to be learned here is to not fall into the trap that Apple wants everyone to fall into. There is no perfect formula for anything in the manufacturers world - there is always going to be something else out there that one could brand as their own. As innovators, our job is to create that something that nobody else has, rather than chasing a model that somebody else has already proven. We need our pinch-to-zoom, so to speak - using that same idea, as Samsung has tried to do, will always put you behind the original. Discover.

Innovation springs from the most unlikely of places, and also from the most likely. New ideas are hard to come up with, yet at the same time new things crop up almost at random. This is the unexpected. That event, good or bad, or perhaps completely unrelated, that somehow manages to change you, your community, your industry, or even your world.

As I believe we spoke about in class, Post-it notes were discovered in this way - a bad event. The glue that they were supposed to be developing was terrible. It was weak, and could barely hold anything together. But somebody had the thought - "Hey, what if we put this on paper?" And so the Post-it note was born.

People want to live in a 'perfect world'. Everybody wants to have everything that they ever wanted, not having to worry about bills, or food, or if the people they care about are safe - this doesn't exist. It can't exist. This issue was addressed by Mr. Smith in the Matrix, when he tells Morpheus about the first Matrix - how it was a perfect world. People's minds rejected it: to achieve, and know that you have achieved, perfection, the human mind seems to have an object of comparison - other people.

Much in the same way, innovation can stem from an incongruity in our lives. How we want to perceive the world, and how it actually is. The space for innovation lies somewhere bridging that gap. Can you create something that can bring people closer to the perfection that they crave? And is it better enough than the current options available to create a sense of elevation in the person who has what you created compared to one who doesn't?

The way your world, and the people in it, work can and will change the way you  think. As a white kid growing up in an urban setting, I have a very different perception of certain things than many of my friends, who graduated from my high school, a small private college-prep school. To them, there isn't as much of a sense of "street smarts", and in the same way, I feel out of place in suburban streets, and my thought process changes. What's around you will affect how you think - there are studies showing that people are more creative when they are sitting in a blue room compared to a red one, or a white one. The people around you, the social demographic, only do more to add to your altered environment. New ways of thought, sparking new roads, new ideas, and finally - something new. That is the creative process.

There are numerous new policies and innovations in our government today, the most recent being the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Although the concept of universal healthcare isn't a new one, the employ of any similar system (even one as convoluted as the ACA), is quite a change for our government.
Another example of an innovation implemented by our government is the Tennessee Valley Authority, in which the government produced electricity and then sold it, creating a benchmark for energy prices throughout the country.
One idea that I've fallen in love with is actually a modification and an improvement to the already prevalent public transit systems present in most of our major cities. I would outfit a fleet of buses with solar panels as well as hybrid engines akin to those in cars, the combination of which should make the cost of fuel a non-issue when compared to current fuel consumption in modern transit systems. In addition, I would run this system much more often than most conventional systems, allowing for safer transport (would run through the night), as well as more consistent, reliable, and more readily available transport - saving the people in my city money, as they would not need to pay for their own vehicle and fuel, as well as time spent in unpredictable traffic situations.