Toolkits are key for democratizing innovation

Today, democratization is sweeping across many spheres of modern living, including innovation of technology based products, services and solutions.

Democratization of Innovation signifies the shift in ‘innovation happening at big firms’ to ‘innovation being driven by end-users / individuals’.

Rapid advances in technology has brought down the cost of technology based products and tools during the last decade. This has made such products & tools lot more affordable for the common man. Technology has also become highly prevalent in people's lives and more and more people have access to technology tools than ever before. Internet based communication and collaboration tools have connected people from different parts of the world together and have made it possible for sharing knowledge widely with each other. This has led to the rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture among the tech-savvy population, who, armed with knowledge of technology and access to powerful technology tools are able to tinker with technologies, experiment and build or customize products, solutions and services on their own, which hitherto was the sole domain of high-tech firms. These DIY enthusiasts and innovating individuals are popularly called "Makers".

These innovating individuals are self-motivated and driven individuals. However, like all others, they too face challenges in the process of innovating. A few prominent challenges that many of them face include:

1. Knowledge and skills in right technologies related to their innovation area(s). Most of the Makers are tech-savvy individuals, but it doesn't mean that they have the required level or depth of knowledge and skills in the relevant technologies. They do need to learn, and it takes time to gain desired skill levels to innovate.
2. Time and effort it takes to innovate. This becomes important as most Makers also are students or working professionals with limited spare time at their disposal.
3. Ready availability of resource materials required for innovating. All resource materials required for the innovation may not be readily or easily available. One has to scout for the right resources in the right places, and this does take significant time and effort. At times, one has to make compromises with resources due to non-availability of the right materials.
4. Cost of innovation. This is especially critical as most innovations involve repeated trial and error process. Not everyone can afford to splurge on their creative pursuits. As such, cost becomes a very important factor.
5. Access to support and guidance when faced with challenges. Innovating is full of pitfalls. One can get struck and spend days together struggling to find a solution. A helpful hand is desired in such situations even by the experienced innovators.

Given these challenges, Makers often look for the right kind of innovation enabler or support tools / toolkits that help them make the optimum use of their time, effort and budget in order to produce tangible results within reasonable time frame and budget.

Among the many tools used by Makers, innovation-enabler toolkits, rapid prototyping tools, and rapid application development (RAD) tools play a very important role. The goal of these tools and toolkits is to enable an innovator or a Maker to rapidly design and develop custom product prototypes that satisfies a specific or personal need, and at a fraction of the time and cost than if they had been developed from scratch.

In his celebrated book "Democratizing Innovation", author and director of MIT Innovation Lab, Eric Von Hippel says:

"By making innovation cheaper and quicker for users,

toolkits can increase the volume of user innovation. They also can channel innovative effort into directions supported by toolkits".

Toolkits provide the key building-blocks for a novice or budding innovator to jump-start with the innovation process. Specifically, these tools and toolkits offer the following advantages:

• They channelize user energies on the core innovation or problem solving aspect.
• They allow the user to innovate without having to understand the nuts and bolts of underlying technologies, nor do they require the user to have specialized skills such as software programming.
• They are expected to be user-friendly and require no specialized knowledge, skills or training to operate. They may include basic usage instructions to make it easy to get started though.
• They allow for trial-and-error based learning and innovation.
• They allow the user to customize, configure and personalize their designs and innovations according to their needs and preferences.
• They allow users to instantiate a variety of use cases or applications with minimal effort and time.
• They offer common modules or features that can be incorporated into custom designs and applications that the user has envisaged as part of his/her innovation.
• They often package several resources, functionalities and artifacts into one kit so that the innovator doesn't have to scout for them independently.