Innovations that changed the way we live

Innovation begins with new ideas. New ideas can come from many different sources: inventors, users, firms, competitors, universities, or governments. New products are created by combining new ideas with resources and expertise.

Innovation may be radical – a whole new design and architecture using new components, or it may be incremental – improvements or changes to the existing products. In either case, these products should satisfy needs and wants of their customers or create new opportunities. This article discusses how simple ideas had been turned into innovative products that changed the way we live.

Car parts incubator

Sri Lanka has been considered as one of the best developing countries with a low infant motality rate with10 deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births. Many factors contributed to maintain such alow rate: free health services, health education and experienced primary health care workers.

However, most of our neighbouring countries – India (46 deaths per 1,000 live births), Pakistan (61) and Bangladesh (49) face numerous challenges to keep this rate under control. Premature birth is the leading cause of death in infants. Most of these babies need to sleep in an incubator to stay warm.

Incubators keep these babies alive. However, rural hospitals in developing nations do not have enough incubators. A new one could cost between US $5,000-$40,000. Some of those hospitals often receive used or refurbished incubators from different organisations as donations. But, when these incubators break, they sit idle or are discarded mainly due to lack of parts or repair know-how.  

These hospitals seldom find trained technicians to fix broken incubators. Technical manuals provided with these machines are written in English so most technicians won’t understand them. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that 1.1 million preterm babies die every yeardue to the lack of basic medical care.

The team ‘Design That Matters (DTM),’ comprised of university students found that no matter what state rural the communities are in, there are always vehicles running on the roads of those communities. When these vehicles break, local car mechanics fix them. Even local auto industries have well-established distribution channels to deliver auto parts to the most remote villages.

There are over 40,000 parts that can be found in a standard vehicle. The team looked into the possibility of using auto parts in the incubator design.  They designed an incubator using car parts and named it ‘NeoNurture.’

It uses car headlights as a heating section, a dashboard fan for air circulation, signal lights and a door chime as alarms, and a motorcycle battery and car cigarette lighter as power backup during power outages. The cost of this incubator is around $1,000 and most importantly, it can be fixed by the local auto mechanics!

The NeoNurture wasn’t an overnight design. This team also involved clinicians, designers, and engineers. First, they identified the problem – current incubators are of limited utility due to the lack of replacements, parts and technicians. Secondly, they conducted a feasibility study to assure the effectiveness of an incubator made of car parts. Thirdly, the designers and engineers closely worked with clinical team to test the prototype.

The most important lesson that we can learn from this product is that it was designed for local conditions by leveraging the existing car parts and the knowledge of auto technicians.

Ten thousand miles sandals:

African nations are abundant with natural resources but many of these countries are poor in human development. Majority of the people earn less than a dollar a day. In rural areas, agriculture is the main source of income. Severe drought poses many challenges. No rain, no crops. Each day, they walk miles barefoot to get water and food.

Walking barefoot in extreme heat is painful. However, they cannot afford sandals or slippers. Besides ordinary sandals would last only a few weeks due to the distance they travel each day but they have a home-grown solution – tyre sandals – sandals made from recycled tyres. These sandals are cheap, comfortable and most importantly, they can wear them for another 10,000 miles. Tyre sandals are also popular among rural communities in Mexico, India and China.

Those Africans who walked barefoot knew exactly what they needed. They designed sandals using recycled tyres based on their own requirements: simplicity, low cost, and durability. The new sandals not only serve these needs, but are also sustainable. They use available resources effectively and create less stress on the environment.

Device that holds a thousand songs

Before Apple entered the portable music industry, few other companies dominated the market. Sony being the market leader offered series of portable music devices while Creative and Sonic Blue offered MP3, Flash and CD players.

However, Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs mentioned in the first ever iPod presentation back in 2001 that none of other companies had the ‘profound recipe’ for the portable music industry. Before Apple released its breakthrough innovation, the iPod, they looked at the service offerings of other products such as CD players, flash players, and mp3 players.

Apple compared features of each product – cost per song (device price/ number of songs it can hold), portability, quality of songs, storage capacity, download time, and battery life. The Apple created its first iPod by mixing best features from other products and leveraging its existing technologies. As a result, the first iPod was a MP3 player that played CD quality music, could hold 1000 songs, had a battery that played 10 hours of continuous music, could download 1000 songs under 10 minutes using fire wire whereas other devices would take close to five hours.

Key lesson

The low cost car part incubators can save thousands of lives of premature babies in poor countries. A pair of recycled tyre sandals guarantees thousands of miles of walking. The music device iPod puts ‘1000 songs in your pocket.’

All these innovations have changed the way people live. An interesting thing is that these products were designed by borrowing ideas from other products and reconfiguring them into new products, eliminating weak features. The new products work better and provide solutions for existing problems.



(The writer is currently working on a technology start-up in Toronto and has over 10 years of experience in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. He holds a Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology from the University of Waterloo and a B.Sc. in Accounting from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. He can be reached at [email protected].)