Where and when does innovation start?

A few night ago, my 10 year old daughter talked to me and declared that in 10 years we will all be drying with automated blowers after a shower. This statement has taken me by surprise, and I naturally asked why she thinks so. Her explanation is that showers are tight places to dry your self with a towel and that the cost of producing towels plus constant washing is more expensive than the cost of of blow drying. She actually has a point, if you look at most hotels, towels are washed everyday and in most cases changed every month, a wasteful exercise. Now it dawn to me the question of what triggers innovation, how does it start? Do we start innovating because we do not like the way current things work? Out of necessity? Out of curiosity?

Let's discount the fact that some people are keener to innovate than others and focus on why. In the telecoms world, we innovate to solve common issues and make them simpler, think iPhone. Now's let's apply that to software, we innovate to make life a bit easier, think of business intelligence solutions. Clearly to me innovation is driven by the need to improve something and at the same time generate financial returns. If I look back at AmanziTel 4 years ago, we started processing drive test data and now we are in the forefront of end2end CEM and SQM. We got here because of the need to simplify the the workload of our customers, make their jobs a bit easier but more importantly keep their own subscribers/customers happy and satisfied. 

I read an Ascom press release two days ago about TEMS visualization supporting various data formats, and have the question that why are they re-inventing the wheel? Actix was there 15 years ago with proprietary software, we innovated in that space 4 years ago with open source solutions and have moved on. Perhaps to some innovation comes late and starts to play catch up. I still believe that the future of telecoms service delivery is in actual customer experience, if done right ti can replace all expensive SQM systems today. That statement actually did not come from me but from a large operator group after seeing what we can do for them.