Ahmed AlAnsari's Blog, page 2

Understanding Innovation

Understanding Innovation is the first factor of the series 6 Factors to Improve Innovation in the GCC Region.

Before we move on and dive deeper into the series. We need to understand the theory behind innovation and why it is critical in our dynamic society.

What is Innovation

The word innovation battles with a legitimate definition due to the enormous technological disruption that the world has witnessed over the last century. Nowadays, most people associate the term innovation with technology; however, as we will clarify underneath, the term itself has a significantly more general importance.

Drew Boyd defined innovation as,

“Anything that is new, useful and surprising”.

Drew Boyd

while Paul Sloane simplified it even more as he stated,

“Creativity is thinking of something new. Innovation is the implementation of something new”.

Paul Sloane

As is clear from above, innovation is not linked to the field of technology alone as some people have misunderstood. A person can be innovative in many other circumstances or industries. I.e. creative art such as Van Gogh, performance such as Michael Jackson, writing such as Najeeb Mahfouz, health and philosophy such as Ibn Sina, martial art such as Bruce Lee, and poetry such as Abdulrahman Rafee.

Image 1.1 – Samples of different types of Innovators in various fields and industries.

Innovation can occur in your strategies, methods, models, or creations. Parents can practice innovative methods to raise their children; chefs can be innovative in their cooking styles and presentations, while marketers can be innovative in their strategies and executions.

Why Innovation is Important?

Throughout history, innovation was one of the core elements to cope with disruptions or even create ones. When people discovered how to generate fire, their lifestyle and food habit have changed dramatically since then.

The same principle when cars were invented, people don’t ride horses or camels to their offices anymore. Successful innovations are associated with added values, and those values are what make people switch their interest, lifestyle, or even their beliefs.

As Simone Sinek ones stated,

“There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.”

Simone Sinek

This is how we improve societies or present innovations. If we are capable to convince a group of individuals to place stock in our novel idea/implementation, at that point we have effectively accomplished our initial achievement.

Let’s consider the following example based on an article by historyofpencils.com. Back in the 6th Millennium BC, people noticed the need for a mechanism to record and communicate their thoughts and beliefs. With the available resources back then, they have come with the idea of curving on stones with woods and metals.

At that moment, this was a significant innovation that undoubtedly created a unique set of essential tools and cultural symbols that allowed a social group of people to properly communicate with each other and send their stories and thoughts to the future.

After a few renewable generations, and as a result of cumulative knowledge, people have discovered better ways to write on wax tablets, leathers, and paper using brushes, chalks, and ink quills. It’s been a few centuries later when the Fountain and Ballpoint pens were invented.

This shows us how people have switched their entire writing system every time they experienced a better option that provided them with greater values.

The limitation of big stone tablets and the difficulties in curving with metals and woods led to the use of wax tablets and leathers while the limitations of inks, wax tablets, and leathers led to the preference of using pencils, pens, and papers.

At present, we can produce papers and pens in mass quantities; in fact, we can utilize smart devices and printers to eliminate the use of pens and pencils in the first place.

A recent example endures the visible presence of Cryptocurrency and its associated Blockchain technology. Like any other analog currency, if people did not believe in the concept and there was no consumer demand, obviously the system has not survived.

The examples set out above are to clarify how innovation can create or cope with disruptions from the very beginning of humankind and how it plays a key role in changing people’s behavior and beliefs.

It is crucial to note that innovation is not a simple process; it needs to be backed up with the right foundation, expertise, circumstances, and creativity to turn our concepts into reality.

After understanding the theory of innovation and why it is substantial, the next article will address the concept of parenthood and how it can act as the root cause for raising society’s knowledge base.

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6 Factors to Improve Innovation in the GCC Region

The 6 Factors to improve innovation in the GCC region comprise a series of articles aimed at providing insights into the various components that might be limiting our progress towards innovation.

In the upcoming series of articles, we will tackle 6 different factors that can improve innovation in the GCC region. We will be going through the definition and importance of innovation, parenthood and its direct effect on future generations, developing a dynamic educational ecosystem, understanding self-dependency in society, monitoring and managing disruptions as well as preparing the next level 5 leaderships.

Our GCC region has improved dramatically in the past decades. According to Zaid Awad in his article The Five Industry Sectors Keeping the GCC on the Global Map, the GCC region is known globally in the fields of energy and power, transport and logistics, health care, retail, and real estate.

In addition, fields such as banking and finance, marketing, insurance, entrepreneurship, visual, and performing arts are getting much more attention compared to a few decades ago.

However, when it comes to the other side of the equation, we are still falling under the late majority category, coming up short on a recognizable measure of novelty, creations, discoveries, expertise, and talents.

This is not another Covid-19 blog as we will be discussing factors that are affecting our society way before the pandemic. However, the Covid-19 has opened our eyes to a new school of thought. People around the world realized that they are too dependent on each other.

As airports stopped to operate and some countries became partly isolated, people found that they could not even manufacture their basic needs for masks, drugs, or even retain their business status or economic conditions.

Governments and societies around the world are trying their best to sustain their health, resources, businesses, and jobs even at an individual level. It replicates one of the best scenarios of how societies around the world collaborated hand in hand towards a greater goal.

On the other hand, we have discovered that we are not prepared for the unexpected and that existing societies are not capable of facing significant disturbances.

To improve innovation in any society, we need to have a strong balance between a global ecosystem and self-dependency.

In the past two decades, we saw a lot of initiatives that build up a few blocks of success to end up waiting for a miracle to move the progress forward. In contrast, we have a few success stories that everyone else wants to clone or replicate. A lot of speeches, events, and awareness sessions all over the GCC in the last few years but the progress is really slow and the achievements are barely noticeable.

How many speeches and awareness-raising sessions we need to move forward towards execution?!

There are few promising initiatives by all the GCC countries that vary in quantity, scale, and effectiveness to spread awareness, enhances research, support education, and invest in entrepreneurship such as Tamkeen in Bahrain, RPDC Innovations in Saudi Arabia, and Mohamed bin Zayed University for Artificial Intelligence in UAE, Qatar Foundation in Qatar, KFAS in Kuwait, and the Research Council in Oman.

Governments, academic institutions, innovation hubs, and the few research centers available are doing their utmost to build a strong infrastructure to create a well-defined ecosystem. Nevertheless, the ecosystem is not well integrated where certain nodes are absent and other nodes are too weak to carry out their tasks.

Sometimes we have great ideas, insatiable hopes, and the will of fire to break through a new world of learning, achievement, and success, to find ourselves stuck in the middle of a process that lacks knowledge, expertise, and tons of resources to end up blaming other entities for our failure.

We pay attention to what other people have done and apprise them while we are not ready to improve ourselves and suppress their achievements. In fact, when we require something, we end up approaching other societies as we are not able to achieve it ourselves.

It doesn’t mean that we need to be 100% self-dependent to survive. However, we need to achieve the balance between our strengths and weaknesses in terms of our core needs, unique deliverables, financial resources, and capable expertise.

Various components may influence the progression of innovation in current society. The following set of articles will present the 6 factors that I believe might improve the framework of innovation in our dearest GCC nations whenever followed accurately.

In the next article “Understanding Innovation“, we will define and understand the concept of innovation and clear any confusion that might exist. Moreover, we will explain the fact of why innovation is important in our ongoing disrupted world?

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Visual Fictional Characters – Storytelling Vs Visual Art

Fictional characters, we find them mostly everywhere! in books that we read, cartoons, ads, and movies that we watch, as well as toys and video games that we play. We live and interact with them in their imaginary worlds and enjoy all the stories that they tell.

The way they are described, their emotions, dress code, moves, expressions, personalities, lifestyle…etc, all sums together to provide us with a unique experience that lets us believe, listen, and get emotionally attached to them.

According to a dynamic List of highest-grossing media franchises featured in fandom.com, there are fictional characters that made their associated brands worth billions of dollars such as Pokémon with an estimated revenue of 95B$, Hello Kitty (80B$), Winnie the Pooh (75B$) or Spiderman (28B$).  

Sales and revenues of Licensed merchandise, books, box office, video games, toys and card games, retail, DVD, ads, stage play, …etc that features those characters boost their brand equity dramatically.

It might start with a fictional character such as Harry Potter in a series of books to expand into an empire of movie chains, video games, and multi-billion merchandise businesses.

We can see fictional characters that represent and identify their own corporates genuinely such as Mario (Nintendo), Sonic (Sega), or characters that became idealistic symbols for an entire culture such as Mickey Mouse and Barbie.

We have Characters who positioned themselves under their novel genres such as Pikachu from Pokemon and Superman from DC. In Japan, there are anime characters who are associated with the entire country’s heritage such as Doraemon and Anpanman.

The list can go on to infinity with thousands of fictional characters entered our lives through different media channels affecting our lifestyles, decisions, personalities, and reactions.

The Art ofStorytelling

Characters in stories, games, and movies are not a result of coincidence. Character design is a mixture of two creative industries, Visual Art and Storytelling. While most of the people will be giving more attention to the visual aspect of the character, the backbone of character design is the story that they communicate.

Character’s biography, personality, dress code, appearance, accessories, movement, and expressions should be creatively crafted in words even before starting a concept art. In fact, fictional characters in books or narratives might not have a visual at all! As a visual artist, you are always tempted to start sketching or modeling before connecting the rest of the puzzle together.

However, in complex scenarios, this might cause a disaster in your production workflow, especially if you are working on projects such as Avengers, Naruto, or Final Fantasy where all the characters are interconnected with the main storyline, belonged under the same environment, and associated with each other in sub-stories.

Visual Art – The Inflection Point

In contrast, visual art is what makes thesenarratives come to Life. The tale of the character must genuinely representshapes, forms, figures, poses, expressions, textures, colors, lightings,shades, and shadows to convince the audience with the story in mind. We see a lotof concept arts that we understand their stories, even without any explanation!This is due to our brain’s ability to make complex reasoning and comparisons.

Let’s take a protagonist such as Guybrush Threepwood from the Monkey Island game series as an example. Guybrush is a fictional character who claims to be a mighty pirate. He is a tall middle age youthful character who throws himself into trouble due to his simplicity. However, he always finds a way out by fixing a hilarious puzzle. He fell in love with governor daughter Elaine Marley and always gets in trouble with the villain pirate LeChuck.

It’s important to notice that Guybrush‘s pirate costume, hairstyle, his numb long face, and youthful expressions are what made him believable and lovable. The way that he speaks and makes hilarious jokes made him unique and different.

We get attached to those characters to an extreme ofplaying their games, watching their movies, wearing their costumes, buyingtheir merchandise, as well as feeling and reacting to their emotions andbeliefs.

Nowadays, with more than millions of fictional characters, the character must stand out from the crowd by creating a memorable iconic figure that tells an extraordinary story and creatively incorporates the character’s visual and story dimensions.

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