The Last Technological Innovations and Its Effects on Growth Process, Labor Market and Society

Book excerpt: Innovation, generally based on curiosity and intuition, is defined as a discovery, invention and an R&D process that brings solutions to a social, environmental and technological problem and also that creates value and meets communal needs in product, process, market, organizational and socialfields. All over the world, investments are based on capital accumulation; the idea of having more output with less input is based on production info; and technologies, production volume, the rise of motivation are based on labor force and therefore, they are all accepted as indicators of economic growth. Capital accumulation, technological developments and increase in labor force constitute the main dynamics of growth of the global world economy. Technological progress doesn’t only provide high output and productivity but it also creates economic growth. Since growth in economic sense corresponds to the rise in tools and products that are used to meet human needs, innovations create new employment and business lines at this point. On the other hand; innovations, in social sense, fight against poverty, inequality and also exclusion being related to them. Innovations offer technological, effective, productive and sustainable solutions to these problems in social sense. While developed countries that are more advanced in technology and economic growth, constitute only one fifth of the world population, they use four of five of the world resources and therefore, the gap between developing countries and them is increasing everyday. This situation is seen as an obstacle in front of the aim of a sustainable world. Since the direction of technological innovation is determined by social and economic needs, innovation types such as radical (disruptive), incremental, contrary, operational and marketing innovations create an effect of leverage with its niche role in sustainable development. Many problems, which are untouched in economic, social and technological senses and also which are seen desperate to solve, can only be solved through paradigm-shifting and disruptive (radical) innovations that should be applied in a way that will break the existing taboos. Disruptive innovations create new business lines by bringing radical solutions for the problems that seem unsolvable and stepwise (incremental, staggered) innovations strenghten the sub-innovations in these new businesslines. At this point; opening the way for innovations, attaching importance to creative ideas to increase efficiency, evaluating the contribution of innovation and also managing the processes well are quite important in innovation management. The authors in this book consider innovations in different fields by evaluating the effects of innovations on labor market, society and economy in order to manage the process well and contribute to it