I'm on my way to a short vacation on Hawaii with my Fiancee, Kimberly. However, before I leave, I'd like to share some reflections on innovation.

What is innovation?

Is it coming up with something completely new that no one thought of before, and might be useful at some point? Or is it equally innovative to execute succesfully on a complex idea, previously thought of, but not successfully implemented?

Sometimes I feel like Woody Allen, who said: "I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown."

Similarly, it seems that we too often accept as innovative only ideas that are completely new to us,  when our innovative powers could in fact be equally or better applied to solving age-old problems better.

Take for example the concept of parallel computing. It's is a concept almost as old as computing itself. Yet, for decades we, the computer scientists, struggled to make effective use of many machines to solve one problem. We were stuck on the problem of procedural programming being essentially at odds with the parallel concept, and new abstract languages more easily parallelized where not widely adopted. So parallel computing remained largely confined to scientific or specialized applications.

Fast forward to today, and take a look at Google - massive parallelism of small machines at work on a very singluar task - to search the Internet faster than the most powerful mainframe could ever do. Or very similarly in the enterprise - look at the Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters, enabling many machines to work together on one simple query from a program that don't even need to know it's running on a grid (hence the name!).

Contrast these examples with efforts like semantic web. Although unquestionably a very innovative idea, and one that is of great interest to Oracle, we also have the reality that most companies are struggling with very basic data issues, such as how to consolidate all too many small databases into fewer, effecient instances.

In other words, I believe most businesses are more concerned with finding their way around Chinatown than knowing the universe. Accordingly, innovation - at least in the private sector - should always be viewed in the context of true problem solving: we can be called innovative to the extent we apply our intellect to the toughest problems real customers face and repeatedly find ways of overcoming them and making the solutions commercially available.

By that standard, I'm proud to say that I work for one of the truly innovative companies of our time.

Aloha.

J.

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