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Innovations



Innovations
Perspectives, The NLM, Sunday, 22 March 1998

Necessity is the father of invention, it is said.  The same is true of
innovation.  To invent is to make something totally new, whereas innovation
has more to do with making something like a trailer, a thresher or some
appliance that may be fitted to the original invention to make it serve
some new purpose.

Take for instance what today is quite popular with the gradually
mechanizing rural scene, the Trawler-G, or Trawler-Jeep as we call it
regardless of what the original name it had.

It is a trailer attached to what could by itself be a push-plough with an
engine.

Not only is it popular on the rural scene, but municipal workers attending
to road repairs and such like have adopted it as a convenient mini-truck to
transport materials and crew.

We are an agricultural country taking the first few steps toward gradual
industrialization.  And these steps include high demand for inventors and
innovators.

We have seen many cases of inventors who take several parts of several
different machines to make one which they conveniently identify with
whatever purpose such a product might serve.  

The huller, another popular innovation on the farm, is a paddy husking
device hitched to a water-pump engine.

It has doubled as a rice mill and serves the rural populace well.

Die-cutting machines and others in the machine-tool workshop see a good
deal of innovation relied upon in the absence of the genuine imports.

In many cases, innovations are the supplements to aid the users of
originals.  Yet their money-saving nature and usefulness make them and
their makers truly admirable.

Other than innovations, spare parts for different cars and trucks, various
kinds of boats and the like which have running parts for which spare parts
are scarce make the innovators reliable suppliers of import substitutes.

These days when all nations big and small have to be frugal, what with the
monetary meltdown in certain countries having repercussions on those
trading with them and with diminished hard currency earnings, innovators or
inventors or whatever we may rely upon are welcome.

If necessity is the father of invention, the innovator is to be lauded for
his contribution to the well-being of others.



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