What if I told you that there was a concept so innovative that it would help you maximize your life to the fullest and avoid needless expenses and pointless harm to the environment? Would you buy into this concept? Would you be a paying customer? How much would you spend?
As I woke up on the morning of March 10, everything seemed perfectly normal. The routine seemed par for the course. I heard my kids from the other room as they came running in to watch a ritual Sunday morning cartoon. I did my standard look at the clock on the cable box and noticed it was later than normal. In fact, it was an hour later than normal. Daylight savings caught me off guard once again as it does twice every year. While I love the fact that the sun will stay out another hour, I never had quite understood the point of why we needed to change clocks to adjust to the sun. After all, it is 2019.
I did a little bit of research and discovered that the idea behind daylight savings, particularly why it is still in existence, is to solve real problems, which places the idea in comparison to any sharp, innovative concept. The idea is truly thinking outside the clocks.
The initial notion of daylight savings time was put in place to help farmers. This way the farmers could maximize the sun during the changing seasons. Currently, daylight savings helps preserve energy and enables us all to live a full day in a scheduled world.
The basis of maximizing daylight for energy conservation does remain, particularly in northern environments where the seasons change drastically. Efficiently utilizing Earth’s limited resources is a problem that is continuously attempting to be solved.
True innovation finds ways to push boundaries of social norms. This is the basis of Synapse Challenges, a crowdsourcing solution for organizations to solve real-world problems and create new products and services by igniting a diverse, innovative talent pool.
Visionaries have offered solutions that are so “outside the box” that they work. Nobody would have thought that IBM’s Watson could help to solve an issue with Metropolitan Ministries. A Synapse challenger proved that it could.
The concept of using blockchain to encrypt a pill dispenser was not on anybody’s radar. Mixing a wearable technology with an ERP system would be thought as too hard and far-fetched. Some ideas may be rehashing other concepts; while others may be so radical that they may just change the world works if implemented successfully. All of these have been pitched by Synapse Challengers.
Visionaries have the ability to take a problem and innovate game-changing solutions. Those who are willing to take risks and think differently while sticking to solving the problem can truly change the way the world works.
How you solve issues is up to you and will determine how far you go, whether in a Synapse Challenge or starting your first business. As you think about solving a problem, think as radical as daylight savings time, a solution to a problem that impacts the way we live.
I encourage you all to think outside the clocks.
