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Before jumping straight into the meat of the issue, I wanted to take a step back and look at the root of what is being discussed: technology and innovation. The two words on their own are pretty easy to process. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines technology as “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area” and “a manner of accomplishing a task, especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge”. It also describes innovation as both “the introduction of something new” as well as ‘”a new idea, method, or device”.

Simply put, technology innovation can be characterised as a tool, product or service that applies knowledge in a new way, allowing for the ability to accomplish a task through the use of a new device or method. In today’s market, I think the distinction needs to be drawn between those who are truly innovating and those who are merely repackaging currently available technology.

The difference to me lies between design problem solving and development problem solving. Both are important and I’ll be the first to say that sometimes the line can get a little blurry.

As an example of repackaged technology that comes to mind, without naming names, are the number of services entering the market that are nothing more than database management tools that launch as soon as they have a prettier interface than their nearest competitor. The products offer the ability to create, read, update and delete data, to and from a database, as well as providing a way to link this data to each other in some way. Developers call this a CRUD system, which isn’t new or innovative.

At buildabrand, we think our work is the epitome of technology innovation. Our development problem solving is fully directed at creating a product that will eliminate branding barriers for startups, small businesses, creatives and designers. We believe we’re out in front with a radical approach to address barriers related to access, cost, application, timing and more. It also means that every day we need to solve problems. We don’t always have the components to solve these problems; sometimes we don’t even have the tools to build the components to solve the problems! We end up inventing tools that enable us to invent components that fit together to create an engine that solves a problem for our customers in a way that currently doesn’t exist.

To me, this process is what technology and innovation are all about.

An excellent example of one of our recent challenges: a product of ours was making quite extensive use of the Apache Batik project to help us with rendering and conversion. David Byard (our Senior Developer) discovered that we were only really using about 3% of the Batik framework, the rest was quite useless to us and it was also quite slow. David then invented a new way to render and convert our internal documents that was cleaner, easier and way more efficient than using Batik. We named it Elementary and it’s now the a large part of our core platform. It’s also over 80% faster than Batik!

We want everything we do to push out new boundaries, raise the bar and exceed expectation both as a service provider and as a technology company. If this kind of working environment and approach sounds appealing, check out our careers page and get in touch.

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