A woman who invented today

A little story that demostrates how innovation is done in real life

When we think of “innovation” we immediately imagine SpaceX, artificial intelligence, fancy prosthetics to save someone’s life or make it comfortable. These are all brilliant examples of innovation. But it is not HOW the innovation is done. It is the result, but not the process.

I really love this post that appeared not long ago on Reddit. A developer explains what game development is about. It goes like this: you spend tons of your time and effort to do one little detail right. But the trick is that if you’ve done it right nobody will notice. Everyone will notice only if you’ve failed to do it right.

It is the same way innovation works — one little step at a time. But every little step matters because if you get it wrong it will have a huge impact.

Here’s a story that demonstrates this principle.

In the early 70s Laila Ohlgren was the only woman engineer in Sweden. She was a part of the group that was in charge of developing a mobile network for Ericsson — the first telecommunications operator to work in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

At some point in time, the group was assigned to deal with the major challenge of actual phones mobility. Test that had been run…