Tomorrow's technology today [engineering innovation]

In many of the recent Internet, music player, and cell phone innovations, the novel part is in making a digital service more convenient and easy to use. Here, technology is an enabler and innovation is based on understanding and predicting the evolution of user needs. In this paper, the author takes a refreshing and energizing look at the foundations of engineering innovation both from an individual and organizational point of view. When properly applied, this approach can give valuable guidance to a basic researcher seeking a new or modifying an existing avenue of research. This approach can also increase the long-term industrial relevance of research results.