Did you know that the human brain is hardwired to solve problems and address challenges, and it is that process which moves innovators into winning circles? So where is your best problem to solve and how could this solution move you forward? I was interested to see the 2006 Young Innovators recognized at MIT’s Technology Review today … mainly because of the way problems were addressed by the winner. 
Joshua Schachter … selected as the 2006 young innovator for his work that identified a problem and then set out to create an innovation to solve it better than any others. Specifically … he showed … how tags exploit the self-interest of individuals to organize the Web for everyone. Joshua zeroed in on his sense that people wanted good links and saw that they were also interested in discovering what others saw as interesting.
That perceived need motivated him to launch the website del.icio.us. And…”Within a couple of years, hundreds of thousands of people were using del.icio.us, and it had metamorphosed into a system for organizing not just individuals information but the whole Web. Today it exemplifies the promise of what's often called Web 2.0--websites and online applications that rely on user participation to achieve their greatest value.”
This new book-marking system allows people to tag pages – using whatever words they want – and that fact made this storing system incredibly useful to people. Check out the details to see how this work grew on the notion that: "You have to solve a problem that people actually have," Schachter says. "But it's not always a problem that they know they have, so that's tricky."
What do you think?
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