Crack the Mindset: A journey to be an innovator

The word “Innovation” is mostly been taken in a very complicated and hard to reach aspect. You need to be highly educated. You need to be highly funded. You need to be in a worldly profiled company.

Beginning with the common misunderstanding about the word ‘Innovation’, as we’re sitting down today with Khun Aim Amarit Charoenphan, ASEAN Director of Impact Collective, our honored guest. Khun Aim will be sharing his viewpoint towards Innovation, as an innovator, and as an angel investor who has been dedicating himself to nurturing new innovators to become the next unicorn in the Thai startups industry. Is innovation really unapproachable? What good innovators should be from an investor’s point of view?  How would we bring our innovation to success? Let’s crack our mindset with Khun Aim and find the answer to these questions together

”The core of innovation is just to look deeply into one particular problem, comprehend and see whether the solutions nowadays are good enough or there could be better options, and how can we add our ideas into that. Are there any new technologies, new formulas, new medicines that could have helped solve the problem better?  However, the essential innovation is to take action. Take your idea to a test-run, and have it evaluated. If you can do this, you can be an innovator.”

This is Khun Aim’s perspective towards the word ‘Innovation’. He also added that the inspiration for innovation can be found around us. The problems we want to solve and the driving force to create innovation don’t necessarily have to be complicated. In fact, innovations are mostly driven by the will to live. Besides, there are many sources we can find to support creating our innovations. Whether it’s technologies, knowledge, fundings, and all other supporting campaigns. What we need to do is to comprehend the problems or the things we need to fix, find the inspiration to solve them and change our idea into action. With this, we are already on the path of being innovators

“Here in Thai society, we are somehow raised to fear. Fear of being unsuccessful. Fear of failure. Fear of losing our face in society. Still, to make the difficulties possible, to be an innovator, I’m telling you to prepare yourself to fail on your first try.  you need to show your stuff. Be brave. Put your idea in the market. Sell it.”

Fear is what Khun Aim emphasized as the major blockade for good innovations from happening commercially, fear of rejection, fear of being perceived as a clown, fear of your idea being stolen, even fear of turning your idea into action. These are all comfort zones that limit good ideas for being just in the paper or in the lab.  The thoughts will block us from taking good ideas and turning them into a great business. No investor will see you and your project. Even worse, our collective knowledge and experiences will never be used to help solve the problems and improve people’s quality of life.

Khun Aim has shared his words to the new generation who are entering the path of being an innovator to accept failure as the situation we all need to overcome in order to succeed. Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to be perceived as a clown, Khun Aim’s encouragement. 

“I’m telling you, those clowns 10 years ago, now they’re founders whose innovations we can’t live without nowadays. Everyone doubted that a social media like Facebook would work. Everyone doubted how Grab would survive here in Thailand, against the Taxi mafia. Everyone doubted that they would get hacked or cheated if they used e-commerce platforms. It turned out that without these innovations, we cannot live without in our current society.”