When we think of innovation we usually focus on narrow technology or business topics. Yet there are many non-business topics that could use a dose of innovative thinking as well (not to mention a good IT infrastructure!)

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article recently on what you could do today to improve the world for $10B. This is a large sum for normal humans but a piddling sum for governments. Here are the bottom line results (each result comes from US university researchers):

Terrorism: hardening terrorist targets is a high cost/low return activity in terms of lives saved. The best payoff comes in policing money transfers -for $128M annually, you could beef up Interpol and IMF activities to cut off funding to terrorist organizations ($11 return for every $1 invested on total investment of $128M/year).

Climate change: taxes and trading approaches again have a high cost/low return in terms of their effect on temperature change. On the other hand, researching new energy efficient technologies has a much higher return ($9 return for every $1 invested on total investment of up to $800B).

Diseases: improving health care in poor countries for heart disease and malaria offer a big payoff ($20 return for every $1 invested on total investment of $500M for malaria and $200M/year on heart medicines).

Hunger: improving nutrition for children ($17 return for every $1 invested on total investment of $60M per year providing vitamins to poor children and $60M per year in developing more nutritious staple crops such as rice).

So other than being fascinating, what does all of this have to do with business innovation? Plenty!

The essence of innovation is finding the right leverage points and attacking them with the right tools. Often we get wrapped up in optimizing existing processes rather than taking a bigger-picture view on how to get the biggest bang for the buck.

Improving a well understood process is always easier than tackling a messy, cross-company or inter-company process. It is easy to talk about global resources but hard to implement in a company where the HR and project management systems assume a single homogeneous workforce. It is easy to talk about 1:1 customer interactions, but hard to implement in a company where the business IT systems don't support customer-centric solutions selling.

Within IT, business analysts often have a good perspective on what the points of business leverage are - however they lack the right tools to solve the problems they identify.

Ten years ago, tools like MS Access, Lotus Notes, and Powerbuilder gave business analysts powerful tools for solving basic business problems. Today, the only way to build a browser-based system is to hire a team of sophisticated web designers and Java developers.

At WaveMaker, we provide tools to help business analysts innovate by democratizing the development of web applications. WaveMaker and other Web 2.0 tools companies like Tibco GI and Aptana are providing visual, open source platform for building web applications that deploy into a standard Java environment. The net result of this new market will put innovation back in the hands of business developers. We may not be directly responsible for helping to end world hunger, but we'd like to help!