Trends lead innovation or innovation makes trends?

After I read the article, Identifying Venture Opportunities, it comes to me that social innovation ideas belong to those who care about the ongoing matters. Work experiences and education background are foundations for social innovation while being kept updated is the key to innovation. On the other hand, social ventures can also lead new trends. Whole Foods Market emerged when people became aware of healthy food. Also, Whole Foods Market makes more people buy organic food. Intuited was founded when personal computer grew at a fast pace to substitute paper work on financial accounting. After that, people not only do financial accounting by computer but also do all kinds of financial calculations. The article reminds me of a remarkable smartphone messaging application in China, WeChat. It has huge market share, changes people’s life and stimulates the development of other industries. I will elaborate it in detail in this blog.

In 2010, due to the development of telecommunication networks and wireless, the lack of competition in telecommunication industry and the popularity of smartphones, people shifts their communication ways from short messages and phone calls to messaging applications. WeChat then came into people’s sight. The basic function of WeChat is sending messages. What at first makes it different from other messaging applications is that it can send several kinds of messages. It supports one to one text, one to many messaging, hold-to talk voice messaging and photos or videos sharing. After its first launch, it receives wide welcome and then makes several improvements which makes WeChat as a social networking platform. There are three distinctive characteristics of WeChat. First, the function “Moments” enables users to share photos, articles and videos with their contacts. This function also protects users’ privacy. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Moments only allow contacts to see the contents and the same to the replies. Secondly, the ways to add new contacts are quick and interesting. Since users may have the same usernames, it causes troubles when adding new contacts. WeChat has two new ways. One is Shake. WeChat will show all the people who shake their mobile phones at the same time. The probability is less when two users with the same usernames shakes at the same time. The other is scanning QR code. Every user has one unique QR code, and one can add new contacts by scanning the QR code. This way is efficient and accurate. Thirdly, it is the games in WeChat. They enable users to play games with their contacts. The latest version even adds virtual banking and online shopping. Users can spend all their leisure time on WeChat. According to The Wall Street Journal, WeChat now has more than 272 million users. It definitely changes people’s life and the society.

There are two reasons accounting for the success of WeChat. First, it has fantastic ideas of social networking. Secondly, WeChat belongs to a successful online chatting company, Tencent. Before WeChat, Tencent has already gained a large amount of users for other products. Therefore, Tencent knows well about the characteristics of its users. WeChat in most cases only apply existing technology. When several popular technologies are put together, the fancy application emerges. The WeChat case seems to create a circle. Technology trends result in new applications. New applications creates new markets. New markets make new trends. Social ventures deal with social issues and also, social issues pushes new social ventures.