Introducing Innovation, Inc.

BOSTON — Billions of dollars and thousands of work hours are spent each day around the world chasing a single, yet powerful, idea: innovation.

Entrepreneurs seek it. Big companies covet it. Business school professors study it. Scientists poke and prod it. Economists worship it. Governments attempt to harness it. Management consultants and business book authors worldwide peddle its many secrets.

At its simplest level, innovation is about finding new ideas that make something better, from new products, to new technologies to more efficient manufacturing processes and more.

But there’s little doubt that innovation is a big idea, no matter how it's defined.

Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter — an oracle for innovation seekers around the world — called it the most important idea in business.

That’s because on a macro level, economic change revolves around innovation: someone has a good idea — often a technological or manufacturing improvement — that creates a temporary monopoly. The big profits that result then entice competitors to come up with their own similar ideas which, in turn, make more money — which leads to greater incentive to create more innovation in the marketplace.

“Those revolutions are not strictly incessant; they occur in discrete rushes which are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet,” Schumpeter wrote. “The process as a whole works incessantly however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles.”

Seen in this grand light, innovation is a virtuous — if sometimes ruthless — circle whirling round and round the global economy.

As we’ve learned covering the world each day here at GlobalPost, these ongoing revolutions know no boundaries.

Innovation pops up everywhere and in companies big and small — from a low-cost airline in booming India, to a neuroscientist innovator in Brazil, to a pioneering brewer in Sudan, to forward-thinking educators in Vietnam, to McDonald’s efforts on five continents to drive sales by constantly innovating its iconic menu to meet local tastes.

To get a better handle on this critical aspect of business and globalization, we’re today launching Innovation, Inc. — a new reporting series from GlobalPost.

For the rest of 2011, GlobalPost correspondents each week will seek out examples of innovations worldwide, from entrepreneurs to giant corporations, encompassing the intersecting fields of business, science, technology, government and more.

Who has the best ideas? How do they work? Where are they coming from? And how are they changing business, and life, around the planet?

To quote Schumpeter again: “Surely, nothing can be more plain or even more trite common sense than the proposition that innovation is at the center of practically all the phenomena, difficulties and problems of economic life in capitalist society.”

Understanding this global business and economic phenomenon is, simply put, the editorial goal of Innovation, Inc. We also, of course, hope to tell some great stories along the way.

Join us here to follow along each week, and we hope you enjoy the ride.