Want to be more innovative? Do some pro bono work for charity!
Netbooks is an example of innovation starting from the charity end. Working with less to create more.
"netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. … By the end of 2008 ... netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market." This is expected to almost double to 12 percent in 2009. From Wired magazine March 2009.
Not bad for a counter-intuitive approach to developing computer hardware.
And it probably all started from Nicholas Negroponte’s dream to build a <$100 laptop for children in the third world as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.