My friends who are loved by Allah Ta’ala! Who says Islam is an ancient religion and does not follow developments? Even the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), he gave tips to his people about how to bring superior innovations that can benefit the world!

He said,

“Make things easy and do not make things difficult. Give glad tidings and do not frighten them away.”
(Narrated by Bukhari)

Pay attention, my friends, there are at least 4 (four) tips that we can take from his words. Here’s a formula that we can use as a guide to innovating:

1. Make things easy

An innovation must of course make one’s activities easy. We will see how trains can save humankind’s time in traveling without having to weary driving a private vehicle. We also see how computers have made human activity more practical and efficient.

Something cannot be an innovation if it is still a raw idea. The idea must be processed in such a way so that the benefits can be felt. That’s what we want from an innovation.

2. Don’t make things difficult

The innovations that have been created to make human affairs faster and more efficient should have features that don’t make it difficult for users.

For example, an accounting application was created to avoid manual calculations by financial staff who are prone to miscalculations and human errors. But what does it mean if the application actually has features that are not practical, making users confused about which features they need?

3. Give glad tidings

Who isn’t excited about the long awaited new feature? Marketers must be smart to provide good news about their innovative products. I take an example, mass transportation companies could display some banners that say that with their transportation, people’s trips will arrive twice as fast than using their own vehicles.

We can use the mass and print media as a means of spreading good news to the public about our innovative products.

4. Don’t frighten them away

It is undeniable that sometimes users are not satisfied with our innovative products. Our job in accordance with this last tip is, how to keep our customers so they don’t switch to other products.

Of course, by preparing experienced Customer Service who can calm angry customers. And don’t forget, that the product developers also prepare an incident report so that any incidents that are unpleasant to customers will no longer be repeated in the future.

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O my friends whom Allah loves, see? Islam has never prevented its people from bringing out an innovation, even encouraged them to make one or several. With a note, innovation is not against the Shari’a or is still within the scope that brings goodness and welfare to His creatures.