Innovation Always Trumps Invention

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2011/id20110114_286049.htm

by ashwinl • 15 years ago

16 5 15 years ago

Confusion• 15 years ago

I don't see anything other than a personal preference in how the words should be used. Innovation trumps invention: yeah, because you just defined the words to mean that. Why innovation should necessarily imply market success is beyond me. I guess if SpaceX ultimately fails, they haven't been innovative...

biot• 15 years ago

What I got from it is that innovation is a specific application of an invention. Inventing the internet didn't result in much until people found innovative ways to use it. Of course, these innovations could be described as inventions... if that were to ever happen, people might start to do silly things like try to patent software. How crazy would that be?

thezeus18• 15 years ago

It's a marketing thing, if you make your customers think that you're selling a completely different category of product they'll eat it up. People will see through anything you try to say about your brand of soap, but when it comes to "cleansing body wash" they can't immediately claim knowledge, and they will be at least temporarily open to whatever you tell them. Here the product is his mediocre restatement of things mostly everybody already knew already.

Full disclosure: I am not a marketing major, so this may be mostly made-up.

6ren• 15 years ago

I'm happy to define invention as the making, and innovation as the making+people wanting. But he's defining it in terms of intention: an inventor creates something for its own sake; whereas when an innovator creates for a market need. It means the same act of creation could be called invention or innovation, depending on the intention.

A deeper objection is that being market-lead only leads where the market already knows it wants to go. It is a problem in search of a solution. But there's the other, more interesting engineering-lead innovation, which is a solution in search of a problem. The Innovator's Dilemma has examples of the latter, such as tiny disk-drives and offroad minibikes.

And I think Steve Jobs is famous for not being market-lead (which is how the article presents him). The iPod wasn't market-led. People didn't say "we need an iPad", in fact many had doubts about it. It is true, however, that he intended and planned it to be a market success - he wasn't just "inventing" without regard to widespread adoption.

I think better definitions are that invention is creating new products, and innovation is creating new businesses. Invention can be a component of innovation. An innovation can target an existing or imagined market need. However, these terms already have meanings, so perhaps we're better off just saying what we mean.

PS: I looked at one inventions he mentions, and it seems cool: Liftaem, a bed-to-gurney hovercraft. When I've seen patients transferred manually in hospitals, I've thought it looks shockingly primitive. http://tincmag.com/2010/12/09/smart-medical-technologys-lift...

beza1e1• 15 years ago

In my definitions, innovation is simply the step after invention and before imitation.

* invention: have an idea and build a prototype to verify

* innovation: make it a product and sell it

* imitation: make it scale

Innovation Always Trumps Invention

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