Innovation Always Trumps Invention(businessweek.com)
businessweek.com
Innovation Always Trumps Invention
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2011/id20110114_286049.htm
2 comments
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...
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.
Full disclosure: I am not a marketing major, so this may be mostly made-up.
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?
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...