Innovation and Invention

Originally posted 03/08/09

‘Innovation’ and ‘invention’ are not the same thing.  This less than entirely obviously point is made cogently in The Social Life of Innovation (2000), by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid:

‘Invention produces new ideas.  It requires innovation and organizational coordination, however, to turn these ideas into new products and processes.  But the distance that supports initial invention [i.e. keeping it separate from other economic processes] can hobble its transformation into organized innovation.  People who have gone away to think outside old paradigms may return souding to those within the old paradigm like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, babbling of unheard and unintelligible wonders.’

When those of us in the business of innovation meet inventors and inventive ideas, we should aim for both the insight to see opportunities to convert invention into innovation and the discipline to recognize which invention is unlikely to lead to profitable innovation (see my post on Good Ideas With No Business Model).