FRIDAY FUN: INVENTION vs INNOVATION

It has been a slow Friday for patent news (at least news that we find interesting) so we posit a question:  is it invention or innovation that leads to the development of new and useful manufactures etc?  The MIT Enterprise Technology Review writer Michael Schrage has thought about this a bit, and writes that there is "Much Ado about Invention" pointing to innovation, not invention, as the means by which products are brought to customers. 

The introductory paragraph begins:

Samuel F. B. Morse didn?t invent the telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell didn?t invent the telephone. Thomas Edison invented neither the light bulb nor the movie camera. Guglielmo Marconi most assuredly didn?t invent radio. Neither Philo Farnsworth nor Vladimir Zworykin invented television. The integrated circuit?s provenance remains in simmering dispute between Jack Kilby fans and Robert Noyce supporters. As for the Internet and its ubiquitous browser, let?s just say that?as with these other technological ?breakthroughs???publicity,? ?priority,? and ?patent? are often mutually exclusive.

Now, for most intellectual property types the facts listed above are not all that surprising.  We know that marketing deparments, history books, and especially media often get it wrong when it comes to who "invented" something.  Some of our clients are really good marketeers -- marketing products that are perhaps marginally inventive -- while others with truly inventive ideas, completely fail at marketing the idea .  Usually it is the nameless individual slugging it out in their basement or a chemist toiling many hours in a corporate or academic lab that is truly inventive.  It is the brilliant marketeer, however, that often gets credited with the "invention" and their name becomes synonymous with the product or "innovation".  Is this fair? Hell no. Is it logical? Hell probably (wasn't ready to be definitive on that point).

Mr Schrade's first point:

The simple truth is that the economics of invention are profoundly different from the economics of innovation. Being ?first to file? has nothing to do with being first to market. Being first to market has nothing to do with being first to profitability. Being first to profitability?and this is key!?has virtually nothing to do with how quickly, deeply, and ubiquitously an innovation spreads. In other words, there is no meaningful correlation?let alone causality?between a ?successful? act of invention and a ?successful? marketplace innovation. None.

So the distinction between invention and innovation, according to Mr. Schrade, is economics: if an invention has no market, it isn't an innovation.  "We" celebrate the innovators (perhaps all successful marketeers should now be referred to as innovators) and ignore the inventors.  The article uses the dot com boom and bust to illustrate the point even further:  many inventions, but not many innovators -- i.e. not much commercial success of very good ideas. 

So don't call the Google whiz kids inventors (had to get in one gratuitous Google reference, have y'all heard about a little IPO coming down the pike), call them innovators. 

Just a little food for thought on this rainy Friday afternoon in Oklahoma City.