Innovation versus Invention
Innovation vs. Invention by Bill Buxton is short but really full of great insights that sums up lots of interesting ideas about innovation.
First about the innovation process:
“the difference between ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’. The closer one gets to Route 128 in Boston and Silicon Valley, the more it seems that people confuse the two. Too often the obsession is with ‘inventing’ something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative understanding of what is already known. Too often ,the obsession is with ‘inventing’something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative.
(…)
The key thing to note is that the average time from invention to market was 20-plus years. So much for fast moving tech sector! Which brings us to one of the most insightful quotes that I have encountered, from
William Gibson: “The future is already here. It is just not uniformly distributed.” Here is the business lesson: innovation is far more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value to ‘gold’ than it is
about alchemy. Rather than focusing on the invention of the ‘brand new’, one might better strive for creative insights on how to combine, develop and leverage“
Then about design:
“So now we come to the big debate: who is a designer, and who should be a designer? Don Norman.It has an epilogue entitled, “We Are All Designers”. To this I say, “Nonsense!”
(…)
it was not enough to simply have great ideas.If you wanted the ideas to come to fruition,you had to spend as much time directing your innovation and creativity to fostering a culture of creativity and a receptiveness to innovation within the company, as you spend on the ideas themselves. “
Why do I blog this? preparing a course for tomorrow about foresight and innovation in a french design school.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:41 am
There’s a french philosopher at “La Sorbonne University”, Pierre Damiens Huyghe, who talks (I think in the same way?) about the difference between “invention” which is more in the field of the engineer whereas innovation (he calls it “dé-couverte” to underline that, as W Gibson puts it, the future is already here, one “just” have to “uncover it”) is more in the designer’s playground.
Does innovation starts when one tries to implement an invention in a (wider) social context therefore with other considerations than the sole technology ?
a fan of your blog from ENSCI-les Ateliers.
PS: I wish you could also come in our design school to talk to us about foresight and innovation…
June 12th, 2008 at 11:39 am
As competition gets tougher, that “20 plus” year gap between an invention and the market is set to reduce. This means we might end up implement an idea without completely understanding its consequences. I would like to get your views on innovation in our corporate blog (mahindrauniverse.com).
June 12th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Thanks Louis-Eric!
The question of where innovation starts is a good one. I only have a personal answer about it as it seems to me that innovation starts with other consideration than the sole technology (more later in a post!)