Innovation = Invention + Adoption

I have been interested in evangelism since I read my first book by Guy Kawasaki. It struck a chord with me because I have worked on some great and now patented technologies that failed to flourish in the marketplace.

Helen introduced me to a paper from the ACM 2006 "Innovation as a Language". The thesis is that often the notions of invention and innovation are confused as the same. This article distinguished innovation by saying it required a behavioural change of adoption. So in order to qualify as an innovation, people had to start using the innovation.

Indeed reading various definitions of innovation, there are some that call out an innovation is the introduction of something in into customs, rites, etc.

Though semantically the argument is on weak ground, I do see the value in distinguishing between that those new things that are invented and left to sit on the shelf, and the ones that are invented, then refined and packaged to be marketable, taken to market, and driven to ubiquity in adoption.

Edison had invented a couple thousand light bulbs before he had invented the first one that could stay lit for the prolonged period of time needed to be feasible in daily commercial use. If he had stopped before the concept were refined, packaged, and ubiquitous we might well think of someone else name in relationship the the light bulb.

Patrick said one common technique in research is to simply invent as many new ideas one can and let the, sit on a shelf until someone comes along and finds a use for it. I suspect that the number of inventions sitting out in the long tail of non-adoption so greatly outweighs the number of inventions in the short head of highly adopted technology that one might better win by buying a lottery ticket than by inventing en-bulk and skipping product focus, refinement, and evangelism.