Invention, Creativity & Innovation
Three words are used almost interchangeably in everyday speech - creativity, invention, and innovation - yet they are distinct, and confusing them leads businesses badly astray. They form a natural progression: creativity produces ideas, invention turns an idea into something that works, and innovation turns that into value the world actually adopts.
Generating novel ideas
Making an idea work
Value that gets adopted
Idea → working thing → adopted value. Each stage is necessary; none alone is sufficient.
| Term | What it is | The test |
|---|---|---|
| Creativity | The generation of novel, useful ideas | Is it a new idea? |
| Invention | A novel idea reduced to practice - it works | Does it function? |
| Innovation | An invention that creates value and is adopted | Is it used, and does it create value? |
The famous distinction
A widely quoted way to put it: invention is the conversion of money into ideas; innovation is the conversion of ideas into money. An inventor can create something remarkable that never reaches the market. An innovator takes something (invented by them or others) and successfully delivers its value to the world. This is why so many pioneering inventors watched others profit from their breakthroughs - they invented, but someone else innovated.
Can you name a case where your organisation (or a competitor) invented something clever that never became a real innovation? What was missing - value, or adoption?
Sources
- Global Innovation Institute (GInI), Foundations of Innovation body of knowledge.
- Amabile, T., "How to Kill Creativity", Harvard Business Review, 1998.
- Schumpeter, J., The Theory of Economic Development, 1934.