Innovation vs. Invention Part II
When you google “greatest innovators of all time” you get:
- Jeff Bezos
- Larry Page
- Sergey Brin
- Reid Hoffman
- Larry Ellison
When you google “greatest inventors of all time” you get people like:
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Benjamin Franklin
- Nikola Tesla
- Alexander Graham Bell
- Thomas Edison
Notice a difference?
I briefly wrote about the difference between invention and innovation here:
Google’s developer festival Google I/O was this past week. It is a conference where Google developers present their latest products. I was…medium.com
There’s a big difference. Invention refers to the act of creating something completely new and brining it into existence. Innovation is the process of taking something that already exists and changing it to make it better.
Aside from the fact that the Innovator cohort is contemporary and the inventors are all dead, another major difference between the two groups is that the innovators are all billionaires. They have managed to amass great wealth through their innovations. On the other hand, even though the inventors helped change the world, none of them got directly rich from their inventions. I believe most of them even died poor, some bankrupt.
I’ve said before that it all really comes down to convenience. Our lives have become much easier thanks to the innovators. That’s where value and impact come from. Convenience adds value, and value proliferates into impact. Time is our most valuable asset. It’s the only one we can’t regain. That’s why convenience is so valuable, it gives us back some time. When you take something that already exists and make it better, or more convenient, it’s going to have more impact.
