Often our general understanding confuses the line differentiating the two strategies when it comes "invention" & "innovation". While the former implies new ideas or products that have been derived from an individual's ideas or from scientific research, the latter is more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value to the idea. In short, 'Innovation is the commercialization of Invention'.
There have been various examples in the world's history of breakthrough inventions but failed innovations. Also, there are numerous examples where the inventors generated little or no returns while others who marketed it as an innovation amassed millions in revenue.
AT&T laboratories, in 1947, created the world's first transistor. Though patented organization could not find a suitable application for it. Thus an outstanding invention failed to develop as an innovation. However, in 1952 they licensed it to out and companies like Texas Instruments, Sony and IBM acquired a technology that produced billions of revenues.
Another company which missed out on big opportunities would be Xerox. It was the world's first to develop a personal computer, a graphical oriented monitor, a word processing software, a workstation, a laser printer, a Ethernet, a hand-held mouse in its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Yet it profited from almost none of these.
Thus continues the dilemma of whether to invent or innovate !!!
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