What is Innovation?

One of America’s most successful innovators was Thomas Alva Edison. One of his known innovations was the light bulb. Edison understood that the real challenge of innovation was not the realisation of ideas but whether the customers would make a purchase from such ideas. In other words, the commercial aspect determines if the innovation is successful or not. Edison recognised that although the electric light bulb was a good idea, it had little practical relevance in a world where there was no power point to plug it into. The idea of a light bulb was great, but the consumers could not use it. Hence, Edison set about building an entire electricity generation and distribution infrastructure and designing lamp stands, switches, and wires. In 1882, he switched on the power from the first electric power generation plant in Manhattan and was able to light up 800 bulbs in the area. In the years that followed, he built over 300 plants all over the world. Edison was indeed a creative genius, but that was not completely all. He was a creator, collaborator, entrepreneur, and social climber to make his idea a commercially successful innovation.

Innovation has been and continues to be an important topic of study for several different disciplines. However, despite that innovation has been studied by many scholars, it is still poorly understood and often confused with other terms, such as invention and creativity. Thus, before defining innovation, this article makes a distinction between innovation and these terms.

One of the most common confusions with innovation is invention. Indeed, innovation is closely related to invention because invention forms part of innovation, but these terms are not interchangeable. Invention is the conception of ideas and stops there. It may, or may not, be useful to society. However, when the invention reaches commercial success, it becomes an innovation. Therefore, one may conclude that the term invention forms part of the innovation formula, as follows:

The conception of new ideas is the starting point for innovation. A new idea by itself, whilst interesting, is neither an invention nor an innovation; it is merely a concept, a thought, or a collection of thoughts. The result of converting intellectual thoughts into something tangible, usually in the form of a product, is invention. This is where science and technology play a significant role. When the invention has been created with practical use and promoted to an audience, it becomes a commercially successful one. In other words, it becomes known as innovation.

Creativity is regarded as a key building block for innovation (Rosenfeld & Servo, 1991) and is an inherent capability in all human beings. Creativity is a mental process that results in the production of novel ideas and concepts that are appropriate, useful, and actionable. The creative process can be said to consist of four distinct phases: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification (Wallas, 1926). Later revisions of this process have added a final phase, elaboration (Kao, 1989), in which the idea is structured and finalized in a form that can be readily communicated to others. Creativity entails a level of originality and novelty that is essential for innovation. Although creativity is a fundamental part of innovation, it is wrong to interchange the terms. Innovation encourages the further processing of the output of the creative process (the idea) to allow the exploitation of its potential value through development.