Invention vs. Innovation

Oh this legendary fight is a classic, what is the difference between an invention and an innovation?

🤯 An invention has no precedence in human history, period! And an innovation is when the market adopts it.

Inventions come in many forms, patents are at large here but we’ll include other forms of intellectual property in this discussion. Many of them have collected dust over the years, others have resurrected when a valuable form of application presented itself. Still, if they never reached the market and simply didn’t create value then it doesn’t merit the innovation label. Remember, we defined innovation as value creation!

🎳 Not every invention is an innovation, but every innovation is on some level an invention.

This is a tricky one, I mean the line does get blurry sometimes. Even so, keep to the simple perspective and explore different examples of both and the same pattern arises. One good example is emoji’s, more specifically the smiley face 🙂 which was copyrighted back in 1971 by Franklin Loufrani. Today the company makes literally more than half a billion from IP licensing. Can we say that given the current global adoption it was an innovation, an isn’t Loufrani an innovator? I mean, didn’t emojis change the ways we communicate?

🌚 The truth is discussing what is an innovation and what is an invention does not matter, what matters is that people understand how each one is defined. And that they are somehow connected.

I’ll try to explore more examples at a later occasion, but for now. Understand the basic difference, and tell everyone about it!