Innovation expert. How can anybody claim to be one when nobody can agree on what an innovation actually is?
The word tires a lot of people out, and for good reason. Everything has become innovation, and the term empties itself of meaning through being used by everyone, for everything, everywhere.
Which raises the question underneath all of it. Can we declare our own products, practices and business models innovative, and if we can, can anybody declare themselves an expert in it?
Answering that requires a vocabulary, and the difference between invention and innovation is only half of it. Four words are involved and they run in an order: imagination, creativity, invention, innovation.
The last of those is the one almost everybody defines wrongly. Innovation is a judgement made after the fact about an idea that was put into practice, which means nothing is an innovation at the moment it launches.
| The usual definition | What it leaves out | The definition that works |
|---|---|---|
| Two words, one distinctionMost explanations of the difference between invention and innovation stop at two terms: invention creates something new, innovation applies it and brings it to market. Accurate as far as it goes, and it accounts for only the last two stages of four. | The two stages before the inventionImagination produces ideas with no frame and no direction. Creativity is imagination placed inside a frame, whether a brainstorm, a deadline or a legal constraint. Skipping both makes invention look like an event rather than the end of a process. | Innovation is a judgement made afterwardsAn implemented idea becomes an innovation only if it changes how things get made or how customers behave. Nothing is innovative on the day it launches, which is why self-declared innovation is a claim about the future rather than a description of the present. |
Innovation, a word that now means everything
Before defining anything it is worth acknowledging why the definitions have collapsed. Innovation became the fashionable term, the jargon that decorates annual reports and executive speeches, and a word used that widely and that indiscriminately loses its impact.
A concept diluted in business jargon
The pattern is measurable rather than impressionistic. Bloomberg’s index research observes that mentions of the word innovation by corporate executives, in earnings calls and public speeches, have grown exponentially, and it charts the frequency across listed companies.
The result is a portmanteau word so general and so overused that it verges on meaningless. The essence of the thing, which should carry novelty and transformation, drowns in a sea of restatement.
When everything is labelled innovative, the term loses its power to distinguish the ideas and products that genuinely change something. Which argues for being far more precise with the language, and reserving the word for developments that shift value, usage or performance rather than for incremental improvements and rearrangements of existing concepts.
Seriously, how does anybody become an expert in a subject this vague? A word used as a lifeline, surrounded by approaches multiplying faster than anybody can evaluate them, from design thinking to the business model canvas by way of lean start-up and service design.
Why imagination and invention will not replace it
Some people would like to swap the word out for imagination or invention. It does not work, and the reason it does not work is the whole subject of this article. Innovation is not a synonym for either of them.
Those terms fail to capture what innovation includes, which is not only novelty but successful application and spread through a market or a society. Innovation is more than an idea and more than an invention. It is a complete process covering creation, development and integration.
Imagination and invention are components of innovation rather than alternatives to it. Which means an organisation has to recognise the distinction and support not only ideation but the development and strategic implementation that turn an inventive idea into a real one.
The four terms, in order
You can agree or disagree with these definitions. They are the ones I find most often in organisations, and they have the practical advantage of running in a sequence, so a team can locate where it actually is rather than arguing about a label.
Imagination, ideas without a frame
Imagination is having ideas with no frame and no particular direction. It is dreaming about what would happen if. It is what the mind does while tired and unfocused.
It is also personal and entirely unbothered by gravity or by the laws of physics in general, which is exactly what makes it valuable and exactly what makes organisations uncomfortable with it.
Imagination is the ground everything else grows in. Its importance gets underestimated in business precisely because it looks disconnected from the tangible reality of daily operations, and without it there is nothing for creativity to work on.
Creativity, imagination inside a frame
Creativity is a mental process that produces new ideas within an imposed frame and a given direction. That frame might be a brainstorm, a deadline, a legal restriction or a budget.
So creativity is imagination put into a frame. The constraint is not the enemy of the idea, it is the thing that makes the idea usable, which is why a brief with no constraints produces worse work than a brief with three.
Understood this way, creativity in an organisation is not a sporadic event or a flash of genius. It is a structured process in which imagination gets guided towards concrete outcomes, and brainstorming and the rest of the creative methods are tools for systematising it.
Invention, the idea enters the physical world
A creative idea often stays vague until it enters testing or prototyping, at which point it becomes an invention. Think Leonardo, think Edison.
Invention brings the creative idea into the physical world, where imagination and creativity are mental processes. That is the whole distinction and it is more consequential than it sounds, because it is the first stage anybody outside the organisation can see.
Unlike an innovation, which can be the continuous improvement of a product, service or process that already exists, an invention did not exist before in any form. This is the point where most published explanations of the difference between invention and innovation begin, and where they should be picking up two stages in.
Innovation, a judgement made afterwards
Despite the word being claimed first by research and development departments and more recently by the digital world, innovation is best described as a retrospective judgement on an idea that was put into practice.
When your invention has become a product you sell, a service you offer or a process you use, it may still not be an innovation. It becomes one if it changes your manufacturing methods or your customers’ habits in some new way.
Read that carefully, because it has an uncomfortable consequence. Nothing is an innovation on the day it launches, which makes every press release announcing an innovation a prediction rather than a description.
It also means innovation is less an act of creation than a verdict on adoption and impact. The process does not stop at the invention. It runs through continuous improvement, adaptation to the market and eventual take-up by users, and only then does anybody get to apply the word.
What the ladder changes in practice
Four terms in sequence give a team something a two-word distinction cannot: a way of locating where they actually are. Most arguments about whether something counts as innovation are arguments about which rung the work has reached.
Adoption and impact are the real measures
What separates an innovation from an invention is adoption and integration into existing practice, which changes the situation that was there before. Measured that way, a product can be technically sophisticated and still fail the test, if it never finds a place in a market or improves an existing practice in any material way.
Australia supplies the clearest illustration I know. The flight data recorder was invented at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne in the 1950s, and it was an invention for years before it was an innovation, because the industry showed very little interest in it at first.
Interest arrived from Britain rather than at home, and the device became an innovation only when regulators began requiring it and aviation practice changed around it. The invention was the same object throughout. What changed was adoption, which is the only thing that ever converts one into the other.
For an organisation this means the emphasis cannot sit entirely on generating ideas or developing new products. It has to sit on how those products are received and how they get integrated into production systems, which is a strategy question rather than a creative one.
Where teams usually get stuck
The sequence exposes a specific and very common failure. Organisations run creativity sessions, produce a great many ideas, and then wonder why nothing innovative results.
What they built was a supply of creativity with no path to invention. The ideas never entered the physical world as a test or a prototype, so there was nothing for adoption to happen to.
The reverse failure is rarer and more expensive. A business prototypes continuously, generates genuine inventions, and never asks what would have to change in a customer’s behaviour for any of them to matter. That produces a cupboard of working objects and no innovation whatever.
Which of the four strategies an organisation is pursuing changes what the ladder demands of it, and I have set those out in the four innovation strategies.
Field note
Four words on a whiteboard, and the argument that follows
This is a pattern across workshops rather than a single client story, and I would rather label it honestly than present a composite as a case study.
I put the four words on a whiteboard early in a session, in order, and ask the group to place their current projects against them. The exercise takes twenty minutes and it changes the tone of the day, because almost every project lands one or two rungs lower than the language used to describe it internally. Work presented in a steering committee as innovation turns out to be creativity, meaning a good idea inside a frame that nobody has prototyped. Occasionally something described modestly as an improvement turns out to be an invention nobody has bothered to test with a customer. The argument that follows is never about vocabulary. It is about who has been overstating and who has been underselling.
The lesson I take from running this repeatedly is that a shared vocabulary is worth more than a shared method. A team that agrees on where a project sits can have a useful argument about what it needs next. A team using one word for four different things cannot, and it will keep funding creativity while wondering why no innovation arrives.
What an innovation expert actually does
With a minimum of definition in place, the job description becomes writable. If you were drafting the role for somebody working with you on innovation, this is the list you would end up with, and it is more concrete than the title suggests.
The functional job description
Twelve responsibilities cover it, and notice how few of them involve having ideas.
- Brings methods and tools that surface ideas from teams.
- Solves, or helps solve, a technical difficulty in delivering a project.
- Advises on protecting and funding an innovative idea or project.
- Runs tests and trials of innovative projects.
- Assists with joining a network of innovative businesses.
- Advises on how to organise the business so that innovation is supported rather than tolerated.
- Develops the specific capabilities needed to carry an innovation project through.
- Improves managers’ capacity to lead innovation, which I call enableship.
- Encourages the adoption of innovation as a company value and as part of the culture.
- Trains managers to develop creativity in their teams.
- Assists with benchmarking and with cross-pollination between sectors.
- Helps turn ideas into projects that actually get built.
Read against the four terms, most of that list sits at the creativity and invention rungs. Almost none of it can produce an innovation directly, because innovation is decided by adoption and adoption happens outside the room.
What the definitions change about who you hire
Traditionally the problems we face, physical, psychological, economic or organisational, get solved by experts. People who have read everything there is to read on the subject and have met and solved every problem imaginable in their speciality.
So it is entirely reasonable, in a period of transformation, competitive pressure and a stagnating environment, to go looking for experts to help. The difficulty is what expertise means in this particular field.
An expertise is normally proved by a qualification, by past successes and by experience. Innovation asks for no expertise beyond being open to the world, no qualification beyond the one you already have, and there is a strong chance your experience will serve you better for avoiding failure than for producing a success.
On top of which, anybody can arrive from anywhere with a brilliant idea, as the popularity of open innovation platforms demonstrates. Which is why I have argued separately that the title of innovation expert cannot be claimed, only conferred.
Want to test somebody against these definitions?
Now that the vocabulary is settled, put it to work on whoever is advising you. Read why an innovation expert can never claim the title, and the one question that separates a record from a repertoire.
How I can help you use the vocabulary
A definition is only worth having if it changes a decision. Most of my work here involves getting a leadership team to agree where its projects actually sit, which is quicker than it sounds and more contentious than anybody expects.
Workshops and keynotes
The workshop runs the whiteboard exercise from the field note on your own portfolio. The output is a map of which projects are stuck at creativity, which have become inventions nobody has tested, and which are genuinely waiting on adoption.
Keynotes suit the moment when a room has been using one word for four different activities and has stopped noticing. Separating the terms in public tends to settle an argument that had been running in the corridors for months.
Diagnostics and manager programs
The diagnostic looks at where projects die in your organisation, which is usually the gap between creativity and invention, and at whether anything is set up to notice adoption once something ships.
Manager programs work on the capacity to lead other people’s ideas rather than to supply your own, and there is more on what an organisation is actually made of in the piece on what makes a company innovative.
If you want to test the vocabulary against your own portfolio, a conversation beats a proposal. You can tell me which of your projects you currently call innovation and we will place it on the ladder in about ten minutes.
Conclusion: curiosity about strange ideas
The difference between invention and innovation is real and it is only the top half of the ladder. Imagination produces ideas with no frame, creativity puts them in one, invention gets them into the physical world, and innovation is the verdict delivered afterwards by adoption.
Which means nothing you launch is an innovation on the day you launch it, and a company declaring itself innovative is making a forecast about other people’s behaviour rather than describing its own products.
It also means the expertise on offer in this field is narrower than the title suggests. Most of what an innovation adviser does sits at the creativity and invention rungs, and the rung that decides everything happens outside the building.
So perhaps what you need is not expertise in new ideas at all, but curiosity about strange ones.
Frequently asked questions about invention and innovation
What is the difference between invention and innovation?
An invention is an idea brought into the physical world as a test or prototype, and it did not exist before in any form. An innovation is a judgement made afterwards about an implemented idea, applied only once it changes how something is made or how customers behave.
What is the difference between creativity and imagination?
Imagination produces ideas with no frame and no direction, unbothered by physics or feasibility. Creativity is imagination placed inside a frame, whether a brainstorm, a deadline, a budget or a legal constraint. The constraint is what makes the idea usable rather than what limits it.
Can a company declare its own product innovative?
Not accurately. Since innovation is a retrospective judgement based on adoption, nothing is an innovation on the day it launches. A company describing a new product as an innovation is making a prediction about future customer behaviour rather than describing what it has built.
Can an improvement to an existing product be an innovation?
Yes, which is one of the main differences from invention. An innovation can be the continuous improvement of a product, service or process that already exists, provided the improvement changes production methods or customer habits. An invention, by contrast, did not exist in any form beforehand.
Why does the vocabulary matter in practice?
Because most disputes about whether something counts as innovation are really disputes about which stage the work has reached. Teams that agree on the four terms can argue usefully about what a project needs next. Teams using one word for four activities keep funding creativity and wondering why nothing ships.
