If no one buys it - did it happen?

It is a common mistake to believe that innovation happens when someone comes up with a new idea. New ideas are a common occurrence – every day, people all over the world come up with great new ideas, new solutions and brilliant potential innovations that could possibly end poverty, build a successful company, or make peeling an orange much easier.

Experiments, though crucial to discovering what is possible and how something might be innovated, aren’t innovation. Prototypes and inventions aren’t innovation either, though they are an important step towards proving how innovation could happen.

Innovation doesn’t happen in the lab, the skunkworks or the strategy off-site. It doesn’t happen in the garage of a genius, nor does it happen when a government task force comes up with an innovation blueprint. Innovation might happen afterwards when the products of everyone’s labors are used by others, but there are quite a few good projects and initiatives that are easily forgotten in a few years.

What about all the patents? According to the U.S. Patent office, over 350,000 new patent applications are filed every year with less than 200,000 patents secured – but a patent is no guarantee of innovation. U.S. registered Patents in the last few years for the “Insect Death Ray”, the “Beerbrella”, (illustrated at left), the “Flush Toilet for Dogs”, and the “Electro Shock Game”, are interesting, but can they be described as innovations? They may be useful as entries in the Museum of Obscure Patents, but I question if they are innovation.

According to Richard Maulsby, director of the office of Public Affairs for the US Patent and Trademark Office, “There are around 1.5 million patents in effect and in force in this country, and of those, maybe 3,000 are commercially viable.” (Karen E. Klein, “Avoiding the Inventor's Lament,” Business Week, November 10, 2005)

If someone invents something that no one buys, did innovation occur?

A good analogue to that question, surprisingly, can be found in metaphysics. In the early eighteenth century, the philosopher and developer of “subjective idealism” George Berkeley introduced the idea of “To be is to be perceived”. His ideas are usually introduced with the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?”

Rephrased by Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss in their 1910 book,Physics, the question became easier to answer, "When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is nearby to hear it, does it make a sound?” When addressed as a physics question versus a metaphysical question, the answer is straightforward: Sound, as explained by Mann and Twiss, is made up of three things:

1. A source of waves – such as a tree falling and creating vibrations as it hits the ground.
2. A medium for those waves to travel – such as the air
3. A receiver – such as an ear, which translates changes in air pressure into what animals perceive as “sound”

Without any animals around to hear the sound, there are only rippling changes in air pressure – no actual sound has been created.

Much like sound in a forest, innovation requires three things:

1. A source of innovation – a person or a team that is motivated enough to not only to come up with good ideas – but to develop them and influence others to follow.
2. A medium for their ideas to travel – such as the marketplace, writing, broadcasting, the Internet, classrooms, churches or any other gathering of people.
3. Receivers - People pay for the innovation, who will change their lives, collaborate with the source, give up something in order to innovate. The more people who receive it, the more innovative it becomes.

And just like the theoretical forest with no animals to listen – if no one adapts the new idea, process, concept or machine – innovation has not occurred. Put another way, “If someone doesn’t pay for it, then it didn’t happen.”

Innovation then, happens when others do it. When customers buy a new technology, when a community stops doing what they did before and begins using a new rule of behavior, when an old paradigm is abandoned for a new one – that’s when innovation happens.

Innovation occurs, not when a new idea or invention is discovered, but when everyone else innovates.

This all suggests three conclusions,

1. In order for innovation to happen, society must agree to that innovation – in effect, to subvert the formerly agreed to rules and participate in that innovation.
2. Innovators are persuaders as much as they are inventors – in effect, they must persuade others to innovate.
3. We all have to start innovating. Now.