Invention vs. Innovation

Mike Masnick draws a distinction I hadn’t given much thought to before:

Over at Computerworld, Mike Elgan has written up a great piece highlighting how the iPhone is a fantastic piece of innovation that really has very little new in it. As we pointed out when we questioned Apple’s claim to 200 patents around the iPhone, the multi-touch interface isn’t new and has been publicly demonstrated numerous times. Elgan points to that video as well as other examples of how almost all of the “new” things in the iPhone have actually been around for quite some time–but that what’s special about the iPhone is that it will really be the first time that such features and tools are available to the general public, and how it’s then likely to move those same features from research labs into all sorts of common computing applications. That’s great for everyone–but it’s about innovation, not invention, and it seems like the market can do a great job rewarding such innovation without resorting to patent-based monopolies.

If you think about it, Apple’s strength really doesn’t come from inventing things. I’ve been a Mac guy for pretty much my whole life, and so during college I was one of those people who’d watch the Steve Jobs keynote every year. Almost every time, my techie officemates would see a new Apple product and say “hey, there’s nothing new there. Linux has been able to do that for 6 months.”

Of course, to do it on Linux, you typically had to purchase some special hardware, download a tarball, compile it from source, tweak a config file, and then hope that the software supported your particular hardware combination. Apple doesn’t invent much, but they do take technologies that are currently only available to people who are intimately familiar with gcc and vi, and makes them accessible to ordinary people.

This is even true of Apple’s most legendary products. Everyone has heard the story of how the original Macintosh used concepts largely copied from prototypes that Xerox was too clueless to bring to market. There was nothing at all new about the iMac other than curvy colored plastic. (It did introduce USB to the Mac market, but USB wasn’t an Apple invention.) And of course there’s the iPod, which attracted a big yawn from the tech world because it didn’t offer any features that weren’t already available on other MP3 players. In all these cases, what Apple did is come up with just the right combination of features, put together with a great attention to detail, so that the whole was more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast, when Apple has invented something genuinely new, it’s tended to be far less successful for the company. The Lisa was in many ways more innovative than the Mac, but it was killed by ludicrously high prices. The Newton had a lot of breakthrough technology, and it’s long since been abandoned. FireWire was an Apple invention, but it’s been relegated to niche status in high-end DV applications–even iPods don’t support it any more.

All of which suggests that, at least in the computer industry, invention is often the easy step. There are thousands of grad students right now working to build breakthrough inventions, many of which won’t make it to consumers markets for several years. But those inventions aren’t very useful by themselves, because typically only a tiny fraction of the population has the technical skills to do anything with them. (and the money that’s often required to buy the high-priced components) What’s really needed is the know-how to take inventions and make them understandable and affordable to ordinary consumers. That is not something the patent system does a good job of protecting. But fortunately, it appears that the market does a good job of rewarding that kind of innovation without much help from the patent system.

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