Henrik Gedenryd wrote:
Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
Forgive me, but I am in need of some solid authority and references relating the importance of incremental invention or innovation, as compared to pioneering and revolutionary invention. In particular, is there any consensus among authorities regarding the relative virtues of the two forms of creativity or their interactions?
The distinction I was taught at Imperial was:- invention is creating something new innovation is making something new actually exist as a presence in some suitable marketplace.
i.e. having a good idea is all very well but it does little good until you can obtain it some currency. To stretch the point a little, whilst it was only in PARC, Smalltalk was an invention, once it spread around (ParcPlace, Digitalk, etc) it was an innovation.
I think I agree with Alan that attending to small improvements (pink work) will indeed impede progress on a greater scale (blue), by detracting attention etc. The recent Internet craze probably held back genuine cs advances for 5 years or so, because everyone focused on exploiting old technologies instead of coming up with new ones. Bad for invention/progress, good for the economy.
Actually I'd argue that much of the waste was precisely because almost nobody involved had any idea of history and spent all their effort on 'inventing' stuff that could be looked up in bazillions of standard texts. A pretty typical process in my experience with CS types.... smart young CS grad insists on 'inventing' a sort algorithm every time instead of using a standard one and getting on with the important stuff. People with engineering backgrounds tend to understand the idea of usig standard parts; they rarely make custom nuts and bolts.
tim