3.8 THE ULTIMATE GOAL: INNOVATION
The successful inventor must progress beyond invention, meaning conception and reduction to practice. Reduction to practice is a legal term, which means that the inventor demonstrated the invention is performing as visualized in conception. In Chapter 5, we define the second law of inventing as
where I is invention, C is conception, and Rp is reduction to practice.
It is not enough, however, for the inventor to only be aware of the first and second laws of inventing (see Chapter ), he must also be aware of the law of innovation (presented in Chapter ). In other words, the inventor must go beyond recognizing the need and applying scientific or engineering principles to satisfy it; he must also put the invention into practice. Innovation is the translation of an invention or an idea into a product or service in the marketplace. Only by combining technical competence and a measure of legal knowledge will the inventor know how to invent and protect his invention, and only then will the invention have a ghost of a chance to mature into innovation—that is, enter the marketplace and be of benefit to society. Or, to put it somewhat differently, successful scientists and engineers must have the capacity to posit a hypothesis that produces meaningful data, which they are able to interpret to become new knowledge, which in turn will lead to patentable inventions ...
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