Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

Open Innovation and Disruptive Technologies

For a CEO to fathom open innovation and disruptive technology, he or she must first know this: Invention is not innovation. Understanding the difference is critical.

As Henry Chesbrough once elucidated in Optimize magazine, we should think of invention as new discovery. A discovery could be new to the world or new to industry, but it consists of something we did not know before. Furthermore, inventions are the province of people with scientific training or who are answering questions like how and why. They’re plumbing the depths of difficult, long-term questions that result in fundamental new knowledge.^[11]

^[11] Chesbrough, Henry. “Are You Open to Innovation?” Optimize, July 2003.

Innovation, by contrast, is applying knowledge to a real-world problem and taking an idea to market. You may not have any customer in mind during a process of discovery and invention, but ultimately a customer is critical to the process of innovation.

In many cases, a company owns the rights to an invention, but innovation doesn’t take place until they figure out how to package it, market it, sell it, and devise a business model that wraps around the invention.

Christensen points to the classic case of Xerox: The fact that you invented the Xerox machine doesn’t mean anything until you come up with the leasing business model that meets a customer need and makes that copying machine profitable in the marketplace.

Anticipating the innovation, not just the invention, ...