From the halls of government to the smallest startup, if you are engaged in a conversation about “innovation,” ask yourself if you are instead really talking about R&D, about invention.
Innovation is like a sentence. Inventions are the nouns. Intentions are the verbs.
Take the humble pencil. It’s an invention. Stick of wood, some graphite, and a little piece of rubber on the end. There it lies. Inert. It is an invention without an intention. Adding some intent, I could use it to write you a nice note, or I could write a manifesto for change. Or I could start poking people in the eye with it. Now it’s a disruptive innovation!
I’m helping co-found a company that is chock-full of invention. The team is top of its field and has made amazing scientific breakthroughs over a decade of hard work. This stuff is seriously going to change how everyone experiences the world…if we match the right intentions to our inventions. Pencil => Eyeball.
A classic mistake for startups fortunate enough to have strong intellectual property is getting too excited about the inventions. They often think less rigorously about what they will do with them and for whom they will do it. The story of their business is told only with nouns. Countless startups turn exciting technology into boring, verb-less stories.
So here we stand with our startup, about to mix some disruptive intentions with our awesome inventions. Hold onto your eyeballs!