Trevor Anulewicz of Launch by NTT DATA and Vito Mabrucco of NTT Corporation were featured mainstage speakers at this past fall’s Impact conference in Cambridge. They discussed the importance of differentiating invention from innovation.
“There’s confusion around what’s an invention and what’s an innovation,” Mabrucco said. “An invention is something that’s uniquely created that, in itself, doesn’t actually serve a purpose. It’s only [when] you apply an invention to some issue or problem or business need that you create an innovation…”
Mabrucco continued: “The transistor, for example, was initially invented in the 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn’t until somebody like Sony was able to convert that into a portable radio, and had massive global commercialization of it. Another example is the iPod, which was an MP3 [player] that Apple created by combining a number of inventions, [including] the small hard drive, Firewire, and also iTunes… And the last one that I want to mention is the Internet. The Internet is an invention of itself, but it’s actually not an innovation. An example is, Amazon had the same access to the internet as everyone else had, and yet somehow Amazon was able to take that technology and turn it into an innovation… So it’s the application of invention that creates innovation, and then the commercialization of innovation is the next step forward in terms of making that ubiquitous and available to the markets.”
“Many inventions never leave the lab, and they’re great ideas,” he said. “But until somebody applies it to a consumer need or a business need, you really haven’t done anything.”
Mabrucco and Anulewicz also laid out the components of the “full stack innovation ecosystem,” and discussed how they can support both invention and innovation.
To watch highlights from the session, click “play” above. The slides from this session are available below in PDF form. This conversation was recorded at Impact 2024 on October 25, 2024.
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