I work in a research organisation where the word innovation is thrown around with gay abandon, especially by management folks. We’re under constant pressure to be inventing and innovating, though the two words are often used interchangeably But, how should we judge when innovation has occurred? What about invention? What’s the difference?

In the midst of their recent article on “Innovation as Language Action” in CACM, Peter Denning and Robert Dunham propose an answer that I find both simple and compelling: innovation occurs where we observe that a group or community has adopted a new practice. Invention is something different – it means to create something new, but it does not require that anyone accept or adopt it.

I should also point out that Denning and Dunham’s article is interesting for many other reasons than the distinction it draws between innovation and invention. In particular, their work takes inspiration from the earlier work of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (whose ideas are very influential in my own research), in looking at the specific skills and steps involved in taking new technology inventions into the broader market from a language-action perspective.

Innovation as the adoption of new practices seems nicely consistent with the ideas of Peter Drucker, who himself linked innovation to the adoption of new practices back in the 1950s. Of course, another definitional question that then arises is: what exactly is meant by practice? Denning and Dunham suggest that practice refers to habits, routines, and other forms of embodied recurrent actions taken without conscious thought, and to me this seems largely to capture the concept.

But is Denning and Dunham’s definition of innovation widely accepted?

One source we can turn to for clarification is the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines innovation as:

The action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms..

In contrast, invention is defined as:

The action of coming upon or finding; the action of finding out; discovery (whether accidental, or the result of search and effort).

While there is no mention of adoption in the OED definition, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the word introduction conveys much of the same sense, while the alteration of what is established clearly implies modification to adopted practices or tools. So it would appear that innovation is interpreted more widely as a stage beyond invention or discovery – where something novel is introduced on a wider scale.

Interestingly, IP Australia also make a similar acknowledgement, through their ‘Innovation Patent‘, which was introduced to provide a specific protection option for innovations that are not sufficiently inventive to meet the requirements for standard patents. In doing so, a line is clearly drawn between invention and innovation, and an acknowledgement is made that patents are intentionally focused on invention rather than innovation.

Indeed, a major motivation for the introduction of the Australian Innovation Patent was that many small and medium businesses make a major investment in developing and testing new products and improvements that, although not vastly different from existing technology, have significant commercial value. These innovations (which are often not inventions) play an important role in the commercialisation and development of new and existing technology. However, because such innovations often apply existing ideas and inventions, they often do not qualify for standard patent protection.

Denning and Dunham provide further compelling evidence of a fundamental difference between invention and innovation in citing Peter Drucker as saying that no more than one in 100 patents earn enough to pay back its development costs and patent fees, and no more than one in 500 recover all its expenses. Put simply, this means that less than 0.2% of all patents make the transition from invention to innovation.

Of course, an obvious consequence of there being such a big gap between invention and innovation is that different skill sets are required for each. Inventors must start with a world of possibilities and work to create new ideas, patents, prototypes or processes, and propose that other people should consider their contribution to the world (often through publication). Innovators take a possibility or idea, often one that inventors have already proposed, and turn that into something that they follow through to adoption.

The bottom line? Ideas are not enough to achieve innovation, and the cleverness of an invention or the existence of a patent is a notoriously poor measure of innovation.