The Key To Innovation: Putting Ideas And Information Together In New Ways

There’s a new, massively detailed, study coming out on the secrets to being a great innovator, and the key finding really stands out:

“What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”

Notice that one of the key components of all of this is seeing ideas and information that are already out there, and then doing the useful part of putting them together in a different way. This is something we’ve noted time and time again when it comes to innovation. Often, the actual “idea” isn’t new — but it’s that it is put together in a better or different way than before, and that new way works better for people. Yet, when you have something like patents on the basic ideas (and, before some patent lawyer shows up to say patents aren’t on ideas but inventions, let’s all just agree how ridiculous that claim is), it makes this much more difficult and expensive. The classic example of this is RIM. The idea of wireless email was hardly new. Lots of folks had been trying to do it right. The technical issues behind providing email wirelessly were not difficult either. What RIM did was put it all together in a compelling way — by recognizing how to package it all in a manner that was significantly more usable than previous attempts. And yet, another firm, NTP, who had failed to innovate and had failed to actually figure out a way to make wireless email useful, came along and sued, because it held patents on the very concept of wireless email. After a long legal battle, RIM was eventually forced to pay over $600 million to NTP.

Read more . . .

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Tags: Innovation, innovation killer, innovator, innovators, inventions, need for innovation, patent system

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Consider This, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Innovation in Society, Need to Know, Shape of Things to Come?, Startups, Techdirt, Worth Repeating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.