A quick postscript to that last post.

Arthur Koestler coined the word bisociation to describe the fusing of two existing ideas or technologies to form something new.

A tea pot

You can try this for yourself.   Think of two disconnected things – I have just thought of ‘tea pot’ and ‘nuclear power’ – and then simply join them together.  Voila!  I have just invented the nuclear-powered tea pot and it’s only five past seven. I think I’ll put that on my business card, which doesn’t actually have a job description yet – Andrew Cooper, inventor of the nuclear powered tea pot.  It would at least be a talking point.

When you know about bisociation it’s incredibly easy to be an inventor. Unfortunately most of the ideas you’ll invent will be about as useful as a nuclear powered teapot.  But the bisociations of clockwork+radio and turbine technology+burning hydrocarbon fuels, to name a couple of real-life examples, were both developed into rather useful innovations.

While I can claim to have invented the nuclear-powered tea pot, it doesn’t qualify as an innovation yet because I haven’t actually made one and you certainly can’t by them in Tescos.  It hasn’t ‘added any value’ or changed things in the real world apart, perhaps, from what’s going on inside your head.

Shouldn’t be too difficult, though, should it?  All I need is a small supply of enriched uranium, some graphite, lead shielding, a tea pot and a few other bits and pieces.  We have a tea pot so I’m already half-way there.

When I run workshops I often ask people to name their favourite innovation or, depending on how the mood takes me, their favourite innovator.  I don’t ask them to name their favourite invention, because there is a big difference between the two things. (If you’d like to join in the fun, click on the ‘comments’ link under the title or at the end of the post, depending on how you’re reading this and tell us what your favourite invention is and why. You don’t have to use your real name, incidentally.)

December 17th, 1903

There is also a big difference between inventors and innovators. An innovation is an invention that has been implemented in such a way that it changes the world.  It might change the world a little, or change it a lot, but it has to change the world in some way.  A more formal definition, and one that might appeal more to the bean counters in your organisation, is an idea that ‘adds value’, to use some management-speak.

My all-time favourite innovation is powered flight and my all time favourite innovators are, therefore, Orville and Wilbur Wright.  I like both flying and aircraft.  When I was a child, my favourite birthday treat was to go to Heathrow airport for the day.  (Heathrow for the day! Little did I know that, a little over 40 years hence, I would think of a trip to Heathrow as my definition of hell.  But things have changed there a little since then, and so have I.)

I’ll return to the Wright Brothers at some point, but for now I’ll just note that when I mention to people who aren’t from the USA they sometimes say ‘Ah but we [insert name of nation other than the US] invented powered flight when [insert name of person/people no one has ever heard of] flew on [insert date before December 17th, 1903]‘.

If I really want to make myself unpopular with my interlocutor, I grab the nearest whiteboard and write ‘Inventor = someone who had an idea Innovator = someone who had an idea and did something with it.” The non-US national in question then gets all sulky and/or angry and never talks to me again.

The Wright Brothers were innovators par excellence.  They did all the right things.  They knew, when they were developing their machines, that powered flight had enormous commercial potential.  We don’t just remember them because they were good publicists (and they were good publicists).  They founded the Wright Company to exploit their idea commercially and thought of some highly innovative ways of promoting their innovation.

I could witter on for pages (tell me about it, you may well be thinking, if you’ve actually plodded through my earlier witterings) about the Wright Brothers.

As I said in an earlier post I still find flying magical, in spite of the ‘my definition of hell’ parts, and these aren’t to do with the flying itself but with the large international airports flying tends to involve.  I see, incidentally, that you still – months later – have a 1 in 12 chance of being separated from your luggage if you fly via Terminal 5.  If only Orville and Wilbur had anticipated that problem: I’m sure that they would have come up with a very elegant solution.