The iPhone Highlights The Difference Between Invention And Innovation

from the which-is-more-important dept

For many years, we've been talking about the important difference between invention and innovation -- and how invention is given too much credit, while innovation is given too little. Invention is the practice of coming up with something new. Innovation, however, is delivering something new to a market that wants it. In other words, innovation is figuring out how to take something new and actually bring it to market successfully. In the grand scheme of things, it's not hard to see why innovation should be more important than invention -- since it's really innovation that helps drive progress and make things better for people. An invention without the corresponding innovation is somewhat useless. Unfortunately, though, the patent system is much more focused on rewarding invention, rather than innovation (and, it often hinders innovation by making it more expensive).

Over at Computerworld, Mike Elgan has written up a great piece highlighting how the iPhone is a fantastic piece of innovation that really has very little new in it. As we pointed out when we questioned Apple's claim to 200 patents around the iPhone, the multi-touch interface isn't new and has been publicly demonstrated numerous times. Elgan points to that video as well as other examples of how almost all of the "new" things in the iPhone have actually been around for quite some time -- but that what's special about the iPhone is that it will really be the first time that such features and tools are available to the general public, and how it's then likely to move those same features from research labs into all sorts of common computing applications. That's great for everyone -- but it's about innovation, not invention, and it seems like the market can do a great job rewarding such innovation without resorting to patent-based monopolies.

VCs Invested $300 Million In Visto And All They Got Were... Some Patents To Sue With?

from the lovely dept

Visto is an interesting company. They've been around for quite some time and came out with a fairly mediocre email system for mobile phones that never really got very much traction -- though, somehow, the company kept convincing venture capitalists to dump in more money (to the tune of somewhere around $300 million). However, more recently, the company has gotten very active on the patent lawsuit front. We noted back in December 2005 that, just as RIM and NTP were going back to court over NTP's invalid patents, NTP "convinced" Visto to license its patents. Though, the details seemed pretty sketchy. NTP first invested in Visto -- effectively NTP gave money to Visto, which Visto could then use to "license" the patents. This way, NTP could point to Visto as a licensee of the patents to put pressure on RIM to settle (which it eventually did). However, it became clear that Visto didn't just take money from NTP, but the lessons of how to use patent lawsuits to its advantage -- which it proceeded to by suing Microsoft for patent infringement.

Since then, it seems that Visto has continued to struggle -- failing to go public as promised in 2006. So, instead, it seems to be falling on the all-too-popular tactic of falling back on patent infringement lawsuits when you've failed to make a real dent with your real business model. There was a bit of confusion last week as Visto had apparently kept quiet the fact that it had raised another $35 million. However, the folks over at Valleywag have come up with a pretty good explanation for why they might have wanted to keep it quiet. The firm that lead the latest round tends to invest in patent trolls. That is, they like to invest in patent litigation, rather than companies that actually have something to sell. The website for Altitude Capital Partners makes this pretty clear. They only care about the "intellectual property" a firm has, along with things like "Number and Quality of Potential Infringers" as well as how well the company has done in previous patent challenges. This seems like yet another example of a company that failed in the marketplace wanting to take money away from those who actually did deliver what customers wanted.