What’s the difference between innovation and invention?

What’s the difference between innovation and invention?

Which one is more important?

Let’s look at each question in turn, starting with the first one. Understanding the difference between these two concepts can have a dramatic impact on your economic future.

Invention is creating a new product or service that—hopefully—is desired by a large audience as a result of its widespread utility. Invention generally requires very technical skills or knowledge. A good example of a modern-day invention is the computer. Obviously, the creation of computerized systems required heavy technical knowledge and training not widely available to the general public.

Innovation is the process of improving a pre-existing service or item. Basically, what we call innovations are improvements made to pre-existing inventions. As you can probably tell, innovations are much easier to create and should therefore be the focus of any “layman” looking to get rich. A good example of modern-day innovation is computerized apps for desktops. Of course, apps have existed for several years on different platforms, but their transfer to systems such as Windows and Linux have greatly improved computer layouts over the last few years.

The important point? You don’t need to be a technical genius to come up with that idea.

If you are looking to become rich, you should be thinking innovation, not invention. You don’t need to expend all the time, money, or energy it takes to make a groundbreaking and best-selling invention. You simply need to think about what would make the products and systems around you better.

That’s the pathway to becoming rich.

Think about it: companies are constantly innovating all the time. Does Facebook keep the same layout year after year? Has YouTube kept its same subscription platform for the last decade?

Of course not. These updates can be considered innovations to pre-existing platforms. As a result of these innovations, the two different sites have greatly expanded their user-base and are now some of the world’s leading services.

You should do the same if you expect to be rich. Don’t be content with the here and now. Think, research, innovate, and collect.

That’s a pretty good motto to have.