While general usage tends to regard the terms invention and innovation as interchangeable synonyms, the eagle-eyed engineer will already be aware of the subtle but important difference between the two. While invention is focused on coming up with the ideas and discoveries in the first place, as Vaclav Smil says in his latest in a long line of highly readable analyses of the modern world, innovation is “perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes and ideas.”
As Smil remarks early in ‘Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure’ (The MIT Press, £20.58, ISBN 9780262048057), after a tortuously slow start for humankind in which it took millennia to develop even the most basic hand tools, we’ve become prolific – especially in the past few centuries – in making the world an easier place to live in by mastering the overlapping domains of invention and innovation. Just look...