If you missed it, the creator of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), a popular social networking website, was sued three years ago by a company he had previously worked at.
The lawsuit lists a number of allegations, including the fact that Zuckerberg “took the original idea” and appropriated it for his own gain.
While the lawsuit is still ongoing, a recent post over at Found|Read discusses the differences between inventing and innovating. Among other ideas mentioned is the role an entrepreneur plays in bringing a good or service to the market.
From a keen observer:
I’d rather be known as an innovator. Anybody can come up with an idea, but an idea is worthless unless it’s acted upon and properly executed (innovation).
And to the delight of IP lawyers everywhere, the litigious fight over innovation can be seen time and again in disputes such as NTP versus RIM (creator of the Blackberry).
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The South Korean equivalent, Cyworld, was launched in 1999. So the idea behind Facebook is hardly original.
That keen observer is almost right, and has actually only missed two points – but they make all the difference.
The first point is that invention is not just about having ideas. For instance lots of people had the idea of getting ink to flow round a ball bearing as a nib. Making that work, the eponymous biro, took finding an ink with the right lubricating, drying, and sticking qualities, and ball bearings with the right hardness and durability. Those in turn rested on yet other people’s achievements. Thinking it’s just about ideas and forgetting about making it work, that’s the mark of a marketer who literally doesn’t get the idea of 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. There was once a marketer who literally couldn’t understand the problem with a bright idea he had, that mobile phones should bleep an alarm whenever their batteries were dead.
That point is about what inventing really takes. The other point is about harmful stuff involved in “innovating”, in the above sense. Think Microsoft FUD, or how getting a dog’s breakfast out early can thwart any effort at doing the job right in any larger sense. Think how the US patent system was rigged to steal the gains of (I cannot put it any less) prior British work on penicillin, by capturing one new bottleneck.
So, innovating is ambiguous in the benefits it delivers, and invention is not.
Long live Lysander Spooner and Stephan Kinsella! (Copyright to me – ha ha)
I there anyway we can stop people copying its so frustrating that people put in so much hard work and someone just comes along and swipes it.
It’s a difficult call became mny people innovate and others come along and improve on it, but credit to the original innovator.
The confusion between mere invention and capitalistic-entrepreneurship is an interesting one that hardly occurs to people unless you draw attention to it. You can actually do this with kids. Ask what would happen if he or she invented a drink that is far better than Coke. What is step two? It will take a while for the point to be clear but after thinking through all the steps and risks associated with marketing, it becomes clear that it is step two and beyond that is the real stuff of economics, and not pure invention. Incidentally, this is why Kirzner notion of the pure entrepreneur has limited real-world explanatory power.
In this wonderful paper, Joseph Salerno maps out a proper Mengerian theory of entrepreneurship that is intimately bound up with property ownership and risk.
This is also why almost all the things we think of as technology were invented or innovated by engineers and tinkerers, and not by scientists.
Hi,
I came across this site the other day called Patent Retriever – http://www.patentretriever.com
You can download patents in PDF format for free.
John
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