Does innovation have anything to do with commerce?

That said, I can’t agree at all with the idea that we live in a particularly innovative time. Most of the businesses that currently get…

Does innovation have anything to do with commerce? Not any moreso than anything else. Innovative ideas are not necessarily commercially viable, and commercially viable ideas are rarely innovative; the space of commercially viable ideas is small, isolated, and nearly fully mined.

That said, I can’t agree at all with the idea that we live in a particularly innovative time. Most of the businesses that currently get marked as “innovative” are attempts to revive business plans that failed in 1999 (like Uber); the remainder are businesses that produce shoddy copies of the products of their technically superior competitors but make more money because they spend a bigger chunk of their budget on advertising to tell everyone how “innovative” they are than they spend on actual R&D (like Apple).

Genuine innovation cannot be easily productized, and as a result, it isn’t really compatible with consumerist capitalism. At the same time, it isn’t easy to mistake genuine innovation for the kind of imaginary pseudo-innovation that is produced by the con-men who dominate most industries. If you can’t tell the difference, you aren’t looking.

By John Ohno on October 26, 2016.

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/does-innovation-have-anything-to- do-with-commerce-3b958d218e41)

Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.