# 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…

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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](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [October 26,
2016](https://medium.com/p/3b958d218e41).

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

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.