That said, I canāt agree at all with the idea that we live in a particularly innovative time. Most of the businesses that currently getā¦
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 canāt agree at all with the idea that we live in a particularly innovative time. Most of the businesses that currently get marked as āinnovativeā 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 āinnovativeā they are than they spend on actual R&D (like Apple).
Genuine innovation cannot be easily productized, and as a result, it isnāt really compatible with consumerist capitalism. At the same time, it isnāt 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 canāt tell the difference, you arenāt 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.