Why is it so hard to sell a unique invention? What are the disadvantages of inventions?
In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter F. Drucker says that, while innovations can be successful, entrepreneurs need to be careful with them. Sometimes, a groundbreaking new product can prove difficult to sell.
Take a look at why Drucker doesn’t recommend inventing from scratch.
Pure Invention Isn’t Always Good
Drucker objects to the romanticized notion of genius inventors and their groundbreaking products. Launching totally new inventions is highly risky and usually depends on the convergence of multiple factors in the market—a single missing ingredient may delay or derail your product’s success.
According to Drucker, one of the disadvantages of inventions is that breaking into the market with brand-new ones is a losing game—for each success, there are countless failures, and predicting which invention will take off is a near-impossible task. As alluring as they may seem, new inventions carry higher risks compared to other types of innovation opportunities, as well as very long development periods from concept to application, followed by another lag from development to market entry, with a total average time in development spanning 30 years for a single invention to grow into wide acceptance by the public.
(Shortform note: Drucker’s assertion that inventions by themselves don’t make for successful innovations is an idea shared by investor Warren Buffett, who famously predicted that the vast majority of internet startup companies would crash in the 1990s. Buffett points to the history of technological progress—any time a new invention hits the market, even ones that are widely accepted by the public, so many companies will flood the market that it’s impossible to predict which handful will still be alive once the initial competition phase is over. Even though the stock market tends to overvalue businesses driven by invention, the market of real goods and services inevitably corrects the stock price, losing investors—and innovators—lots of money.)
Furthermore, Drucker points out that innovation through invention rarely hinges on a single new development—instead, it commonly depends on the union of two or more technologies or practices. For instance, even though cathode ray tubes (CRTs) were invented in 1897, it wasn’t until Philo Farnsworth leveraged the newly discovered “photoelectric effect” that he could build the first CRT-based television. Therefore, until every piece of the puzzle is ready, an innovation isn’t ripe for deployment. It follows, then, that your first step must be to analyze everything that needs to exist for your invention to succeed. Not doing so can result in a misfire—either your innovation will bomb, or a competitor will swoop in and seize the advantage after you fumble.
(Shortform note: Not everyone agrees with Drucker’s cautious approach to invention. For instance, in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he writes that the Apple founder believed that invention has to come before the market knows what it wants. Jobs’s approach to innovation relied on his intuition to see possibilities others missed. Jobs wasn’t a perfect oracle, but when his intuition misstepped, he’d just take the next leap ahead. However, he was canny enough to spot the convergence of technologies that Drucker describes. For example, when he introduced the iPod music player, he already knew that advances in cell phones would make the iPod obsolete—so he started work right away on his next innovation—the first iPhone.)
