Turning Invention Into Innovation
In most of the roles I’ve held over the past 15 years a key outcome was to create a growth business. It didn’t matter whether the effort was a start-up, creating a new product, an acquisition, or a partnership. One of the hardest things to do in those roles was to take an idea and translate that idea into a fully formed business that made peoples’ lives better.
The work we’re doing at Posit Science has brought this to the forefront again. The scientific breakthrough of harnessing the power of the brain to improve performance is clear. This is the invention. Invention- the word invent comes from the Latin word inventus, in plus ventus, meaning to come upon or to encounter. I think of an invention as a discovery or an idea that we dream up.
Now we need to turn that invention into an innovation at a scale that impacts the world in a dramatic way. The word innovation is also from Latin but a different root- in plus nova, meaning to renew. I think of an innovation a new way of doing something or the introduction of something new. You might say innovation is an invention successfully put into practice.
Over 100,000 people have used Posit Science’s products and we’ve found multiple ways to partner with others to accelerate distribution. We had a terrific fourth quarter and a great holiday season. But there is still significant work to do in order to achieve our mission of bringing this brain science to the people.
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Posted: Brain Fitness Marketing, Odds and Ends
Posit Science's corporate blog is the place where our employees share their thoughts about Posit Science and its products, brain fitness, breakthroughs in neuroscience, and any other topic they find interesting and relevant. 
January 7th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
These are great products! I see that there may be different kinds of research within the company. You may have a whole team of people researching the latent needs, I mean the cognitive skills that people may want to improve. But on the other hand, there may be the people always in the search of a training program that fix the problem.
January 7th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
And talking about Innovation. I read an article this morning that you may want to read.
It talks about the balance between science, technology and design for successful innovation
http://ow.ly/TQrg
February 7th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
I appreciate the link to the innovation resource … here’s another one to look at that speaks to the importance of innovating through gathering ideas broadly and finding partners to help turn those ideas into offerings http://openinnovation.haas.berkeley.edu/openinnovation.html