Inventors won’t make a dent without a savvy innovator. And without inventions, an innovator has nothing to market. Take Apple Inc for instance. Wozniak was the inventor behind the early Apple computers and Jobs a great marketeer. In isolation neither of them would have succeed, but together they formed a great inventor-innovator team..
Other notable examples of this dynamic are Bill Gates and Paul Allen or Edison as well as Westinghouse reaping the rewards of Nikola Tesla’s ingenuity.
More contemporary,, there is Elon Musk and the engineers who created the Tesla EVs.
History is littered with inventors who couldn’t make a dime of their brilliant inventions. They need an innovator to bring their creation to market and often create or leapfrog an entire industry.
On the other hand, innovators would not exist without inventors. What vehicle of creative novelty would they use to fundamentally change our life?
Inventors think up new ways of doing things. Innovators think up ways to apply the inventions to fulfil a need. Innovators are not data-driven, but need driven. They anticipate or even create a need and look either for an existing product to fulfil the need or team up with an innovator to create one. .
