The Importance Of Innovation

A regular and repeated argument in commercial circles is the one that debates the order of importance between the factory floor producing the product and the sales team ensuring that it finds its place in the market. While the latter ensures the generation of essential income to fuel and grow the company, without something to sell they wouldnt even have a job let alone the commodity with which to generate sales. A regular chicken and egg debate if ever there was one or is it?

To my mind both camps are eligible for the title of most important for this platitude must surely belong to another group even further back along the chain, the innovator. For without the guy who dreams up the product in the first place there is neither need for production or sale of the same. So, surely, it is the inventor, the ideas man, the designer who has first claim to assuring the success of any corporation regardless of its size or market influence.

How many factories exist now thanks to that Eureka moment of the innovator who sits up in bed at three in the morning armed with a thought that could change the World, or at least influence a small part of what we require to make it a...