Writes Mark W. Johnson of Business Week:
Creativity, by itself, is not enough. As I’ve previously written in this space, inventions that aren’t commercialized — no matter how creative — remain inventions, not innovations. To be commercial, an invention needs to matter enough to a customer to be worth paying for. And what matters to most customers is not the invention itself but what job it enables them to do that they couldn’t do, or do well enough, before. The microwave, for example, when it was first introduced, was a terrible oven, but it was fantastic defroster.