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In its purest sense, "invention" can be defined as the creation of a product or introduction of a process for the first time. "Innovation," on the other hand, occurs if someone improves on or makes a significant contribution to an existing product, process or service. Consider the microprocessor. Someone invented the microprocessor. But by itself, the microprocessor was nothing more than another piece on the circuit board. It's what was done with that piece -- the hundreds of thousands of products, processes and services that evolved from the invention of the microprocessor -- that required innovation.

When competition can develop better products, better delivery, better marketing and stronger customer relations at lower cost you lose, they win.  Competitors like these are not competitors you already know they are those you don't know yet.  However they are coming and they will run you over and take your market share at the click of a mouse. Look at Apple, Groupon or Foursquare. All have launched game-changing products-not by being first to market, but by rethinking the market's needs. They didn't just ask, "How can we make a better product?" They asked, "How can we better serve a need?" Interestingly, the need they addressed was often not being explicitly requested by the consumer. In his book The Innovator's Solution, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen describes this as addressing "non-consumption." By offering a product to a specific part of the market that's not currently buying, you're not competing with an established incumbent but, rather, creating a new market. And, often, you're introducing economics that make it difficult for entrenched competitors in other parts of the market to compete.

James Kelway started the Six Circles - an Experience Design Framework, as an enquiry into how different design principles can be applied to the field of digital product design. The principles studied led to the emergence of six core themes; persuasion, behavior, visual design, usability, interaction and content. The book describes the importance of these areas and how working systematically with these themes will require a holistic mindset and approach that require multi-disciplinary teams within organizations to ensure the creation of quality products. It is also serves as a way to judge the effectiveness of digital products using the six lenses described

Developers can find excellent resources at productontology.org, home of The Product Types Ontology: High-precision identifiers for product types based on Wikipedia.

In the knowledge economy, content is no longer sufficient - everyone has access to a multitude of content. You cannot compete on what everyone knows. As you move up the hierarchy, it becomes more difficult to compete on individual competency - everyone is highly skilled and experienced at the top. It is hard to compete when everyone is so similar. The new advantage is context - how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to new products and services. Creating competitive context requires social capital - the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others, inside and outside of the organization. Social capital is derived from employees' professional and business networks. The new competitive landscape requires focusing on between-employee factors, the connections that combine to create new processes, products and services. Social capital encompasses communities of practice, knowledge exchanges, information flows, interest groups, social networks and other emergent connections between employees, suppliers, regulators, partners and customers.

SemTech is the preferred industry platform for exhibitors to announce product launches and breaking news. Attendees will have the rare opportunity to view products and services from top industry insiders.

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook. In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

Social media are talk technologies. They are the means of production in an age of communication. They aid in the production and exchange of knowledge and information and culture, based on human interests. They are media in which people see themselves represented. Their impact is as much psychological and social as it is technical. In recent years, social media have come off the page. Social tools have become more talkative, mobile, and real-time. They have taken a conversational turn. And as these social tools increasingly facilitate relationships and communication, their role in these deeply personal and social dynamics has become a matter for design. The need for a deeper understanding of the fit between tools and social interactions calls for a new design practice. This is social interaction design

"Discovery is the most important business capability in the emerging Age of Insight - it's the missing ingredient that makes Big Data a source of value for businesses and people. The Language of Discovery is an essential tool for providing discovery capability, whether at the scale of designing a single discovery application, determining the value proposition of a new product or service, or managing a strategic portfolio of technology and business initiatives. This presentation outlines the Age of Insight, and suggests deep structural and historic precedents visible in the Age of Reason, especially in the central parallels between Natural Philosophy and the emerging discipline of Data Science. We then review the language of discovery, and consider widely visible examples of products and services that demonstrate the language. We review our own usage of the framework as an analytical and generative toolkit for providing discovery capability, and share best practices for employing this perspective across a variety of levels of need."

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't? The biggest cost - assuming you don't crash - is to your productivity. In part, that's a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you're partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it's because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you're increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

As the fundamental flow of energy through the marketplace transforms from 'push' to 'pull,' organizations will need to become more active and participative social networkers.  New opportunities will show up first on the myriad of non-structured, social media sites that cater to people who want to collaborate to solve problems, start trends, influence the masses and build support.

"Much like other crossover sensations from the creative world such as design thinking and information design, the visual thinking phenomenon has sustained interest for some time now. From the most staid corporate institutions to the most enlightened young startups, visual thinking techniques are being sought after as part of a new business toolkit in the quest to create "cultures of innovation." Post-its, whiteboards, and flipcharts are infiltrating once stodgy conference rooms and work spaces. Unbridled creativity - not industrial-era efficiency - is the key to better products, smarter services, and increased profit. But behind the glowing promise of the vizthink movement, a challenge persists for many in the business world: how best to harness the power of visual thinking to achieve real results?"

"Two things are clear. The first is that smart machines are evolving at breakneck speed. Moore's law-that the computing power available for a given price doubles about every 18 months-continues to apply. This power is leaping from desktops into people's pockets. More than 1.1 billion people own smartphones and tablets. Manufacturers are putting smart sensors into all sorts of products. The second is that intelligent machines have reached a new social frontier: knowledge workers are now in the eye of the storm, much as stocking-weavers were in the days of Ned Ludd, the original Luddite. Bank clerks and travel agents have already been consigned to the dustbin by the thousand; teachers, researchers and writers are next. The question is whether the creation will be worth the destruction."

People who have already sifted through online information to make sense of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks without ever directly communicating with them, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research have demonstrated. This process of distributed sensemaking, they say, could save time and result in a better understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users might have, whether it is planning a vacation, gathering information about a serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy.

You know how our social graphs are creeping into every aspect of our web lives, from search results to coupons? Well, get ready for something a lot more personal, a lot more targeted and, perhaps, a lot more creepy. Much as social graphs are maps of our social media connections that follow us across the web, interest graphs are maps of our interests. Some companies want them to follow us across the web, too, meaning that wherever we go, there we are. There'll be no more need to search through news sites for the stories we want, or shopping sites for the products we want, because the site will know as soon as we hit its system who we are and what we like. Whether you're fascinated or appalled by the idea of interest graphs, here's a taste of how they might work.

Just because a product has the largest market share doesn't mean it is the best one for your organizational needs.

"When adding game elements to your site or business, be sure to incorporate a way for current customers to recruit new ones, says gamification expert Gabe Zichermann. Unlike loyalty programs, which can reinforce behaviors of existing customers, the "viral nature" of gamification can help attract new customers to your business. "At the very heart of what you're trying to do with gamification is to get people to come in, keep coming in and bring their friends to create a cycle in which your products, services and egagement drive customer adoption," Zichermann says."

To what extent are you responsible for innovation in your company? The reality is that unless they're in research or product development, most people in organizations don't think of themselves as innovators. In fact, many managers discourage their people from inventing new ways of doing things - pushing them instead to follow procedures and stay within established guidelines.

Businesses are using collective intelligence to speed up company growth, improve efficiency, enhance products and services, and strengthen the employee environment, according to new research from IBM.

Behavior is the unknowable variable in every innovation, and it is the variable that most determines the opportunity a new business model has to evolve and take advantage of the new behavior.