Order of European Inventors and Innovators
At first sight the word looks technical and cold. In reality, inventics is one of the most human of disciplines: the study of how the human mind produces the new — the methods, the stages and the conditions in which inventions are born.
Three words that do not mean the same thing
A discovery brings to light something that already existed: a law of nature, an element, a phenomenon. An invention creates something that has never existed: a device, a process, a new technical solution with practical application. And innovation is the road an invention travels into the world — the moment when the new solution becomes a product, a service or a process adopted by the market.
The distinction is not pedantry. A country can have many inventions and little innovation — patents that stay in drawers because nobody carries them towards the market. It is precisely that road, from idea to public use, that is the territory of inventics.
The science in it
For a long time it was believed that inventions were the privilege of a few geniuses touched by inspiration. Research into creativity has shown otherwise: the creative process has stages that can be described and trained. The classical model speaks of preparation (gathering knowledge and framing the problem), incubation (the silent work of the mind), illumination (the “eureka” moment) and verification (the test of engineering and of facts).
On this skeleton, concrete methods for generating ideas have been built — from techniques of divergent thinking to morphological methods, which systematically explore the possible combinations of a solution. None of it guarantees genius; but all of it increases the chances that genius will appear — and above all that it will not be lost.
The art in it
And yet no method replaces the personal leap: the courage to ask a question nobody has asked, the sensitivity to see a problem where everyone else sees normality, the stubbornness to rebuild a prototype for the tenth time. Here inventics borders on art — because it demands, as every art does, a form of inner freedom.
Why it concerns all of us
Inventive thinking is not the business of engineers alone. A teacher who finds a new way through to a child, a doctor who improvises intelligently in a critical situation, an entrepreneur who rearranges resources differently from every competitor — all of them practise, in their own way, the same discipline of the new. A society that understands this stops treating creativity as a luxury and starts treating it as a basic competence, one that can be taught.
In the Journal of the Order we will explore this world article by article: the methods of technical creation, the people behind it, and the often dramatic road of ideas towards the market. If the subject is close to you, write to us at contact@euroinnovationorder.com.