Innovation and Invention

The answer to the Kodak puzzle is the whole point of this course. Inventing something and turning it into value that people use and pay for are two different jobs.

Innovation is the purposeful process of creating new ideas, products, services or methods, or significantly improving existing ones, and putting them into use in ways that solve problems and create value. The key words are into use and value. An idea in a notebook is not yet an innovation. A clever prototype nobody can afford is not yet an innovation. It becomes one when people adopt it and it changes how something is done.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter, who put innovation at the centre of economics in the first half of the twentieth century, described it as the engine of economic change. New combinations of technology, products and methods push out the old ones, a process he called creative destruction. Typewriter repairers gave way to laptop technicians; queues in banking halls gave way to mobile transfers.

The two words are often used as if they mean the same thing. They do not.

• Invention is the creation of a new idea, device, process or concept for the first time. It is about novelty and discovery. It usually happens in a laboratory, a workshop or a research team.
• Innovation is the application of an invention or idea in a practical way that creates value, solves a problem or meets a need. It is about use, adoption and impact. It usually happens in a business, a government agency or a community.

A neat way to hold the difference: invention answers "What is new?"; innovation answers "How can this be used effectively, by whom, and at what price?"

Notice the last row. Every innovation in the right-hand column uses inventions from the left-hand column. Nigerian fintech companies such as Paystack, Flutterwave, Opay and Moniepoint did not invent the internet, the smartphone or electronic payments. What they did was apply those existing inventions to local problems: helping small businesses accept online payments, letting traders take card payments through a POS terminal at a market stall, and giving people without bank branches nearby a way to send and receive money. That is innovation, and it is no smaller an achievement than invention.

Innovation does not have to involve technology: a new way of organising a market or a new payment plan can be innovative on paper alone. But in the modern economy, technology is the most powerful enabler of innovation, and computing sits at the heart of it. Technology supplies the tools, platforms and infrastructure that turn ideas into working services. It enables innovation in four main ways:

1. Automating processes. Software performs repetitive tasks faster and with fewer errors than people. Payroll, ticketing and student-result processing that once took weeks of manual work now take minutes.
2. Improving efficiency. Organisations do more with fewer resources: a single customer-service chatbot can answer thousands of routine questions at once.
3. Reducing costs. Digital systems cut paperwork, travel and the number of intermediaries. Filing a document online is cheaper than sending a messenger across Lagos traffic.
4. Creating new markets. Technology opens up services, industries and business models that could not exist before, such as ride-hailing, app stores or online tutoring.

Innovation matters everywhere, but it matters with special urgency in a country like Nigeria. Unemployment, slow public services, uneven access to quality education and healthcare, and large numbers of people outside the formal banking system are serious problems. Each of them is also an opening for computing-based solutions that improve efficiency, reduce cost and widen access.

Mobile technology has been the strongest driver. Many Nigerians do not own a laptop, but most adults have access to a mobile phone. That single fact explains why so many local innovations are mobile-first: USSD banking codes that work on basic phones, agent banking through POS operators in villages, online classes delivered as small video files, telemedicine consultations by phone, and farmers receiving weather alerts and market prices by SMS.

For a computer science student this is good news. Programming, databases, networking and systems design are exactly the skills that turn these needs into working services. Innovation is therefore not only an academic topic but a practical skill that lets graduates contribute to national development and, often, create their own jobs.