In the world of inventors, "innovation" is the key term. The assembly line was an innovation that transformed the automobile industry. The Internet, a distributed network of computers spitting hypertext documents at one another, was a massive innovation in telecommunications.

Big jumps aside, a lot of innovations don't really happen by completely inventing or reinventing an entire new system or infrastructure. They happen by tweaking what already exists. DVD players were a whole different kind of technology, but the players themselves looked just like thinner version of VCRs, and their media recorded on the same material as audio CDs. A complete innovation in coffee would happen if the majority of coffee drinkers stopped drinking coffee and started drinking something else.

What we should really be looking for is not the new and daring, but the obvious. It's the thing that, when we see it, we slap ourselves in the forehead and say, "Duh! Why didn't I think of that?" The comment belies something that we know on a lower level, but of which we're not fully aware. It those corners of our mind that we glean over because we're taking what's hiding in them for granted.

This might sound like simple advice, but it isn't, because finding the obvious is one of the most difficult things to do. But there's usually a bigger market for the obvious than the truly, radically innovative.