Thomas Edison wasn’t technically the inventor of a light bulb. Decades before him, inventors such as Ebenezer Kinnersley (1761) and Humphry Davy (early 1800s) did a great amount of work to create incandescent lamps.
However, Edison turned the electric lightbulb into a practical product and wrapped an entire ecosystem around it.
Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.
Thus, Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight.
A lot of the time, an organisation’s innovation effort ends up producing something brilliant, but without blending it with the organisational processes, supported systems, customer value and market opportunity, these end up merely as inventions with little or no commercial value.
Thinking Space 