Everyone wants instant pudding. Then, Dr. Deming stands up and says there is no such thing as instant pudding. That we must learn how to integrate knowledge of people, statistics, and theory of knowledge into a working, breathing organizational system. That understanding these principles will lead to transformation. Instead of being competitive, individual components of the system will, for optimization, reinforce each other. This process is not spontaneous and is discontinuous. Some days little will seem to be accomplished. Other days great breakthroughs will occur. Progress will not be predictable.

But if we shift our attention from invention to innovation, we begin to see a much broader horizon. Innovation — the ability to create and capture economic value from invention — is what really drives both the economic prosperity of nations and the shareholder value of corporations.

Innovation isn’t just confined to commercialization of new products. It can also build upon creative new practices, processes, relationships, or business models, and even institutional innovations such as open-source computing — invention occurs in all these domains. And while breakthrough innovations can generate significant economic value, sustaining that value requires a capacity for continual incremental innovations.