I’d rather move past all the terms definitions, useful and perhaps essential though they are, and focus on this clause:

“So innovators (think of them as idea entrepreneurs, or whatever) both figure out which inventions are not hopeless and deliver the useful ones at scale. Innovators create all of the surplus, inventors do little more than breathe”.

I think that “idea generators” and “pure theoreticians” and “idea retailers” (to alter your formulations with other analogous terms) all serve important functions. But “innovators” (who might also be called “project engineers”, “production mappers” or even “quilters”) who carry the ideas into
play are essential. Also, “resource determiners” are critical, leaders, whether in corporate America, academia, Main Street small business, or government, who allocate which resources will be devoted to which ideas.

I think that we are watching the test tubes rumble in the experiment to test whether the technology revolution (including the internet) has resulted in
the ability of people with access to the capital markets, but not the dramatic structure of traditional corporate business and government, can cause sweeping change beyond electronic product design. It’s far too early to tell if the technological movement stemming from the internet and successful electronic technology has given rise to a new culture of getting things done. I personally hope (having to edit from “we all hope” to a more muted statement) that we are seeing a kind of “Can Do 2.0″, when
large scale problems can be addressed by “innovators” who are able to work from relatively small platforms. Could small business, fueled with the methods of new technological innovation, solve some of the alternative fuels barriers in ways that the 1970s companies could not do? It’s too early to tell.

I’m not very interested in dismissing the “idea generators”, as you do, but instead in celebrating the people who, to paraphrase Beagle, “colonize dreams”, but more important than the Beagle quote, who “colonize dreams and then make them fit on a desktop as fully operational usefulware”.

Bringing “product to market”, whether it be a fuel or a solution to poverty in Mali, that’s the key. Those “market definers”, to coin yet another term, interest me.

I respectfully disagree.

An innovator is somebody who brings a new product to the market.

(I took an Innovation 101 class.)