Sparking the Fire of Innovation

Do small organisations offer more oportunity for inventiveness, in particular, through research and development?

Without first reading 'Sparking the fire of invention' my first thoughts, on the above question, were that the bigger the business, the better they are financially for reasearch and development and the more staff to come up with new developments. But it soon became apparent, while I was reading, that my thoughts were slightly wrong as I didn't realise that what was meant by a 'small company' was a company that was solely for coming up with inventions, not a company which had a portion of its employees, who were inventing.


After reading 'Sparking the fire of invention' I will like to state that I do not agree with the way big businesses diregarded the impotance of the invention stage of 'technological change'. The following statement from the reading says: 

"Companies adopted the view that invention by itself was only a tiny part of business success; for every $1 spent on basic research, the conventional wisdom went, $100 would be spent on development and $1,000 on commercialization."

If it was not for the invention there would be no innovation, where the invention is transformed into products and services, and then there would be no diffusion, where the products and services are maketed. The invention is the most important part of the process.
It is little wonder that smaller companies do very well at inventiveness when that is the way big companies think. That is where little companies spend their time and money, with researching and developing new ideas.

This following extract from the above reading is what holds back bigger companies"

"Invention is so steeped in the myth of accidental discovery that one might conclude it’s like playing the lottery."

Some inventions may come from accidental discovery but most come from lots of research and 'trial of error'.

I very much like the following, from the inventor Jay Walker.

"invention is about taking risks that will almost certainly fail in order to find the unlikely breakthrough."

Which is basically the theory the small businesses like Myhrvold's Invention Science,  and others referred to in the reading, go by.

So to answer the question which was asked at the start, do I agree that small organisations offer more oportunity for inventiveness, in particular, through research and development?
I believe they do but only because big companies do not value the inventiveness stage of technological change. If big companies were to change their way of thinking then maybe they would have a better chance against the little companies.