"To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions"
About this Quote
Kamen’s line is a demolition job on the way “innovation” became corporate incense: light it, wave it around, and everyone feels visionary without naming what actually changed. By yoking innovation to the wheel, fire, language, and movable type, he draws a hard boundary between technologies that rewire civilization’s operating system and the endless stream of gadgets that merely optimize it. The provocation isn’t historical pedantry; it’s triage. If you call everything innovation, nothing is. The word loses its ability to signal scale, risk, and consequence.
The subtext is a critique of incentives. In a startup-and-press-release culture, “innovation” is a reputational shortcut, a way to launder incrementalism as disruption. Kamen, a working inventor who’s spent decades in the trenches of medical devices and ambitious engineering projects, has reasons to be allergic to that. Truly foundational shifts are rare, slow, and often invisible while they’re happening. They don’t arrive with a keynote; they arrive as new defaults that make entire categories of behavior possible. Movable type didn’t just print books better; it mass-produced authority, argument, and dissent.
Calling everything else “invention” isn’t an insult. It’s a demand for precision: celebrate improvements, but don’t confuse product iteration with civilizational leverage. Kamen’s intent is to restore a hierarchy of impact, forcing listeners to ask the uncomfortable question that marketing usually avoids: does this create a new world, or just a new SKU?
The subtext is a critique of incentives. In a startup-and-press-release culture, “innovation” is a reputational shortcut, a way to launder incrementalism as disruption. Kamen, a working inventor who’s spent decades in the trenches of medical devices and ambitious engineering projects, has reasons to be allergic to that. Truly foundational shifts are rare, slow, and often invisible while they’re happening. They don’t arrive with a keynote; they arrive as new defaults that make entire categories of behavior possible. Movable type didn’t just print books better; it mass-produced authority, argument, and dissent.
Calling everything else “invention” isn’t an insult. It’s a demand for precision: celebrate improvements, but don’t confuse product iteration with civilizational leverage. Kamen’s intent is to restore a hierarchy of impact, forcing listeners to ask the uncomfortable question that marketing usually avoids: does this create a new world, or just a new SKU?
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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