Construct · 4 fields · 8 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaninginnovationcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to invention is innovation.
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In classical rhetoric, invention (Latin inventio, Greek heuresis) is the first of the five canons: the work of discovering and generating the arguments, proofs, and appeals available for a given case, before they are arranged or given style. Cicero set it out in De Inventione (c. 84 BCE) as the finding of things true or plausible that make a case persuasive, building on Aristotle's account in the Rhetoric of finding the available means of persuasion. Here the word names an act of searching for and selecting what to say, not the granting of a legal monopoly, a piece of music, or an economic first-creation.[1][2]
In patent law, an invention is a new and useful advance that qualifies for a patent because it is novel and not obvious to a skilled practitioner. The concept enters modern law with the Statute of Monopolies of 1624, which barred monopolies except patents granted to the true and first inventor of a new manufacture, and it was sharpened over centuries into the doctrinal tests analysed by Merges and Nelson (1990). The referent is a legally defined, examinable object of property rights, unlike the rhetorical act of finding arguments, a musical composition, or the economist's first act of creation.[3][4]
In music, an invention is a short contrapuntal piece that develops a single melodic idea across two or more independent voices. Francesco Antonio Bonporti used the title Invenzioni for his violin works of 1712, and J. S. Bach made the form canonical in his keyboard Inventions (BWV 772 to 786, c. 1723), whose construction Dreyfus (1996) analysed as deliberate motivic working-out. Here the word names a composed instrumental work, not a way of finding arguments, a patentable advance, or a stage in economic change.[5][6][7]
In the economics of innovation, invention is the first workable creation of a new product, process, or method, kept distinct from innovation (its first commercial introduction) and from diffusion (its spread through the market). Schumpeter drew this line in The Theory of Economic Development (first published 1911), treating invention as an act that lies outside the economic system until an entrepreneur carries it into use as an innovation. The referent is the originating technical or organisational act in a sequence of economic change, not a rhetorical search for arguments, a legal grant, or a musical composition.[8]
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