Found or made

When something new appears in a market, people argue about who got there first. It is often the wrong argument, because two different things are being called new.

Some things were always going to be found. On the first truly hot week of the year in any Gulf city, somebody starts selling cold water at the traffic lights. Nobody invented that. The heat was there, the thirst was there, the lights were there. Whoever noticed first deserves some credit for noticing, but if they had not, someone else would have within days.

A great deal of what gets called innovation is like that. A new delivery route, a cheaper format, a pack size that suits a smaller household. The conditions were already in place, the demand was already waiting, and the move was close to inevitable. Being early is useful. It is not the same as being original.

Other things did not have to happen at all. A grandmother's way of cooking aubergine that the whole family now calls by her name. A song. A shop that decided to sell only one thing and do it beautifully. Nothing in the weather or the economics produced these. They took someone's taste, a particular insight into people, and the stubbornness to keep going until others came round.

The difference matters because the two call for different work. Finding rewards attention: watch closely and move when the gap opens. Making rewards nerve: build something nobody was waiting for and keep building it until they are.

Plenty of people who start things believe they are inventing when they are finding, which is why they are surprised when copies appear by the end of the summer.

Those who study the world mostly find what was already there. Those who build and make things add something that was not.