Jon Udell has a nice short post on a Businessweek article that tries to argue that innovation is just as much about refinement of ideas as it is about breakthrough concepts. As Jon quotes:

The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one.

While I'm not sure I completely agree with the claim, I do love this notion that "any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old." This statement is a neat twist on something that I heard from one of the Sun founders at a talk while I was at Stanford (I can't remember if it was Andy Bechtolsheim or Bill Joy) about how you should keep notes about what you think will happen in technology 5 years from now so that you can go back and see the bias in your predictions.

Jon closes the post by mentioning the web-browser as a good example (invented just over 10 years ago, big over the next 10 years). I would add: cloud-based consumer data services, auction-based e-commerce systems, and search engines as three vectors for what we might see as having even more of a significant impact over the next 10 years. What do you think?

(Thanks to Eddie who pointed the piece out)