Successful Innovation - Timing or Strategy?

I have often wondered what the key to successful innovation is. Is it just the knack of knowing how to utilise an invention, or are there other aspects? Is there a time when all the planets align in auspicious symmetry for an idea?

My friend Google and I went in search of an answer. Bad idea. In no time at all I was knee deep in paradigm shifts and peculiar graphs, which seemed to demonstrate an eerily accurate relationship between time passing and people aging;  but maybe I missed the point. I'm pretty sure I've discovered a relationship between pseudoscience and the topic of innovation, anyway.

In another article I found a framework of innovation strategy alignment, which would have cleaned up in Buzzword Bingo ; But it also brought enlightenment in the shape of the reference:  'In French, we say “the best is the enemy of the good” ' which in turn led to an attribution to Voltaire and the general interpretation that to strive for perfection can be an impediment to progress, i.e. near enough is usually good enough.

With that we are starting to make some progress towards identifying the key timing aspects of innovation. Concept #1:  If you have a new idea, get it out there, warts and all! (other wise known as the Microsoft Way)

However there is the equally widely touted, but diametrically opposite philosophy that “good is the enemy of great”. In this case the meaning is that settling for good enough prevents one from achieving greatness. H.L. Mencken similarly warns us against overly facile answers when he says “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.“ Was he thinking of ethernet, perhaps? IBM's token ring network architecture was by many accounts a superior concept due to its more linear performance as traffic increases. Where is it now? Its failure was in fact attributable to a couple of things: 1) ethernet was cheap to implement 2) ethernet was first to be proposed as a standard.It was all about critical mass. The classic video recorder technology battle of VHS vs Beta was a supreme example of this.

So back to the issue at hand – the key to innovation; do we beat everyone else to the punch with our implementation of an invention? Or do we let the pioneers get shot full of arrows while they prime the market for our superior solution? History suggests the former strategy is most successful.