An invention isn't an innovation until it changes behavior.

1:45with uh have you ever heard Sean the story of how horsepower kind of came to be? >> No. Tell that story. So one of my one of my great contentions is that when we look at great entrepreneurs or great inventors, Jobs, you know, if you say uh Edison, Ford, what Bolton, they tend to be written up as historians as inventors. And my argument is that an invention isn't an innovation until it

2:17changes behavior. I think it's Stuart Butterfield of Slack who says something very similar. No, the only real measure of the effect you're having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior. And you can invent anything you like, but if you can't get anybody to adopt it, it's an invention, but it's not an innovation. And what was selling steam engines to mine owners? And the purpose of the steam engine was

2:41to replace the horses they used to walk round and round in circles draining the mines so that miners could go in and effectively mine coal slate coal whatever without drowning. What he realized is that you could you as an engineer you could talk around you know the calorific capacity of the boiler or the length of the piston stroke or whatever and these people didn't want to know. So Watson and Bolton amongst

3:05themselves said, "Well, what do these people really want to know before they're prepared to buy a steam engine?" They said, "They want to know how many horses they no longer need to feed if they buy a steam engine. How many horses can I get rid of if I buy the steam engine?" So what went out and invented a unit we still use today, which is called the horsepower. And the reason it's not

3:25named after a famous scientist like the M or the Newton or the Koulom or the Watt for that matter or Celsius or anything of that kind is because it's a marketing unit. It was invented for marketing purposes because he could then go and say if you buy 25 horsepower steam engine you can actually get rid of 75 horses cuz I think the horses worked in shift. So it does the work of 25

3:46horses but it does it 24 hours a day. So you can now get rid of of 75 horses. And these people would go scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble. Cost of horses, cost of feeding horses, cost of looking after horses. And you know, on the back of an envelope, they could then go, we'll have two of those. By the way, it went even further than that. I mean, the industrial revolution

4:06was a marketing revolution every bit as much as it was an industrial revolution because there was no point in being able to produce things in abundance if you couldn't create corresponding demand. So, you know, one of the things about the 18th and 19th century in England was it was an absolutely pioneering period in terms of how people marketed things and that included the steam engine where what and Bolton would go to a mine

4:31owner. Now, let me get this right. Some people were already using Nukeman engines which were less efficient steam engines than the Watt engine. and Watt and Bolton would go along to the people who are already using these inefficient steam engines and this is how they priced their their own steam engine. They said, "We'll supply it for free. You pay us a third of the money you save