invention

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invention

the creation of new production techniques and processes and new products that can be developed into usable processes and products through INNOVATION. Invention is an important means for a firm to improve its competitive position over rival suppliers by enabling it to lower supply costs and prices to consumers and to provide consumers with improved products. These benefits also improve overall MARKET PERFORMANCE. Certain kinds of MARKET STRUCTURE may be more conducive to invention insofar as they offer better incentives and resources for undertaking RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT (see MONOPOLY for further discussion).

In a more general way, invention can add to the growth of national income and output (see ECONOMIC GROWTH) by the qualitative improvement of a country's CAPITAL STOCK as investment in new technologies improves PRODUCTIVITY. See TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESSIVENESS, PATENT.

References in periodicals archive ?

In the rhetorical tradition, imitation is recognized as a generative, inventional resource that allows an individual to "take experience apart and put it together in new ways" (Corbett 1971, 250).

Art controversy in the Obama White House: performing tensions of race in the visual politics of the presidency

Selection from the inventional canister of "performance" also allowed successful metaphoric mapping of paraphiers related to celebrity, fame, excitement, and quality.

The never-ending election of 2000: metaphoric expression by the press in the service of public political understanding of an uncertain election result

Ingrid Bartsch makes this point about science and rhetoric as she summarizes the work of Donna Haraway, who "echoes a pre-Platonic notion of rhetoric in which tropes and topoi are inventional systems and not simply databases used to store and retrieve information":

Science in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie

See "An Inventional Archaeology of 'A Fable for Tomorrow,'" in And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," ed.

A meeting with Old Ben: seeing and writing nature in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses

The disclaimer at the end of the sentence identifies a reciprocity between the inventional capacity and human social need, a dialectic between the creative and the material: "Even the metaphor, that figurative transfer of meaning, stands in the service of satisfying urgent needs" (p.

Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition

Memory served as 'the epistemological place where the inventional materials of torture were assembled (dispositio) and rehearsed for performance (actio)' (61).

Jody Enders. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence

Haraway echoes a pre-Platonic notion of rhetoric in which tropes and topoi are fertile inventional systems and not simply replicated databases used to store and retrieve information.

The jeremiad's promise: Cyborg wetlands and vampiric practices

It is a final inventional rebellion against rebellion.

Walk-out: rereading George Oppen

The inventional nature of the architecture trope is clear in its twelfth-century use.

The poet as master builder: composition and locational memory in the Middle Ages

In light of these contextual constraints--the awareness of the story of Selma's unfulfilled promise, Clinton's own presidential record on race, and his lame duck status--one might conclude that Clinton's inventional options were increasingly limited, his speech more likely to feature only the most uncontested parts of the Bloody Sunday narrative as if to suggest that Selma, too, had been a site of transcendence even if it was less clear that the results of that transcendence had been achieved.

Speaking at Selma: presidential commemoration and Bill Clinton's problem of invention