Why do we innovate?

I keep hearing this from management of every organization I work for, we need to file more patents. We need to be more innovative. I never understand somehow why a small set of people end up filing patents while most do not. I also hear another set of people complaining that some people spend enormous time and energy in filing patents rather than spending time in their day to day activity.

Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be I had been bitten by the patent bug 5 times. I filed 5 patents with USPTO from 2003. And most of them were by chance than choice. Many a times I have been asked by people to suggest how to be innovative. Luckily, I have been able to defend myself without having to reply to such requests nor actually talking about it. But, I feel sometimes myself what has made me innovate if I ever did it. Here are some of my thoughts. Feel free to question them or disagree with most of them, after all these are just what I feel.

1. Necessity is the mother of all inventions - I filed couple of patents because there were no better way to solve the problem. Either I innovate or find something new and different or perish in front of an ever demanding boss who felt I was at my wits end in solving the problem. And you end up coming up something which looks cool and different but I am not sure how I am going to consume it. It just looks like magic.
   
2. Being rigid in doing something someway - I filed a patent because I felt the way to do something in the way I think and not the shortcuts (may be long cuts) the world is doing today. This is my way of doing and I think that's unique and hence it's a patentable idea. It works I feel.
3. I am too lazy - I believe a safety pin was invented when a husband got frustrated with his wife's ever demanding needs of broken buttons and devised a contraption by twisting a wire lying around. In some sense, people who innovate are lazy. They love what they want to do in life than reading to 10000 lines of additional code someone else has written than to replace with their 100 lines of alternate code. After all who does not enjoy spending the evening with a beer mug in a bar than in front of a computer monitor.
4. What is innovation? I think the best answer to this question is given by Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes in their book Lateral Marketing.
   

In short we innovate because it's different and mostly even if it's not known why is it different.