Money and Finance
- Walter Isaacson On Npr
Walter Isaacson discusses his latest book (released today), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Link to: How The Cold War And George Orwell Helped Make The Internet What It Is The story of how...
- America’s Greatest Inventor – By Bill Gates
I love learning about history, especially the history of innovation. I recently got to write the foreword for Edison and the Rise of Innovation, a new book about one of the great inventors ever. I thought I would share the foreword with you, along with...
- Nassim Taleb Quote
From Antifragile:There is something sneaky in the process of discovery and implementation—something people usually call evolution. We are managed by small (or large) accidental changes, more accidental than we admit. We talk big but hardly have any...
- Bill Gates: My Plan To Fix The World's Biggest Problems
We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine. Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the...
- Cultivating Genius - By Jonah Lehrer
Most economic growth has a very simple source: new ideas. It is our creativity that generates wealth. So how can we increase the pace of innovation? Is it possible to inspire more Picassos and Steve Jobses? The answer to that question is hidden in history...
Money and Finance
Forget Edison: This is How History's Greatest Inventions Really Happened
Found via @farnamstreet.
The world's most famous inventors are household names. As we all know, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
Except they didn't. The ideas didn't spring, Athena-like, fully formed from their brains. In fact, they didn't spring fully formed from anybody's brains. That is the myth of the lonely inventor and the eureka moment.
"Simultaneous invention and incremental improvement are the way innovation works, even for radical inventions," Mark A. Lemley writes in his fascinating paper The Myth of the Sole Inventor. Lemley's paper concentrates on the history and problems of patents. But he also chronicles the history of the 19th and 20th century's most famous inventors -- with an emphasis on how their inventions were really neither theirs, nor inventions. Here is a super-quick summary of his wonderful distillation of the last 200 years in collaborative innovation.
……………….
Related article: “In the Air” – By Malcolm Gladwell
- Walter Isaacson On Npr
Walter Isaacson discusses his latest book (released today), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Link to: How The Cold War And George Orwell Helped Make The Internet What It Is The story of how...
- America’s Greatest Inventor – By Bill Gates
I love learning about history, especially the history of innovation. I recently got to write the foreword for Edison and the Rise of Innovation, a new book about one of the great inventors ever. I thought I would share the foreword with you, along with...
- Nassim Taleb Quote
From Antifragile:There is something sneaky in the process of discovery and implementation—something people usually call evolution. We are managed by small (or large) accidental changes, more accidental than we admit. We talk big but hardly have any...
- Bill Gates: My Plan To Fix The World's Biggest Problems
We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine. Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the...
- Cultivating Genius - By Jonah Lehrer
Most economic growth has a very simple source: new ideas. It is our creativity that generates wealth. So how can we increase the pace of innovation? Is it possible to inspire more Picassos and Steve Jobses? The answer to that question is hidden in history...