The Myth of the Lone Inventor

Codex The Sloth writes "Malcolm Gladwell (who amongst other things, wrote "The Tipping Point") has written an article for the New Yorker claiming that the role of the lone inventor is over. The example of Philo T. Fransworth (the "inventor" of Television) who failed because (amongst other reasons) he didn't have the big resources of a company to allow him to focus on his innovations. The thesis is that it is rare to have a single innovation that makes a product workable and that getting all of the inovations together requires a (large) corporation. No doubt others feel different."

Comments

I believe it's true...

[Anonymous Coward]

We're reaching a point where it's incredibly difficult for a single individual to develop new inventions of any significance because of complexity. There is still a role for innovation by individuals, however.

Even though software programs aren't inventions in the normal sense, I think this is one area where individuals can still have a huge impact, although we're also seeing most large software projects written by teams.

yea right..

[rootlocus]

"...the role of the lone inventor is over"

Tell that to Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Moolenaar, etc etc... The role of the lone inventor is still very much alive when it comes to open source software...

Re:yea right..

[bentini]

As far as I can tell, these people have, respectively "invented" Linux, Perl and Vim, which are respectively marginal improvements (in certain senses) of UNIX, AWK, and ed/sed. They all at least have various philosophical similarities to what I have described as their predecessors.

These three inventions were all made by Bell Labs. Bell Labs was supported only by the telephone monopoly, aka the biggest corporation in the world. I'd say that that is a far cry from a "lone inventor." What it once took a genius years to do, it eventually takes anyone no time at all. You understand the laws of motion (probably) and gravity, which is more than can be said of anyone living in the 12th Century. You can create new applications of those problems, but that doesn't make you the inventor of them. Even if you recast them and re-write them.

Hacking is human nature

[SHiFTY1000]

As long as there are tools and imagination, there will be inventors... Anyone remember the guy with the wind-up radio for the third world? A guy called Trevor Bayliss had the idea watching TV about how batteries in Africa cost a month's wages.... So he built a prototype in his garage and was eventually successful. Source here http://www.engineerguy.com/comm/2574.ht m I think lone inventors will always be around, but corporations will determine whether they can make a financial success out of their idea.

Ha

[The Cat]

Absolute horsefeathers.

Big corporations don't invent anything, and the worst place in the world for an inventive, brilliant, highly intelligent and competent person (like an inventor) is a stultifying, closed-minded, skeptical, gray, dull bureaucracy (like a big corporation). Nothing will take the joy out of invention like having to appease a bunch of self-serving arrogant skeptics.

The days of the lone (or small group of)
inventor(s) is just beginning. What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.

The day we hand over the responsibility for progress to middle management is the day we better start preparing for a stagnant society.

There are two parts to the problem

[catsidhe]

First you must have an idea. This is almost always the result of one person having a brainwave.

Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.

This has always been the way. Edison made such an impact because with his first small successes he built a corporation which could produce and market other more marginal products. Tesla, on the other hand, had some (literally) world-shattering ideas, but as he didn't have a large corporation of his own, he had to go cap-in-hand to people like Westinghouse and Morgan to get the funding to develop his ideas. (Yes, Tesla did start several companies to develop specific concepts, but they were all small, specific and all failed for one reason or another. If Tesla had had all the resources of Westinghouse at his command, rather than at petition, who knows what toys we would have now?)

This is not to say that Edison was a better inventor than Tesla (many would argue that Tesla left him in the dust as far as raw imagination and engineering skills went), but Edison had the marketing skills and business sense which enabled him to do more with what he had.

You will, I think, find this pattern in all revolutionary inventions over the last two-hundred years. The inventor was

1. working on his own, and used his great idea to build a company around it, (Edison Electric Lights)
2. working on his own, and made a deal with an existing company to produce and market it (Tesla, Westinghouse and AC generators), or
3. working as part of a corporation already, and already had the resources available to do something with the idea (Transistors at Bell Labs, just about anything from PARC, etc.)

You will probably find that the discoverer of the Blue Laser Diode was working with a corporation, and could make a deal with that corporation to produce the diodes. He could not have done it on his own. Similarly with the Clockwork Radio, IIRC the inventor used funds from the UN to start a company to produce these radios.

Re:There are two parts to the problem

[catsidhe]

The context was the success of inventions, and how likely it is for an invention to be taken up if one person only had worked on it, versus the resources of a larger company and the baggage entailed.

I took 'success' to be how much the invention has been used in the real world, and how much influence it has had on people's lives. Tesla's AC generator technology was successful. Everyone who uses electricity from a power plant owes a debt to Tesla -- and to George Westinghouse who financed the development and installation in the first large scale central power plant. Similarly for the electric light bulb, or the Transistor. Other ideas Tesla had, such as wireless transmission of energy, have not been successful; not because they were bad ideas, but because Tesla could not get anyone with enough resources to bring the idea to market to give him enough money.

Babbage and his Difference Engine is another example. His idea was brilliant. Its execution was excellent, given his resources. That you can read this message is proof that the concept was sound. But. It was not until large organisations -- namely governments -- were convinced that they needed computers were enough resources brought into play.

My point is, I suppose, that life is not fair. An invention's brilliance is not the only factor in how much of a difference it makes to the world. For a sufficient impact, there must also be a large enough mechanism to develop, market, produce and ship the finished product. In the example of your piano playing (which isn't really relevant, but what the hey) you are absolutely correct that you do not need a large corporation to write new music, or to enjoy doing so. But if no-one else hears that music then it will die with you. Recording and distributing that music requires more resources than any of us have, unless you are using the net to distribute MP3s, and even then it is you and 1 billion other people. You are not likely to be noticed, and hence you are not likely to make any impact on the world, unless you enlist the help of a large organization or company in some way.

It's not fair, but it's how it is.

Lone inventor not extinct.....lone legal team is..

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

Lack of a lone inventor is not the problem with the system. There are a lot of people today that can focus on a product and develop it. Having a big staff is not the issue, and sometimes it actually slows development. It's simply that the lone inventor is having trouble getting past the legal flacks of big business who throw down slap suits, suits designed to suck off your cash, suits designed to "discover" all of your company info through the legal process of discovery, suits to hold you in court while they come up with a product, suits to determine where your bank account is so that they could sue you there...... .simply put, truth and justice have almost nothing to do with today's legal system. It's all "time and materials" for the corp. lawyers.

Corp. Flack to boss: "How many thousand lawyers do you want me to drop on company X today boss?"

Boss: "Enough so they never come back!...I want those basterds!...send all we got!"

This method of operation is being used to hunt the "lone inventor," so that disruptive technologies do not emerge to threaten the giants. They have people dedicated to keeping the walls of the empire safe, that's the advantage of being big.

What Mr. Farnswort lacked was the equivelent legal firepower of the MPAA and RIAA.....could you imagine his lawsuits against RCA?...He would have ended up owning the company....but RCA's lawyers combined with the unfortunate timing of the WW2 means that Mr. Farnsworth is simply out of time to collect on his invention. The big guys stole his stuff and stalled out untill the penalties were meaningless.....sound familiar?

Now....flash forward to todays system.....all of the corporate giants not only have lawyers that they could para-drop into any courthouse across America, but they have the DMCA to make that "taking" of private invention all "legal"...think of Sonic Blue's situation....being forced (I know that it was reversed later, but principle) to collect information for the MPAA about their customers.....I know, I can hear the cynics, "It's all legal though, gotta be, it was decided in a court of law, right?"

Until the "lone inventor" can defend himself in court on the merits of the case rather than the cash onhand, he will always be hunted....

Legal reform for this problem made simple: The loosing party pays ALL legal expenses for ALL parties!....just think...no more nuiscense suits, no more extortion by the big guys because I could get the BEST defense on contingency by the BEST professional who would WANT to help me defend my position! He wins, he charges plaintif company X whatever he wants (huge is fine with me!). Contingency has done wonders for the plaintif lawsuit market, perhaps by making legal defense profitable, we can reverse the trend!

The lonely inventor sometimes has an edge

[NewtonsLaw]

As someone who qualifies as a "lonely inventor" (see my latest invention) I can say with some authority that there are occasionally some definite advantages to working outside the huge corporate structure.

For a start, many of those working within the corporate machine have obtained their position as a result of a splended array of formal qualifications and their academic background.

Now, while such a background is extremely important, there are occasions when it actually makes the act of "inventing" an awful lot harder.

Some of the most interesting (and practical) inventions are the result of someone who didn't know (because they hadn't been taught) that something was impossible -- so they just went ahead and did it.

An unfortunate effect of gaining a depth of knowledge is that one's field of vision is often reduced as a result. Sometimes an important innovation comes as a result of applying knowledge gained in a totally different field to a problem.

It's been my experience that occasionally the "experts" get so close to the problem that they can't easily see the bigger picture -- a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees so to speak.

Of course the reality is that if "the lone inventor" does have a good idea, they're then left with no choice but to solicit the help of a large corporation and the resources that such an organization can bring to bear. There's usually a huge void between an idea or a working prototype, and a commercially successful product.

The inventor and his invention are just one piece of the puzzle.

Of course (as I well know), the biggest problem faced by many inventors, regardless of the quality or viability of their ideas, is getting the right "big corporation" interested enough to provide those missing pieces.

I shudder to think about just how many great ideas have never seen the light of day -- not because the inventor couldn't invent, but because (s)he simply had no luck in attracting corporate or investment interest.

Of course anyone wanting to invest in my X-Jet engine is welcome to contact me :-)

Not surprising; look at the source

[adam_megacz]

This ran in the New Yorker. Of course it's going to advocate large corporations over individual inventors. Most of their readership are managers.

If Wired decided that they were going to run an article on inventors, do you think it would glorify the organization or the individual?

Ridiculous

[browser_war_pow]

Your argument is as ridiculous as saying that every single government on Earth is as genocidal as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Pol Pot's Cambodia. The head of my CS department was a manager at IBM. He was paid from what I hear about $400,000/year. Based on the kinds of bonuses that he secured for his top subordinates, I would bet good money that he got a lot of innovation and hard work out of them. Bonuses that were frequently in the $17,000 ballpark. He got them bonuses that were higher than what some people make in 1 year in the US. You would have to be pretty foolish to think that people won't bust their asses for cash like that. Good corporations have regulations to make sure that people don't go off in every direction, so that there is a purpose to research. But good corporations will pay whatever they can to ensure that there is financial motivation to bring out the genius in every employee doing the R&D that they can.

There are always new ideas and new solutions

[Mandelbrute]

A new solution may only take a single idea, and many seemingly obvious fixes take an individual to implement it.

An example is automotive cooling systems. For the majority of the last century to water flowed through in the wrong direction. The cold water came in through where the oil was kept, then the warmed water flowed around the cylinders where everything is hot. Now you want your oil to be nice and warm so that it will flow well and cover everything, and you want the rest of the engine to be kept cool so that pistons don't get stuck and other high temperature nastyness. The reason the water flowed the way it did was simply because that was the way water flowed with gravity feed, but for nearly a century after the water pump was introduced into the system the water flowed the wrong way.

There is always room for innovation. Even very simple systems can sometimes do with a tweak. The role of the lone inventor is not over, as shown by such people as the guy in Thailand that is making spherical fire extinguisers that you operate by rolling them into a fire.

Re:True, but collaboration != corporation

[Graymalkin]

I wouldn't say the free software movement is about inventing anything at all. Inventiveness is surely involved but many piece of free software are just free implimentations of a non-free product. The GNU manifesto is all about creating Free versions of closed source pieces of software. That is hardly inventing a product. This isn't to say the whole free software sharing is caring paradigm isn't an effective means of collaboration and an efficient way to share ideas. Many computer inventions have come out of well funded commercial or academic projects simply because someone working with these backings can sit around and think of ways to accomplish something. I think Alan Kay is more of an inventor than Linus Torvalds.

Didn't James Burke cover this 15+ years ago?

[nagora]

The basic premise of the TV series "Connections" was that no one pulls an invention completly out of their own mind, it's always based on earlier work.

In fact, Issac Newton summed it up somewhat earlier when he said "If I have seen further than others, it is through standing on the shoulders of giants" (precise wording not guaranteed, statutory rights not affected).

TWW

Re:True, but collaboration != corporation

[msouth]

I wouldn't say the free software movement is about inventing anything at all. Inventiveness is surely involved but many piece of free software are
just free implimentations of a non-free product. The GNU manifesto is all about creating Free versions of closed source pieces of software. That
is hardly inventing a product.

This is true, but one could argue that the GPL is a remarkable invention. It was done by a lone inventor, and it hardly "stood on the shoulders of giants" as the original post implied (he was talking about the software, though). One might say that it stands on the shoulders of the giants who created copyright law--I would say that it's an elegant hack of the system, but, whatever. I think it's a very interesting invention.