Interesting column.
Yes, I too read the Economist a few weeks back on the research into innovation by William Baumol.
I, unfortunately, don’t have a newspaper on tap willing to pay me 300 quid to rewrite it.
Bugger.
The Shorter Luke Johnson
In
2 responses
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Luke doesn’t get it.
Anyone who works for a large company, has a good idea and has the personal drive to turn that idea into product will jump ship to do it on his own.
Luke is seeing the effects of this process while completely failing to divine their cause.
“Luke Johnson is chairman of Channel 4 and Risk Capital Partners”
Well there you go. You think he’ll remain as Chairman if he comes up with some hot new idea? -
In the social sciences it is often not too difficult to select examples which confirm a hypothesis – after all, it would be odd if there were no plausible, consistent examples. But what of possible counter-examples to the hypothesis, in this case that major break-through innovations are usually due to the persistence of lone inventors?
Counter-examples such as CD discs, which were due to a joint venture between Philips and Sony, two giant, consumer electronics companies?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc
And remember the standard wars between Sony and JVC over video cassette recorders where the eventual outcome depended on which had the most marketing muscle or the deepest pockets? JVC was a relatively small electronics company but it was backed by Matsushita (which trades mainly as Panasonic in Britain), a huge company, roughly double the size of Sony in terms of total sales revenues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCR
IBM launched the PC in 1981 and IBM wasn’t and isn’t quite a lone inventor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC
None of those are exactly trivial, minor examples. The lone inventor narrative needs to be taken with a little salt.
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