If anybody has twelve great ideas, the kind that can make fortunes, send them to SLL and SLL will send you one thin dime. Dale B. Halling at thesavvystreet.com takes a look at invention and explodes an asinine bromide:
There is a popular myth that great ideas are a dime a dozen (see here, here, and here). I don’t know what a great idea is. Is a Dick Tracey watch or a nuclear-powered rocket a great idea? No, not if you don’t know how to implement them, then it is just a fantasy and unless you have a plot to go with it, it is not even a good fantasy story. However, I do know what a great invention is and they are not even a billion dollars a dozen. A great invention takes incalculable intellectual skill, years of training, years of hard work, and significant resources.
“Hey Mike—we’ve heard your ‘good ideas are a dime a dozen’ speech before. The electric light bulb, the cotton gin, the polio vaccine, the microcontroller, hell, the CAT scan, were all a dime a dozen.”
John, Venture Capitalist, Pendulum of Justice
It may be that such conjectures are popularized by people in the finance industry, who are looking to improve their negotiation position or are just too intellectually challenged to really know when an invention is great. It also inflates their self-importance.
The reality is that most people create almost nothing original in their lifetimes and this includes many people in finance, even if they personally get rich. It is only by raising our level of technology that we increase our per capita wealth and only inventors increase our level of technology. Great inventors create incalculable wealth and even if they become wealthy, what they receive in payment is a pittance to what they provide.
“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The concept “great ideas are a dime a dozen” may have been a spin out from Joseph Schumpeter who made a distinction between innovation and invention, while denigrating inventions and inventors.
According to Wikipedia:
Following Schumpeter (1934), contributors to the scholarly literature on innovation typically distinguish between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully in practice.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the distinction above, but the way it is applied blurs together a number of different skills. This blurring shows a misunderstanding of the process of innovating. Broadly speaking, innovation can be broken into two distinct sets of skills: creation and dissemination. By creation I mean creating something new, not production—which is re-creating something that has been created before.
To continue reading: The “Great Ideas are Dime a Dozen” Myth
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