Good Techdirt piece on the exploration of innovation. We met with PARC and had a lunch with Engelbart and discussed how the mouse eventually emerged, hoping to apply come of the ideas to internal innovation promotion and transmission. Aim to read the whole thing, with some caution given the author ...
" ... In his latest piece, Gladwell goes a step further in his exploration of innovation, in writing about the difference between invention and innovation, picking apart the classic story of Steve Jobs seeing the GUI/mouse combo at Xerox PARC and "copying" it for the Macintosh. Gladwell points out that the lessons that some take from the story aren't really correct. Specifically, one of the standard lessons is the idea that Xerox had the personal computer revolution in its hands and let it slip away. But Gladwell points out that this isn't really true. While PARC showed Jobs that idea (much of which was copied itself from Doug Engelbart and his famous work at SRI), it really was the implementation that mattered, and Jobs and Apple (along with Ideo) had to work quite hard to take the idea of the mouse -- which cost hundreds of dollars and was fragile in the Xerox version -- and make it cheap, reliable and easy to use ... "
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of course this is true, but the common assumption these days is that inventors don't need to be compensated at all--obviously he who owns the pc has the only incentive to perfect, so he must pay for inventions-otherwise they are simple thieves and belong in jail for it will prevent many if not most authentic invention otherwise, however invisible
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