Today, years away from the Renaissance, we’re still attached to the myth of lone inventors. We do recognize collaboration and partnerships, but we often fall back on tales of lone innovators as heroic figures for reasons of convenience. We insist on isolating credit and dismissing the importance of others. Patent law, by design, credits one or a handful of individuals, assuming not only that ideas are unique and separable, which is dubious, but that individual names can be given legal ownership of ideas. Patents, as currently applied in the U.S., do solve problems, but they create just as many. They distort popular understanding of how inventions happen, as well as which innovations are most valuable to the world. Guy Kawasaki, author of Rules for Revolutionaries and former Apple fellow, argues for demystifying lone invention. In his experience, great innovations, and businesses, are born when two or more creators work together to make things happen. He recommends: Find a few soulmates. History loves the notion of the sole innovator: Thomas Edison (lightbulb), Steve Jobs (Macintosh), Henry Ford (Model T), Anita Roddick (The Body Shop), Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines). History is wrong. Successful companies are started, and made successful by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. After the fact one person may come to be recognized as “the innovator,” but it always takes a team of good people to make any venture work . Grand partnerships are easy to find: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Its easy to attribute innovation to individuals, but most often, great innovations usually come from a team of people. Falling back on the “solo genius” takes away from the real process of how we can actually engineer innovation. It is more about finding the right team, environment and timing.
