Dear Kingsley,

You wrote

Show me an innovator and I'll unravel a person that's had to solve a really frustrating personal problem that became a product. The much celebrated Steve Jobs is a prominent example, and of course there are many others :-)

Nicely exemplified. Other examples are the classically celebrated inventors such as Thomas Edison (who actually just funded developments to reach goals he set for the actual problem solving engineers he hired), Nicolai Tesla (one of his engineers), Alex Graham Bell (who built on the shoulders of EM theorists), and Henry Ford (who solved the practical problems of economical construction of cars). They were all individuals, who organized other individuals and accepted the others’ contributions as their own. Work for hire laws distort whose intellectual contributions were actually recognized and rewarded financially.

-Rich

On 4/7/12 12:20 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:

The point of the article, as I see it, is that individuals following self interest are the originators of knowledge, sharers of knowledge, and the source of social progress. Grouping people into political units (such as religious movements, democracies, socialist states, dictatorships, pick your favorite or most reviled instance) is what turns the groups ultimately toward the dark side.

Great point!

Some use the moniker 'Game Theory' for what your excerpt above.

Show me an innovator and I'll unravel a person that's had to solve a really frustrating personal problem that became a product. The much celebrated Steve Jobs is a prominent example, and of course there are a many others :-)

My passion for data access was the product of frustrations I had eons ago, while working as an accountant. I couldn't understand why Lotus 123 and other productivity tools didn't have seamless hooks into back-end relational databases :-)

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen    

Founder & CEO 

OpenLink Software   

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