THE STRANGE THING about the electric lightbulb is that it has come to be synonymous with the “genius” theory of innovation—the single inventor inventing a single thing, in a moment of sudden inspiration—while the true story behind its creation actually makes the case for a completely different explanatory framework: the network/systems model of innovation. Yes, the lightbulb marked a threshold in the history of innovation, but for entirely different reasons. It would be pushing things to claim that the lightbulb was crowdsourced, but it is even more of a distortion to claim that a single man
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