Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb by 1879, only 3 percent of U.S. homes had electric lighting twenty years later. The economic benefits arise not from innovation itself, but from the entrepreneurs who eventually discover ways to put innovations to practical use—and most critically, as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt have pointed out, from the organizational changes through which businesses reshape themselves to take advantage of the new technology.12
