Ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas on the other hand... ;)

I will acknowledge that the microcontroller is one superlative piece of engineering. Until its advent, we had to put up with microprocessors and their need for countless discrete support components such as RAM chips, flash ROM chips, bus controllers, ADCs, DACs, tri-state buffers, multiplexers/demultiplexers. The microcontroller reduced a whole board of components to a single chip needing barely more than a quartz crystal to support it.

As great a work of engineering that the uController is, I do not class it as a landslide invention. It is no Rearden Metal.

It was very hard for me to give up a craft that I had become an expert in. My knowledge and expertise still held up regarding the hardware such as lens quality and pixel resolution, but frankly, the need no longer for setting stops and shutter speeds, determining the right film etc. is something I miss.

Once again you show your ignorance of history. Yes, Joseph Swan had created an incandescent light bulb before Edison, but it was not practical. Two big problems with Swan's light bulb were that it had an incredibly low resistance and it had a very short life filament. As a result, it took another inventor (Edison) to invent a high resistance incandescent light bulb that meet all the requirements for a commercially practical light bulb Both men deserve credit for what they invented, but it is non-sense to suggest the light bulb was a dime a dozen idea or that it was business acumen that was holding back the incandescent light bulb.

sigh. all invention is a combination of known elements. Db knew personally the inventor of the microcontroller. He hardly thought his invention was "just" anything. never mind

A decent "buggy whip" management team would have first defined all its assumptions, including the assumptions that animal-driven transport would continue to dominate, and that whipping creates in animals an inducement to draw the vehicle more energetically.

Then, members of the team assigned to reviewing such assumptions would have come across developments in mechanically powered transport, and then done a business analysis on the impacts from this. People on the team worth their pay would have then come up with recommendations to 'pivot' over to motorised transport interests.

part of inventing, for many inventors, involves the raising of capital to give them time to do their work. The idea evolves as the invention is worked out. Opportunity costs, trial and error are all legitimate aspects of inventing. I suggest, if you have interest, you read McCullough's excellent book on "The Wright Brothers." Everything begins with the invention. Edison was a master inventor. There were many lean years while he was a copious inventor-changing our world. He worked during the day as a telegrapher and invented at night. when he was fired from his teleph job, an inventor/mentor gave him a lab space to develop his first inventions-the stock ticker and an electric voting device. He was simultaneously working on an electric battery for an automobile. He hardly had the time to build a great management team. In fact, his lab is considered to be another great invention-the first modern laboratory.

I work in tech. I know. Raw ideas fly around all the time. The breakthroughs to which you refer substantiate my case, that only a tiny subset of ideas find the support of a well organised team to take the idea to prototype stage, then to a stage where production can tool up and scale up, and then to where channel partnerships and strategy can be developed to get it to market.

I have programmed microcontrollers and used them in one of my own hardware designs. Nifty little beasts, sure. But they are just a marriage of existing microprocessor and PLC technologies. Minimal microprocessor (largely 1960s-70s architecture), plus support circuitry, together on a low-cost easy-to-deploy VLSI chip.

The electric light was a marriage of two known phenomena - the knowledge that metal wire carrying sufficiently high current to heat it to a temperature tends to emit visible light, plus the knowledge that oxidisation can not occur in a vacuum.

Many great inventions are simply novel (albeit often inspired) combinations of well established concepts. For decades I've been flooded with them. But to make it to market, they have so many hurdles to jump through.

The concept of creating light using a thin wire heated by electricity existed long before Edison worked out a way to make it practical and commercialized it by deploying light bulbs in prominent places.

I am not trying to make some snide argument that ideas don't matter or in any way criticizing your article. I'm also not making some argument that once Edison found a practical realization of the lightbulb someone should be able to steal that technology.

The lightbulb really was 1% inspiration 99% perspiration. Edison got capital, built a lab (ironically with large windows to let in natural light) where people could come work for no money but for a chance at being around greatness and possibly getting wealth by making a share of that. He risked real money to publicize his inventions and to work on new inventions, some of which never panned out.

So what davidmcnab is saying rings completely true for me. Edison was a master at creating an org, creating prototypes, promoting technology at high-profile events, and tooling for large-scale production. Maybe we should call all those activities part of ideation, not "business" as if that were separate from invention. Maybe my confusion is in terms of what counts as invention and what is creating an organization.

The Mamiya was the first dual lens camera with interchangeable lenses. It allowed for different lenses because of a built-in bellows for focusing. Built like a brick shithouse, it was a staple for many professionals.
The king of 120 film cameras for many years was the dual lens Rolleiflex whose biggest advantage was its smaller size and light weight. It was supplanted by the single lens reflex Hasselblad.

Judging by the amount of interest and discussion on political topics, there are plenty of Objectivists (including many on this site) who would be willing to defend and advance their philosophical principles by becoming presidents, governors, mayors, legislators or judges. One of the heroes in Atlas Shrugged, Judge Narragansett,is attempting to make needed corrections to the U.S. Constitution by the end of the novel. http://www.conservapedia.com/Judge_Na...

Not everyone has to become a businessperson, inventor, writer or artist in order to be creative. Objectivists can likely be found enjoying successful careers in any legitimate occupation. If government is necessary for a free society to function, then participating in government (including making improvements to its framework, as in Judge Narragansett’s case) is an honorable career for any Objectivist who wishes to pursue it. The alternative is to abandon the creation and implementation of public policy to power-lusters such as those who dominate most areas of government today.

"The electric light bulb, the cotton gin, the polio vaccine, the microcontroller, hell, the CAT scan, were all a dime a dozen.” Right - your an idiot -1

great ideas are NOT a dime a dozen and to think so would be myopic thinking in the business world.

And therein lies the rub. It's difficult to imagine a group of Objectivists, egoist, creators wanting, striving for, gaining, and manipulating for that governing power. Can an Objectivist be the governing power, and if so how is he chosen and controlled once selected to such position? We've never satisfactorily addressed that question on this site, at least to my satisfaction. The conflict between wanting to gain and maintain government power vs living an Objectivist, laissez faire capitalist life, seems at first glance to be overwhelming.

Rand seemed to deal with the conflict as she did in the quote provided above "The acceptance of the achievements of an individual by other individuals does not represent “ethnicity”: it represents a cultural division of labor in a free market; it represents a conscious, individual choice on the part of all the men involved; the achievements may be scientific or technological or industrial or intellectual or esthetic—and the sum of such accepted achievements constitutes a free, civilized nation’s culture." It is the acceptance of the achievements by other individuals by conscious, individual choice on the part of all men involved.

That acceptance cannot be forced nor "implemented by the governing power" gained through political whim or even party battles. We've seen the first attempt to implement by the governing power in the founding of this country, and it failed--spectacularly in many measures, from it's first day of existence--and it failed as the result of the failure of the intellectuals and institutions to maintain philosophical principles of individualism and laissez faire capitalism, as well as the compromises ceded between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists and to satisfy many other parties in order to get the Constitution accepted. I think that's why Jefferson saw the need for a revolution each generation--as a necessity to deal with those that sought and gained that governing power.

Protection of rights relies on philosophical principles and the implementation of these philosophical principles in legal and political practice. The “discussion of gaining or maintaining governing power (the ability to enact law and use force)” is absolutely on point here – philosophical principles cannot “support freedom and economic gain” unless they are implemented by “gaining or maintaining governing power.”

Ideas -- even revolutionary disruptive ideas -- are a dime a dozen. However, teams who can create the organisation and funding to bring the idea to prototype, tool up for production, and position it for viable market penetration -- these are definitely not a dime a dozen.

yes, it is certainly possible to be "ahead of the market." that is not the bigger problem. Including Digital-which tried to come up with processors after the fact. What they would have to do was a much larger metric than startups. either way, invention is the ONLY thing that gives you competitive edge, as long as you have a property right, your govt is willing to protect.

Are you referring to a Mamiya C330? If so, I sold many of them. A good workhorse of a camera.
As for Adams, he schlepped big old view cameras up mountainsides and cliffs in order to get just the right angle and waited until the lighting was just the way he wanted. If he wasn't happy he'd camp out in his van until he got the shot he wanted. Then, he'd spend as much time in the darkroom getting the print just right. It is rare to find that kind of photography today.

Sometimes innovation gets ahead of the market. If that Digital Computers, Inc was really Digital Equipment Corporation which specialized in mini computers before the PC, then it was not that they did not innovate for small computers, they did it too far in the future with the Alpha processor with 64 bit architecture which was much faster than processors from Intel and AMD. The problem was that being a more advanced processor made the selling price much to high. They innovated too well, if there is such a thing, and might not have considered marketability beforehand. In order to avoid that, that is probably the reason why smaller improvements are introduced periodically in products. Too much new might be too expensive to make a profit.

Well stated!