Historically misunderstood..............

     By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation.  But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius.  His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative:  assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.  "I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me,"  Edison famously said.  "I am quite correctly described as "more of a sponge than an inventor."

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World