Bench Talk

The buzzword “innovation” has become something of a mantra for the technology sector, designed to stimulate the out-of-the-box thinking needed to come up with winning products against ever tougher competition. But innovation is perhaps as wrong a mantra today as it was in the seventeenth century when, according to an article in The Atlantic, innovators were more likely to have their ears cut off and be thrown into jail than celebrated. What we need today, more than ever, is not innovation, but invention.

In its pomp the electronics retailer RadioShack enjoyed years of big profits from nerds looking for components for their next electronics project. (Two of those nerds used the company’s diodes and transistors to build a “blue box”, a device that tricked the phone system into letting them make free long-distance phone calls. Later those same nerds, both named Steve, went on to found Apple.) But then RadioShack changed its identity, lost its core constituency and, after years of struggle, filed for Chapter 11 in 2015.