Finish-Line Fallacy

A man comes up with a crazy idea for something he believes ought to exist. He spends 10 years of his life building the prototype. Finally on his deathbed he releases it. A second man picks up on this invention and spends another 10 years making people want the thing. But it barely gets him and his family out of poverty and he runs out of steam. A third man picks up on where the previous two left off and comes up with a new financial model for the thing. For 10 years he grows adoption of the thing but eventually retires. Finally a fourth man picks on what the previous 3 had been working on for 30 years. He comes up with a new way scale the thing. Over 10 years he carries the proverbially baton across the finish line. And what was once a crazy idea is now just the new norm for how the world works.

Question: Which man is credited as the industry inventor?

If you answered any of the first 3 you’re wrong. But if you answered the 4th, you’re also wrong. The industry inventor crown goes to the first person to bring the entire system together.

This matters because if you want to understand industry invention, you can’t just study the person who today is crowned as the inventor. You have to look to the industry’s lineage. If you just study Henry Ford, you miss out on Karl Benz as the true inventor, you miss out on Alexander Winton who sold the first car in America, and missing out leads to misunderstanding. Because by not understanding what happened before Ford, you’ll incorrectly conclude that it was a mass production that led to Ford being crowing the automobile inventor.