Innovation often disappoints in its early years, only to exceed expectations once it gets going, a phenomenon I call the Amara hype cycle, after Roy Amara, who first said that we underestimate the impact of innovation in the long run but overestimate it in the short run.

It is possible, for instance, that in any very strict sense there is no such thing as an inventor or an invention. To put it another and slightly more persuasive way, the act of invention may simply be making conscious, explicit, and regular what has been done for a considerable time unconsciously or by accident. Bessemer changed his society by dis

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WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until

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