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Inventor’s Luck
A System Perspective
success = talent + luck
great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck
—Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics [12]
[F]or the rst fteen years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no
one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure.
—Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author of eleven books on
marketingmethods[13]
The common expression “the greatest thing since sliced bread” would make
little sense to people before the early 1930s, the years when electric bread-
slicing machines and wrapped, sliced loaves of bread started turning up in
bakery shops in the United ...