War and Peace and IT

SG	Side Glance: Innovation

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

—Goethe, Aphorisms

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter argued that innovation was the driving force behind change—in particular, business cycles—in capitalist economies.1 He was trying to show that very large, industry-dominant companies were not bad for the economy, as many had believed. The conventional view at the time was that large firms would use their monopoly power to lower production and maintain a ...