A recent New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell argues that Steve Jobs was a tweaker, not an inventor. He quotes a paper in which Meisenzahl and Mokyr make the argument that England took the lead during the industrial revolution partly because it had more “tweakers.” In explaining England’s success, they say people “who had the dexterity and competence to tweak, adapt, combine, improve, and debug existing ideas, build them according to specifications, but with the knowledge to add in what the blueprints left out were critical to the story.”
HT: Cheap Talk