"There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative." Uh, I don't think that was being questioned here. Englebart did not have a committee to gau

"There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative." Uh, I don't think that was being questioned here. Englebart did not have a committee to gauge his budget, only the low-bureaucratic ARPA system where he had to convince only one technical person, and not a commitee of generals to get his funding. I presume ARPA itself was under more traditional guidance. The question was not that there can always be only one protean creator in an organization. The point was that a crowd adds no value to the divergent thought process of innovation. Only a productizes output can be sanely evaluated by a large group. At this point the question is not 'could this work' but rather, does it. The former is subject to mere opinions, whereas the latter is more or less a matter of objective measurement (if done honestly).