I've been through enough cycles to develop an even more detached/depersonalized view of it... As you say, the credit is an observer's construct, but I think som

I've been through enough cycles to develop an even more detached/depersonalized view of it... As you say, the credit is an observer's construct, but I think sometimes the innovators are also just the audience of an emergent concept. Put another way, I think the whole narrative of ideas "coming from" an individual is often a self-indulgent fiction. I've seen too many R&D topics where the supposedly novel ideas seem to be inevitable memes. The self-styled sole inventors are often one of many seeing the same insights at the same time, because they are all hosting the same prerequisite background knowledge. There are also often lots of these ideas floating around simultaneously. A significant meta (or negative?) thought process is to defer or suppress most of the ideas and focus on a few. Sometimes, we might think to credit the boss with the wisdom of deciding _when_ an idea deserves attention. That business decision is often more impactful than the juniors' many heartfelt flashes of insight. But this meta-analysis can go further. Often there are different labs all in slightly different phases and some are "before their time" and some, perhaps, "too late". Was the boss at the goldilocks lab really more innovative? Or are all the players merely parts of a broader monte carlo search method...?