Steve Jobs (Apple) didn’t invent the semiconductor, Bill Gates (Microsoft) didn’t invent the computer operating system, Oprah Winfrey (The Oprah Show) didn’t invent the talk show, and Mark Zuckerman (Facebook) did not invent social networking.
Yet each of these people became multi-billionaires as innovators in their respective fields of work. To be sure, each have come up with plenty of new ideas, but what distinguishes them from all of the inventors you have never heard of is that all of the people on the list above have developed and applied their ideas and others’ in ways that created enormous commercial success. In doing so, each got rich.
But more importantly for our purposes, all of these people have contributed significantly to the wealth of millions of other people around the world, by creating products that satisfied human wants. Indeed, if we look more carefully at the world, we find that innovation is the source of most of our wealth.
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