Category Archives: Blotter

In the 1978 ‘Rescue from Gilligan’s Island’, actor Russell Johnson shows the Professor in a reinvention predicament. After returning to work at a university, he discovers all his inventions made (while stranded on the island) had been invented already, among them the Frisbee and skateboard. His frustration makes him want to give up the world he's come back to. Reinventing the wheel has become a modern epidemic plaguing Internet technologists, and some are even giving up on innovation and settling into parlaying the same flawed technology because of a fear of trademark infringement or, more frightening still, because they think it just can’t be done any better. Blogger Tim Kastelle has written much about what he calls the Innovation Problem (IP), which advocates that we approach innovation through idea management, an effective counter to the...