The rise of generative artificial intelligence has provoked a new set of questions in technology studies: what is originality and what is imitation? First came Samuel W. Franklin’s Cult of Creativity, which I’ve previously written about in the Milken Institute Review. Now Matthew Wisnioski’s Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life considers another shibboleth of the past 75 years of so.

Wisnioski has not written a history of the practice of innovation. Instead, he has shown how the word “innovation” became a watchword transcending professional and political boundaries — at first blandly and self-evidently positive, but more recently surprisingly controversial.

Basic to his study is the sometimes-blurred distinction between inventors and innovators. Invention is an improvement of the state of the art, a potential patent or trade secret that may or may not be ready for the marketplace. To take one example: the engineers Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver patented bar coding of product information way back in 1952, but by the time scanning technology could read codes economically, the patent had expired and the inventors had sold it for only $15,000. 

Conversely, innovation may not always be patentable. Today, Federal Express owns hundreds of patents, but its founder Fred Smith’s signal innovation, a national hub-and-spoke air freight system replacing reliance on passenger airlines’ route structures, was never patented. (Smith, who died with a net worth of $5 billion, first proposed the plan in a Yale undergraduate paper in 1965. He got a pre-grade-inflation C.

From Inventors to Innovators

While there have been inventors and innovators since the Paleolithic, the celebration of the inventor-entrepreneur took its contemporary form only with the classic 1859 best-seller book, Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles, an unsuccessful physician who became a genre innovator himself. Smiles’s heroes were not only ivory tower scientists but pragmatic entrepreneurs who persisted through countless setbacks to create new and beneficial products at scale.

Smiles’s admiration, it’s important to emphasize, was less for brilliant insight than for successful execution. Among the book’s many international disciples were Japan’s leading inventor-innovator, Sakichi Toyoda, who applied Smiles’s principle of patient observation and persistence to create a new generation of power looms that circuitously led to the founding of his eponymous automotive dynasty.

In the early 20th century, many of the media’s heroes of industry were entrepreneurs and managers, rather than inventor-industrialists in the classic mode of the rivals Thomas Edison, George Eastman and George Westinghouse. Thomas Watson Sr. who made IBM the dominant corporation of the punch card and mainframe computer eras, was the greatest of a new breed of nontechnical innovators without a patent to their names — but with genius in organization, motivation and marketing, as well as the wisdom to support scientific and engineering talent even through the Depression decade. Likewise, General Motors’s Alfred Sloan advanced his company to industry dominance with no background in invention.

As his book title suggests, Wisnioski is less interested in such recognized giants than in the movement to democratize and universalize innovation. He brings to light a series of fascinating half-forgotten mid-century thinkers who created an innovation movement.

If there was a founding father, it was Everett Rogers, an engineer whose parents’ farm had gone under because they were reluctant to plant new-fangled high-yield hybrid corn. A paragon of land-grant meritocracy and PhD in rural sociology from the University of Iowa, Rogers studied not invention but adoption. Some farmers were evangelists for new methods and fostered progressive networks. Others were more cautious, and still others (like his father) remained holdouts. His 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations, became a classic.

A flood of innovation studies followed in the late 1960s and thereafter. Wisnioski presents fascinating profiles of the men and women who preached the new gospel, counterparts of the forward-thinking farmers Rogers had interviewed. Some were inventor-entrepreneurs in the traditional mold, but the concept was also applied to cultural pioneers like the creators of Sesame Street.

As more scientists worked in industry rather than academia, even pure science was rebranded as innovation to help recruit a new generation of students. Corporations seeking technical staff in help-wanted advertising and engineers looking for management opportunities seized on the label of innovator. Newly founded magazines appealed to scientists and engineers who saw themselves in the role. 

The boldest venture was the slick elitist magazine Innovation, with subscriptions ranging from a virtually unprecedented $35 to truly outrageous $75 a year in 1969. This price tag was justified by the imprimatur of a blue-ribbon board of advisors and contributions from star management thinkers like Donald Schön and Warren Bennis. 

Sadly, the magazine and its parent company, Technology Communications, did not survive its founders’ deaths. The new genre of management-oriented science and technology magazines it inspired did flourish, though — paradoxically until innovation in the form of search-engine and social-media advertising decimated most magazine publishing in the early 21st century. Innovation giveth and innovation taketh away.

Rise and Fall of Innovation Consensus

Meanwhile, the ideal of innovation as a response to both the Soviet military threat and the Japanese industrial challenge enthralled Democratic and Republican administrations with very different ideologies. Innovation meant growth, and growth meant rising standards of living for all — a creed that survived and even flourished as recently as the Obama administration. Indeed, from a 2026 perspective, there was remarkable consensus across the political spectrum.

The last chapters of Every American an Innovator analyze the breakdown of what seemed to be a grand bargain. Not that Donald Trump has repudiated innovation. Despite his embrace of protective tariffs, his vaccine skepticism and his budget cuts to academic science, Trump has allied himself with a new generation of radical innovators and venture capitalists including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and Marc Andreesen who identify with the political right. Conversely, many progressives are concluding that AI is innovation run amok. Movements for progressive and equitable innovation survive, but techlash dominates the political left.

Innovation’s Shadow 

If there is any gap in Wisnioski’s account, it is the ubiquity of failure in both invention and innovation, the crucial role of luck, the obscurity of the also-rans. Innovation magazine had everything going for it — publishing experience, great design, top contributors — but lasted only three years.

Nor did justice always prevail after Samuel Smiles’ era. While both the U.S. Congress and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers History Center have recognized the Italian-American engineer Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone who was only prevented by lack of funds from enforcing his claim against Alexander Graham Bell, the latter is an icon while Meucci has remained a footnote. The dark side of innovation is that many men and women recognize an opportunity for a patent or a new business method, yet out of a hundred ideas there is rarely more than one big winner and a few runners-up. There are always dozens of losers, individuals and corporations that have spent thousands on attorneys’ fees in vain. Some rebound, but most don’t; it’s hard to overcome survivorship bias.

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The real question is whether a new generation of potential innovators will consider the current tech oligarchs as transitory as most of their predecessors or as an emerging impenetrable caste. Innovation depends on the assumption of risk. And taking chances depends in turn on hope that is now in short supply.