IDG Contributor Network: What's old is new again

In 1843, Henry Ellsworth, the U.S. patent commissioner stated to Congress that “the advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” In other words, anything worth inventing will have soon been thought of. While that was clearly not the case, it is true that many older ideas seem new when applied in a new context. Fast forward to a 1968 article in the Harvard Business Review, wherein a