close window 
Political innovation would be useless without economic and business innovation, according to British journalist Sir Harold Evans. You can’t understand the United States of America simply from political history. And yet that is the way it’s taught in schools, and the way it’s taught by the press. Every schoolchild knows Abraham Lincoln. How many can tell you about Sam Insull? he said, referring to Thomas Edison’s right hand man who figured out a way to bring electricity to the masses and ultimately founded General Electric.
Insull is one of 70 American innovators profiled in Evans' s book, They Made AmericaFrom the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovation (Little, Brown 2004). Evans, one of the world’s leading journalists, described it as the first book on the history of American innovation when he spoke to students January 24 at the Hyde Park Center. The presentation was sponsored by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship.
Among the examples he outlined was Cyrus McCormick, who met with success because he quit inventing and became entrepreneurs. The founder of International Harvester, McCormick was not the first or only manufacturer to sell reapers to farmers, but he had a vision of scale, lowering unit costs, producing not 5,000 in a year but 50,000, Evans said. He organized the first American big business corporation; he took the big view and bought out the inventions of others.
Evans said, You cannot learn unless you fail, and yet the media and Wall Street today emphasize the short term all the time. The tendency is to devalue science, devalue innovation. And Wall Street’s fetish for quarterly earnings on publicly traded stock (leading to the rise of venture capital) is a threat to innovation. Our first response should be, let’s celebrate the innovators and learn from them by concentrating on their virtues instead of concentrating on their disasters.
Patricia Houlihan