In each instance the innovator changes the rules on the incumbent.
While this example is imperfect for several reasons, the metaphor is a good one -- innovators see opportunity where there is a market and brilliant innovators change constantly change the world.
A conceptual revolution swept through the arts during the late 1950s and early '60s, as radical young innovators changed the subjects, methods, and often the materials of their disciplines.
The value of an innovation to the innovator can change over time, especially in response to changes in the legal protection (such as patent rights) afforded the innovator.
There are the Robert De Niros, charismatic innovators who change the common technique and then settle into an unchallenging winter phase.
Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.
Sonny Rollins, 69, was, and still is, a major innovator who changed the sound of the tenor saxophone.
During my travels through Vietnam and Sri Lanka as an Eisenhower Fellow, I saw and met with amazing innovators and change agents looking to build on their nation's respective digital and technological economies.
Important artists are innovators who change the practices of their successors.
When it was announced that the TED enterprise -- which features global conferences with idea innovators and change agents -- was gearing up to present a TEDwomen conference, there was immediate push back.
