Digital Rights Network

The transition from entrepreneur to established, cautious firm can be breathtakingly fast. An historian who studied the beginning of the electrical lighting industry in the U.S. pointed out that in ten years, Thomas Edison moved from a maverick trying to get incandescent lighting accepted as feasible to a staunch opponent of the "dangerous" innovation of alternating current. H. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers 1875-1900, at 174 (1953). The same phenomenon has been noted repeatedly. See, e.g., Scherer, Invention and Innovation in the Watt-Boulton Steam-Engine Venture, 6 Tech. & Culture 165, 174 (1965), quoting a letter from James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, to his partner James Boulton:

On the whole I find it is now full time to cease attempting to invent new things, or to attempt anything which is attended with any risk of not succeeding . . . . Let us go on executing the things we understand, and leave the rest to younger men, who have neither money nor character to lose.

Source: Taken from Merges and Nelson 1990, The Complex Economics of Patent Scope, n.141: