Here is a comprehensive summary of two tech pioneers, Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. The post by Ellen Clegg, Inventors of the Future: Engelbart & Kay in Conversation about What's Next, mentions the vision behind Engelbart's high profile inventions such as the computer mouse, contained in his 1962 philosophical paper. It is "a system enabling people to aggregate ideas and navigate information in a way that would "augment human intelligence" - a vision that would have diffused technology in a much different way than what has occurred."

Engelbart' work foreshadowed things we have today such as hyperlinking, the Web, blogs, wikis, online knowledge management tools, videoconferencing, file/photo/video sharing and .pdfs where every word of a document can be addressed and linked. But the post concludes, "...all of the components that are working in the world today do not work together in the way Engelbart had envisioned as the way for people to systematically organize their ideas across disciplines to "raise the collective IQ."

Kay remarked in the conversation "Less progress has been made in the last 25 years than before 1980...the commercialization of technology spread it wide and thin without getting to the real heart of the matter. "We call it reinventing the flat tire. We wish they'd reinvent the wheel."

Engelbart said a big piece that is missing in today's technology picture is what he calls the "improvement system" - communities of people who focus specifically on systems thinking across disciplines. He has talked and written for years about the guidelines for such a system but it's not something a single inventor can do. "It's not inventing 'an object' but things being invented concurrently," he said.

The increased transparency and collaboration of Web 2.0 has the ability for foster more co-invention. If really use this power the right way we might get there. The recent efforts at Proctor & Gamble are an example, see More Web 2.0 Stories, Part Two: Proctor & Gamble Embraces the Wisdom of the Web for New Product Ideas. Although in this case the success example given was the faster ability to make painted potato chips. Let's hope nobler goals emerge.