> It's amazing to see that a significant percentage (~30%) of ideas they have come up with have been also thought of by others e.g. from the YC list independently to an uncanny extent.
Imho the concept of multiple discovery [0] applies just as much to innovation as it does to scientific discoveries.
It has always intrigued me how even great ideas like the theory of evolution were thought of by more than one person. I always reasoned that the spread of knowledge by books to begin with and then the tele* media( graph , gram , phone etc) accelerated it.
Nowadays it is almost unbelievable if multiple discovery didn’t happen. Internet plus 7 billion people plus the accumulated treasure of knowledge is one helluva tailwind
Imho the concept of multiple discovery [0] applies just as much to innovation as it does to scientific discoveries.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery