I've thought a lot about the analogy with Steve Jobs and the iphone, but it's also a bit misleading to me because academics doesn't even credit things the same way as in business.
The iphone is made by Apple after all, and we can get into discussions about how much credit Apple even deserves for the iphone or whether Steve Jobs deserves credit for whatever portion of that we give.
But in academics we still act as if it's just "Joan Smith" doing their research and hiring people to get things done, and acting as if they're brilliant for doing so, when in fact many other people probably have the exact same ideas, or happened to be in the right place in the right time, or know the right people in the grant agency, or whatever; or their grad students or postdocs are the ones with the ideas, etc. etc.
I keep thinking about a colleague of mine who, whenever someone like a grad student would have an original idea, but required his grant money or whatever to pay for it, he would take credit on papers saying "ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the work involved getting it to happen that matters." But if there was a paper that was the result of a relatively unoriginal idea that required a lot of RA, grad student, and postdoc labor, it was always "it's the idea that counts, and not whoever follows through with it."
I feel like that's the atmosphere in academics now.
