Interesting idea - does some one have the intellectual property rights to it or can I just steal it and have my way with it.

Innovation is an ACTION! I have had and continue to have great ideas and heaps of intellectual property that I am trying to put into ACTION about health care. About a year ago I told Google about some specific ideas - today Marissa Mayer and her Google Health Team have ACTIONED those ideas, or a set of very similar ideas, into a global platform for patient records.

Should I complain to someone? Did they steal my ideas and my precious Intellectual Property? Even if they did steal it does anyone care? Do I care? I care only insofar as they have made some of my ideas, or their ideas I am truly not sure which, come to fruition.

I can now use my residual Intellectual Property and other innovative ideas in this arena to leverage off the Google platform. How good is that?

Thanks Google for stealing my Intellectual Property, even if you didn't, because you have given me the chance to prove my related ideas have merit and revenue building capabilities.

Oh, fiddle sticks. Whoever came up with this lame quote does not understand the difference between innovation and imitation. We cite emerging Eastern powers as being imitative cultures, but what is the engine Western economic power based on other than monkey see, monkey do. Our very media engine is based on imitation rather than innovation as a people. Or in other words a small pride of competitive sharp lions who innovate exist to serve a commercial mass zoo of brand domesticated zebra's. From Henry Ford to W.Edward Deming to moi, innovation is about redefining a world where we are learning to collaborate. Collaboration does not mean imitation, it means the capacity of each individual to think their own thoughts and learn from their own mistaken beliefs, without providing 30 examples of "expert" minds who have been proven to have said the same thing, so as to qualify opinion or "get to the point", when media is opinion and academia should be peer review. This therefore means the inevitable shift from imitative academic existence (the way we are taught to learn), to an entrepreneurial and thoughtful culture (the way we need to do and learn how to learn), or at least shape a 21st Century pathway to a more self-organizing and sustainable village. Such a utopia won't occur by focusing on lame "Big Idea" quotes as quoted above, but getting out of the worship of bibliography and moving towards an innovative frame of mind, which is to present ideas that can shape the authorship of our own individual existence, and that is the one thing we can control, the quality of own thoughts. I think this is best summed up in a quote from Ronald Burt's paper on "Social Origins of Good Ideas" where he writes "The certain path to feeling creative is to find a constituency more ignorant than yourself. This is a familiar phenomenon in academic work. We specialize by method, theory and topic.". It is a quote best read in its proper context but as a person who has a proven capability to jump from domain to domain and idea to thought, all I can say is that if this is a sample of what is to be determined to be "Big Ideas", then lurking here will only lead me to a greatly inflated and an increasingly worthless sense of my own creativity. At the minimum, put out some Warren Buffett quotes out that we can collectively chew on, for at least Warren is cogent about what innovation is and how fodder for a herd mentality runs counter to that. Allow me to offer up three of his quotes in that regard. firstly "The smarter the journalists are, the better of society is" and secondly "A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought" and finally "When ideas fail, words come in very handy". I certainly do believe that innovation in social media SHOULD occur below the line where the comments are and that will happen when "non-professional" blogs are more innovative rather than imitative. If I am going to continue investing my time as a lurker for the rest of this year here at FC, then serve up more material that is progressive and less that is regressive. FC writers like Chris Dannen, David Kushner and Anya Kamenetz do keep me fully engaged, but ideas like this only serve to motivate me to fire off a loud explosion of my own voice across the social bows, in the remote hope that it might raise the bar on that lumbering ship called "Big Ideas". IMHO we need to pay constant attention to the only metric of social media that truly matters, that is, how it leaves a thinker in a better position of thought. Personally it is what that means to my own particular chosen social media community allegiance, this huge and silent online community of "We the lurkers", so all I ask is that we the lurkers with increasing silent admiration and invisible respect......M.

Innovation is fueled by new ideas. Whether those ideas were stolen or not, is actually irrelevant to the concept of innovation. Whether the innovation is incremental or a seachange is also irrelevant. Even a small, incremental innovation is still an innovation, even if it was someone else's idea. However, if you've stolen some else's idea in order to implement an innovation, you're not an innovator -- that title belongs to the person who originated the idea that you've implemented. If, on the other hand, you've taken someone else's idea and improved upon it, in an innovative way -- well, then you could claim to be an innovator. But, in fairness, you should share the credit with the person you've taken the original idea from. Otherwise, how can you expect to ever be treated fairly, yourself, or even with respect?

One man's loss is the gain of a civilization.

The only way this question could be answered yes, is if the person answering the question has identified the first primate to use tool is the sole victim.

nothing is original anymore. Every post is a repost of a post, and every innovation today builds on existing IP. And not by much!

According to the Copyright Laws of the U.S., and idea isn't 'your property' until or unless you have copyrighted it or can prove when you first had it. On that basis, I disagree with the statement. If you want to keep an idea to yourself until you can copyright it, then keep it to yourself! Talking about it is likely to get it into someone else's "keeping", and any profit they make from it is then theirs according to the law. There are so many ideas floating in the Cosmic Consciousness, theft of one is all but impossible and definitely unnecessary.

I generally disagree but that statement really depends on what you define as "Intellectual Propoerty." Innovation can never fueled by theft since the innovation implies change. It is the "change" that fuels intellectual property not the other way around.

I disagree. I think many great existing ideas, products and services are expanded on by other forward thinking complementary ideas. Does anyone remember mini-disk CDs? They were a cross breed of today's CDs encased within a floppy. That’s what innovation is all about. As long as we are not talking about out right piracy of an existing idea it just needs to be looked at in a different context and, in the context of no context, there is nothing new.