This is a key point to be made -- especially about the kind of research that ARPA/PARC did. We built all of ideas in quantity both in order to use them ourselves, and as the only good way to validate them.

This involves teams, and -- for example -- the award in baseball is a "world series ring" for everyone involved in the effort. The standard awards -- including the Draper, which does award to more than one person, are really more like "most valuable player" awards -- which quite misses the point in large scale edge of the art computing research.