I think the fact that we are talking about "innovation" so much is a sign of an excessive degree of self-awareness. People used to be at peace with having a specific interest and true expertise and were not thinking "okay, I'm smart so let me 'disrupt' a market and shake things up." Many were okay with simply being a useful, necessary and perhaps not-so-widely celebrated part of a larger whole. Larger wholes like NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM, Bell, Digital Equipment and others that gave rise to this much lauded period of innovation (the mechanics of which the author doesn't entirely seem to understand). It also goes without saying that the larger players in academia were expanding in to engineering in a much more serious way due to Cold War competition.

Sure, there were exceptions to the theory of leviathan organizations of specialists. Intel is an exception, in that it was a start up. But it was a start up founded by people with the understanding of how a larger research entity would work (two of the main founders were established engineers at Fairchild). Talking about this sort of thing in the context of modern start-up culture, to be honest, is flippant and cheeky. Maybe "idea guys", business journalists, and a lot of modern hackers in general just need to stop thinking innovation as some substance you can bottle and beating us over the heads with said bottle until the word loses all meaning. The innovators who created the sophistication of the modern transportation and energy infrastructure we now enjoy, not to mention the fundamentals of computing, were a lot humbler than the baby boomer titans of technology and probably a lot of us out there, too.