Discoveries are typically made independently by several people at once, because the prerequisites arrive before the person.
Ogburn and Thomas catalogued 148 cases in 1922. The telephone, the telegraph, oxygen, natural selection and the calculus were all discovered more than once within a few years.
In practice
- Two teams in the same firm build the same internal tool in the same quarter, neither knowing about the other.
- Four startups launch the same product within a year, because the enabling technology became cheap in the same month for all of them.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- What gets in the way of good work