"My idea is better than yours"

The "Aha!" moment, or when ideas seem to appear as bolts out of the blue holds a certain fascination among inventors and the general public alike fuelling the notion of the "lone genius". However, the reality behind innovation in today's complex markets for products and services is often a collaborative creative process where individuals bat around thoughts collectively and rub ideas against each other also eliciting input from across disciplines. The view that groups or teams rather than individuals form and shape ideas has implications for who gets credit for innovation, or even intellectual property, IP. That is, should IP be shared freely and placed whenever possible into the public domain and open-source-commons? Or should these rights be protected and inventors be allowed to profit from their proprietary ideas and innovations? Moreover, which of these two approaches best promote innovation? For example, Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Steve Jobs (Apple) didn't believe in free sharing of software, in contrast to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WorldWideWeb, who insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, and shared openly in the public domain.