There is no limit to the good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.
General George C. Marshall
"There’s another level to this idea, one much more difficult to embrace. Assume for the moment you have a truly brilliant idea, but neither the resources, nor the influence necessary to make “it” happen. What do you do?
If you really want to see the idea take off, then you give it to someone who can make it happen. By “give it”, I don’t mean write up a proposal and hand it to someone else. I mean you identify the person who could make this happen and you bring them to the point where they come up with the idea. To a point where the idea becomes theirs – lock, stock and barrel. You take no credit for it.
Objections to this final step are many. The idea of allowing someone else to take credit for your idea is a difficult one to swallow. Look what I did when credit was stolen from me so long ago… I quit my job. With that deep seated sense of ownership to “credit”, how can I possibly justify the advice of putting others in a position to take credit for your ideas? Because it would be your choice. We can choose to do this when we know that we can’t deliver the final achievement, and the person we’re handing the opportunity to, can."
Lots of stuff here for the intellectual property argument. Who should get Credit for the Rachmaninoff Variations on a theme by Paganini Assume for the sake of argument that the Paganini theme was buried in a otherwise obscure piece, and no credit was given. Ethical? If Paganini was a no name contemporary and Rachmaninoff heard it in a cafe and wrote Variations on a Theme what then? Interesting questions. Further deponent saith not.
