Re: "It's not long before someone's doing a variation on your theme."
I spoke with someone recently about this very phenomenon. I cited how several independently working individuals separated by oceans and national boundaries came to invent the telephone within a short time of one other. They neither knew one another nor were they aware of the others' acitivies and intentions, or so the stories (plural) go. Notably, each of their inventions took place during the mid ninetheenth century following uptake of Morse's telegraph. The actual number of claims is debatable, as are other aspects of the contraption's birth, but that is neither here nor there. My telling of this litte vignette to my friend stemmed from another situation concerning two freelance writers who regularly write for the same trade journal. You probably guessed it already, but be kind and read on, since I took the time to write it.
One spring each writer came to learn, to their indivudal chagrin and dismay, but only after the fact which made it worse, that they had been independently writing about the same topic, picking pretty much the same subjects or general class of subjects as examples to write about, and arriving at nearly the same conclusions, and then submitting their individual drafts to the same publisher for consideration for an upcoming issue. Neither writer had ever discussed his intentions or had knowledge of the theme that the other was working on, yet their submissions were a solid eight-point match on AFIS.
Chalk both scenarios up to "natural outgrowths," meaning the principals in each case were exposed to --and stepped on the backs of-- the same events that preceded them, making their choice of creation the next logical extension of their particular regimes. This is also a critical component in what has arfully been dubbed in academia, "innovating at the edge," where the term "edge" refers to the extremity or border region of any activity or chain of dependencies within a domain, especially when it touches another edge of another like- or dissimilar- domain. Now, I don't want to get hung up on, or give anyone the impression that I'm stuck on, Hagel and Seely-Brown, but the following article from Computerworld about their book does serve to offer some good examples of what I'm referring to. See:
Q&A: Driving innovation at the 'edge' of the enterprise
computerworld.com
If at least three geographically dispersed guys who didn't know of each other or what the others were doing can come up with the same idea and invent the telephone within a short time frame prior to the telephone's invention (naturally), then I'd expect that the number of natural outgrowths of the type you're referring to will occur orders of magnitude higher during the Information Age. It's no wonder, then, and rather timely based on the above, that the US Patent Office is raising the bar for certain classes of claims, so as to disallow or strongly challenge those whose main merits would otherwise fall to simlarity of appearance.
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