Last week’s issue of TIME featured the TIME Invention poll, in cooperation with Qualcomm, a survey of 10,197 people in 17 countries around the world. The poll, which accompanied TIME’s annual list of the year’s 25 Best Inventions, revealed a wide range of opinions about who inventors are, how they do their work and which countries are the most inventive. “It’s easy enough to recognize a prolific inventor when we see one,” wrote TIME’s Jeff Kluger. “It’s far harder to define what the act of invention is—how it springs into being, how it visits some of us and not others, how an idea that seems so obvious after the invention has been conceived and built was so opaque, so elusive before.”

Read more: TIME/Qualcomm Panel Discussion: The Future of Invention | TIME.com http://techland.time.com/2013/11/21/time-panel-discussion-the-future-of-invention/#ixzz2vxSxXngp