OPINION:It is increasingly clear we are giving credit to the wrong people for some of the great innovations of our time

HAVING INTERVIEWED mobile phone innovator Matti Makkonen recently, I'm left with some questions about the nature of innovation. Makkonen is a shy, retiring former telecom engineer from Finland, who in appearance could be your ideal geography teacher - tweed jacket, friendly smile and, no doubt, a bag of boiled sweets in his coat pocket. What sets him apart is that it was he who first had the idea for the SMS text message.

These days he is introduced as "the father of text messaging" and I met him at an awards ceremony a few weeks ago, as he received a lifetime achievement gong.

His story is unusual in that it took 18 years for Makkonen's contribution to be recognised. A journalist tracked him down after former colleagues told her Makkonen first mooted the idea of the text, in a Copenhagen pizza parlour in 1984. For 18 years, he was content to sit by while text messaging became a central part of modern life, not to mention a billion euro industry.

A few things about the story have stuck with me. First, how much of a collaborative effort most so-called inventions are. Makkonen had the idea, but the work that led to the "eureka" moment was done by hundreds of people toiling over a period of many years. It is another nail in the coffin of the "lone inventor" stereotype, of the wild-haired old man in the white lab coat, now subsumed into what could be called the brand of Einstein.

The lone inventor is a romantic idea we cling on to because it is convenient to do so. Pub quizzes demand short, snappy answers - who invented the aeroplane? The Wright Brothers (there's doubt about this actually) - not a long list of collaborators. There are also legal reasons for it: the patent system often suggests a single creative source.

However, increasingly it is clear we are giving credit to the wrong people for some of the great innovations of our time.

Thomas Edison was not the first person to invent a lightbulb, only the first to bring it to public attention. Likewise, Elisha Gray would be a great deal more famous had Alexander Graham Bell not given a grandstanding presentation of his telephone at the World's Fair in Philadelphia in 1876.

Gray patented his telephone on the same day as Bell who, it must be said in his defence, was a bona-fide genius, who contributed hugely to innovation across many different fields.

In an essay for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell once suggested the great ideas were "in the air" and referred to what scientists call simultaneous discovery or "multiples", listing some high-profile examples. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both identified evolution.

Three mathematicians "invented" decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Britain, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Sweden, a year earlier.

Colour photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

The point being, if one person hadn't made the final breakthrough, someone else would have. In this way, Matti Makkonen was the man with the idea for text messaging when the music stopped. This doesn't make him a genius, just a very bright and diligent professional.

Over time his name will be quoted in classrooms and in text books as "the man who", but my feeling is that he has more in common with Elisha Gray than Alexander Graham Bell. If it were not for a curious journalist he would have remained one of history's nearly men, the thousands of people whose work goes un-rewarded by posterity.

Matti Makkonen didn't push himself forward to claim his place, and now he's famous (well, you now know of him) he is faintly embarrassed by the attention, and keen to share the spoils with his former team-mates.

However, I doubt we'll listen. We will continue to cling on to the lone inventor, even though we're quite sure he doesn't exist.