New technology has a prominent place in the theory and practice of innovation, but the association between high tech and innovation is not inevitable. In this paper, we discuss six metaphorical heroes of agricultural innovation, starting with the dominant hero of frontier science and technology. At first sight, our six heroes can be divided in those who are proand those who are anti-technology....

The American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association faces a quandary. The name of Dr Thomas Parran, a 20th century hero in the field of sexually transmitted disease prevention, accompanies a prestigious award given by the organization annually. Members are now confronted with the unsettling realization that Parran, like many honored figures of the past, also had a less heroic side. It was al...

‘Leadership’ is not a common topic for research in international development. In recent years, however, prominent studies like the 2008 Growth Commission Report noted the importance of leadership in development. This and other studies focused on individual leaders—or heroes—when examining ‘who leads development’. The current article asks if heroes really do lead development. It deconstructs the...

A tournament is a complete graph with its edges directed, and colouring a tournament means partitioning its vertex set into transitive subtournaments. For some tournaments H there exists c such that every tournament not containing H as a subtournament has chromatic number at most c (we call such a tournament H a hero); for instance, all tournaments with at most four vertices are heroes. In this...