Don,
My argument, or question to tone down the rhetoric,
is whether being first makes you a significant cause.

If I knock over sulfurized rubber onto a stove, I
have not invented the car tire.

If later people are looking for a smoother ride (a
kind of needs-driven project, though obviously they
didn't call themselves design researchers back then),
and deploy vulcanized rubber, you seem, to me at
least, to be belittling what they've done as merely
reassembling previous inventions.

If vulcanized rubber only comes into its own in a
really significant (world-changing) way when inflated
into a tire, then shouldn't those 'design-research-
driven' people who came up with tire, be given the
credit for the paradigm shifting rather than
Mr Goodyear, even though they came later? Those
need driven assemblers of synthetic rubber seem
to me to be more significant than earlier vulcans
to the earth-shattering thing that we now call
'THE car'.

It perhaps comes down to what you mean by
'fundamental':
> The fundamental inventions of our time
> do not come from some deep research about societal or individual needs.
Does fundamental happen when the base technology
appears, or when it is enlisted into something
that is meaningful for society?

To avoid seeming to be a mere nitpicker, perhaps an
example might be the disposable razor. According to
myth, King C Gillette discerned, in the manner of a
designerly insight, that the world needed dispos-
ability. He then set about looking for something to
fulfil that need, and, on inventing the disposable
razor (after 10 years of material exploration,
(self-)user testing, and supply-chain research),
also created a whole new way of doing business and
of being a consumer that results in our current
intractable unsustainability.

When Fernando Flores tells this story he foregrounds
how designerly Gillette's insight into changing
masculinity at the time was; in _Disclosing New
Worlds_ with Charles Spinosa and Hubert Dreyfus.

> These are all needs today. Before
> that they were luxuries, and before that unheard of, undreamt of.

Flores point is that the 'real' invention (he calls
this 'radical innovation') - the one that we should be
worried about, i.e., educating for - is the one that
manages to convert things to needs.

And, it is precisely the argument of some sociologists
of technology that the role of old-style post-design
user-research is to turn useless inventions into needs.
I am thinking of Woolgar's _Configuring the User:
The Case of Usability Trials_ in Law's _A Sociology
of Monsters_. 

In which case, forget about the tinkerers who
accidentally come up with they-know-not-what,
and study, and celebrate, the social-oriented
research-led designers.

Some fluff to end with; even if things were that way,
perhaps that is not how things will, and should, be.
After all, that old way sure did result in a mess.

Cameron