Wang’s digital pen also reflects an ongoing transformation in the process of invention at some large corporate labs, a hybridization of the lone inventor and traditional corporate R&D. Wang is the pen’s lead inventor, and it is his insight, daring, and creativity that have largely driven the effort to develop it. But at the same time, he could not have made such rapid progress without Microsoft’s collective expertise in pattern recognition algorithms, computer vision, handwriting technologies, and text-editing software. “Personally, I’m really excited about it,” says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, whose main facility is in Redmond, WA. “It’s an example of a new kind of product incubation that we do,...one that brings together people with many different skills to solve a unique problem.”

Gregory T. Huang, "Microsoft’s Magic Pen," Technology Review, May 2004 via Tomalak's Realm