When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it.
True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the XYZ system to work on (sadly I'm prevented from disclosing the actual system). They remarked how they spent a couple of days looking over the system which was complicated and creaky, they couldn't figure it out so they wrote a new system. Yup, and they committed that. This person is a coding God are they not? (sarcasm) I asked what happened to the old system (I knew but was interested on their perspective) and they said it was still around because a few things still used it, but (quite proudly) nearly everything else had moved to their new system.
So if you were reading carefully, this person created a new system to 'replace' an existing system which they didn't understand and got nearly everyone to move to the new system. That made them uber because they got something big to put on their internal resume, and a whole crapload of folks had to write new code to adapt from the old system to this new system, which imperfectly recreated the old system (remember they didn't understand the original), such that those parts of the system that relied on the more obscure bits had yet to be converted (because nobody undersood either the dependent code or the old system apparently).
Was this person smart? Blindingly brilliant according to some of their peers. Did they get things done? Hell yes, they wrote the replacement for the XYZ system from scratch! One person? Can you imagine? Would I hire them? Not unless they were the last qualified person in my pool and I was out of time.
That anecdote encapsulates the dangerous side of smart people who get things done. Sometimes they are too smart and do too much. So when the question of 'invention' comes up I like to wrap it around discovery. Sort of 'Tell me about a time where you built something that you had no idea how to build it when you started.' Things I look for are how did you go about discovering the path? What resources did you engage? What options did you consider? When did you 'call the vote'[1] ? My experience has been that things built by two or three people, working as peers, are often much 'better' (meet the needs better, cover more cases, have a more consistent model) than things built by one person.
[1] 'call the vote' - in parlimentary terms when continuing debate will not help you make a better decision, it is time to stop debate and to vote on the decsion. Good leaders look for this point, and move forward once all the voices have been heard.