http://www.gruhn.com/newsletter/newsltr25.html
Here's some excerpts from the article:
In terms of pure innovation, Chet’s most important achievement was the "solidbody acoustic" guitar he brought to Gibson in 1982. He had come to prefer nylon string guitars because he had brittle fingernails, but with a conventional acoustic guitar he experienced feedback problems onstage, using a microphone for amplification. By this time, piezo-electric pickups were developed to the point that an acceptable acoustic sound could be reproduced. Just the original solidbody guitar designers had done, Chet did away with the acoustic body and had luthier Hascal Haile build a solidbody. It worked, and Gibson put it into production in a nylon-string version. Five years later, a steel string version, the SST, found broad acceptance among rock and country artists, and it established the solidbody acoustic as its own genre of guitar.
Today, the plethora of artist signature models would seem to indicate that artists are active and influential in guitar design, but for the most part, these signature models only represent a new combination of existing features, such as a wider fingerboard, a hotter pickup or personal cosmetic touches. When it comes down to true innovation and influence as guitar designers, the only professional musicians who we would rank with C.F. Martin, Orville Gibson, Leo Fender and Ted McCarty are George Beauchamp and Chet Atkins.
George Gruhn and Walter Carter