Innovators (Walter Isaacson, 2014)

If you want to understand how innovation happens and how technology has shaped our lives, The Innovators by Walter Isaacson is a must-read. It demystifies innovation, bursts several myths along the way, and presents a case on how true acts of greatness are almost always collaborative in nature.

Here are the most incisive quotes from the book.

Digital revolution

The Internet was originally built to facilitate collaboration. By contrast, personal computers, especially those meant to be used at home, were devised as tools for individual creativity. (pp.2–3)

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere. (pp.3)

Artificial intelligence need not be the holy grail of computing. The goal instead could be to find ways to optimize the collaboration between human and machine capabilities — to forge a partnership in which we let the machines do what they do best, and they let us do what we do best. (pp.479)

Innovation

Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea come along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it. (pp.35)

Progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps. (pp.35)

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. (pp.39)

Great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large number of sources. An invention, especially one as complex as the computer, usually comes not from an individual brainstorm but from a collaboratively woven tapestry of creativity. (pp.84)

Innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage. (pp.85)

Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals with teams that knew how to implement their ideas. (pp.92)

The sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other rather than as bolts out of the blue. (pp.110)

Innovations tend to proceed through collaboration and building on the work of others, so it is difficult to ascribe with precision the ownership of ideas or intellectual property rights. (pp.176–177)

One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is inventing popular ways to use these devices. (pp.182)

Inventions sometimes occur when people are confronted with a problem and scramble to solve it. And other times, they happen when people embrace a visionary goal. (pp.196)

Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire. (pp.210)

Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal making moxie) to turn it into a successful product. (pp.215)

Innovations often bear the imprint of the organizations that created them. (pp.217)

Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them. (pp.246)

Most true geniuses have an instinct for simplicity. (pp.277)

The greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully. (pp.364)

New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce. (pp.408)

One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused. (pp.429)

This is the way that good ideas often blossom: a bumblebee brings half an idea from one realm, and pollinates another fertile realm filled with half-formed innovations. (pp.441)

Creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. (pp.479)

The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them. (pp.480)

Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones. (pp.484)

This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. (pp.488)

Science

War mobilizes science. Over the centuries, ever since the ancient Greeks built a catapult and Leonardo da Vinci served as the military engineer for Cesare Borgia, martial needs have propelled advances in technology, and this was especially true in the mid-twentieth century. (pp.72)

Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck in their ways. The same traits that make them inventive, such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along. (pp.94)

[John Von Neumann] an enthusiastic polymath and urbane intellectual, he made major contributions to statistics, set theory, geometry, quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons design, fluid dynamics, game theory, and computer architecture. (pp.101)

Transistor was one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. It came from the partnership of a theorist (Walter Brattain) and an experimentalist (John Bardeen) working side by side, in a symbiotic relationship, bouncing theories and results back and forth in real time. (pp.144)

The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. (pp.260)

Collaboration

[Bell Labs] located then in Manhattan on the Hudson River edge of Greenwich Village, it was a haven for turning ideas into inventions. Abstract theories intersected with practical problems there, and in the corridors and cafeterias eccentric theorists mingled with hands-on engineers, gnarly mechanics, and businesslike problem-solvers, encouraging the cross-fertilization of theory with engineering. (pp.47- 48)

Eckert and Mauchly [creators of ENIAC] served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with passion for precision; Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved… Eckert, whose technical skills came with a nervous energy and scattershot attention span, badly needed an intellectual sounding board, and Mauchly loved being that. Although he was not an engineer, Mauchly did have the ability to connect scientific theories with engineering practicalities in a way that was inspiring. (pp.74- 75)

One of von Neumann’s great strength was his talent — questioning, listening, gently floating tentative proposals, articulating, and collating — for being an impresario of such a such a collaborative creative process. (pp.110)

There was value to getting together in person rather than just reading each other’s papers: the intense interactions allowed ideas to be kicked into higher orbits and, like electrons, occasionally break loose to spark chain reactions. (pp.135–136)

Many of the key partnerships in the digital age paired people with different skills and personalities. (pp.211)

The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academic was, in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological revolution of the late twentieth century. (pp.220)

The most productive teams were those that brought together people with a wide array of specialties. Bell Labs was a classic example. In its long corridors in suburban New Jersey, there were theoretical physicists, experimentalists, material scientists, engineers, a few businessmen, and even some telephone-pole climbers with grease under their fingernails. (pp.480)

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. (pp.480)

Leadership

One problem with successful teams, particularly intense ones, is that sometimes they break up. It takes a special type of leader — inspiring yet also nurturing, competitive yet collaborative — to hold such teams together. (pp.152)

Effective management need not always come from having one strong leader. It can come from having the right combination of different talents at the top. (pp.192)

Best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. (pp.481)

Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. (pp.481)

Quotes by others

“Math constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world.” — Ada Lovelace (pp.17)

“What is imagination? It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations… It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.” — Ada Lovelace (pp.18)

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way… but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.” — Albert Einstein (pp.68)

“It takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device.” — William Shockley (pp.133)

“Basic research leads to new knowledge… It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn.” — Vannevar Bush (pp.219)

“New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” — Vannevar Bush (pp.220)

“Since my father was a scientist and my mother was an artist, the atmosphere during my early years was full of many kinds of ideas and ways to express them. I did not distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘science’ and still don’t.” — Alan Kay (pp.282)

“An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed a bit imbalanced… Certainly in my teems and 20s, I fit that model.” — Bill Gates (pp.338)

“Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us… It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them in the air and sell a few’.” — Steve Wozniak (pp.351–351)

“Good artists copy, great artists steal… And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas… They [Xerox] were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do… They just grabbed defeat from the great victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.” — Steve Jobs (pp.365)

“Mathematics has something in common with poetry… It’s made out of these true relationships, true steps, true deductions, so it has this beauty about it.” — Richard Stallman (pp.370)

“Money is not the greatest of motivators… Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers.” — Linus Torvalds (pp.378)

“If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in Bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency.” — Tim Berners-Lee (pp.421)

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” — Jimmy Wales (pp.445)

“Amazingly, I had not thought of building a search engine… The idea wasn’t even on the radar.” — Larry Page (pp.458)

“I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey. They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.” — Jeff Bezos (pp.464)

“Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent… Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.” — Gary Kasparov (pp.470)

“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.” — Steve Pinker (pp.472)

“Human ingenuity will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.” — Leonardo da Vinci (pp.474)

“The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.” — Larry Page (pp.485)

“The machines will be more rational and analytical. People will provide judgement, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.” — John Kelly (pp.486)

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” — Steve Jobs (pp.487)