H**T
The Complexity and Beauty of Innovation according to Walter Isaacson
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson is a great book because of its balanced description of the role of geniuses or disruptive innovators as much as of teamwork in incremental innovation. âThe tale of their teamwork is important because we donât often focus on how central their skill is to innovation. [âŠ] But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how todayâs technology evolution was fashioned.â [Page 1] He also goes deeper: âI also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by the government spending and managed by a military-industrial collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.â [Page 2] âFinally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.â [Page 5]The computerI was a little more cautious with chapter 2 as I have the feeling that the story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage is well known. I may be wrong. But chapter 3 about the early days of the computer was mostly unknown to me. Who invented the computer? Probably many different people in different locations in the US, the UK and Germany, around WWII. âHow did they develop this idea at the same time when war kept their two teams isolated? The answer is partly that advances in technology and theory made the moment ripe. Along with many innovators, Zuse and Stibitz were familiar with the use of relays in phone circuits, and it made sense to tie that to binary operations of math and logic. Likewise, Shannon, who was also very familiar with phone circuits, would be able to perform the logical tasks of Boolean algebra. The idea that digital circuits would be the key to computing was quickly becoming clear to researchers almost everywhere, even in isolated places like central Iowa.â [Page 54]There would be a patent fight I did not know about. Read pages 82-84. You can also read the following on Wikipedia: âOn June 26, 1947, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the first to file for patent on a digital computing device (ENIAC), much to the surprise of Atanasoff. The ABC [AtanasoffâBerry Computer] had been examined by John Mauchly in June 1941, and Isaac Auerbach, a former student of Mauchlyâs, alleged that it influenced his later work on ENIAC, although Mauchly denied this. The ENIAC patent did not issue until 1964, and by 1967 Honeywell sued Sperry Rand in an attempt to break the ENIAC patents, arguing the ABC constituted prior art. The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota released its judgement on October 19, 1973, finding in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand that the ENIAC patent was a derivative of John Atanasoffâs invention.â [The trial had begun in June 1971 and the ENIAC patent was therefore made invalid]I also liked his short comment about complementary skills. âEckert and Mauchly served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision; Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved.â [Pages 74-75]Women in Technology and ScienceIt is in chapter 4 about Programming that Isaacson addresses the role of women. â[Grace Hopper] education wasnât as unusual as you might think. She was the eleventh woman to get a math doctorate from Yale, the first being in 1895. It was not at all uncommon for a woman, especially from a successful family, to get a doctorate in math in the 1930s. In fact, it was more common than it would be a generation later. The number of American women who got doctorates in math during the 1930s was 133, which was 15 percent of the total number of American math doctorates. During the decade of the 1950s, only 106 American women got math doctorates, which was a mere 4 percent of the total. (By the first decade of the 2000 things had more than rebounded and there were 1,600 women who got math doctorates, 30 percent of the total.)â [Page 88]Not surprisingly, in the early days of computer development, men worked more in hardware whereas women would be in software. âAll the engineers who built ENIACâs hardware were men. Less heralded by history was a group of women, six in particular, who turned out to be almost as important in the development of modern computing.â [Page 95] âShortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women. « Despite our coming of age in an era when womenâs career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer. » It happened because a lot of women back then had studied math and their skills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: the boys with their toys thought that assembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a manâs job. « American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today, » Jennings said. « If the ENIACâs administration had known how crucial programming would be to the functioning of the electronic computer and how complex it would prove to be, they might have been more hesitant to give such an important role to women.â [Pages 99-100]The sources of innovationâHopperâs historical sections focused on personalities. In doing so, her book emphasized the role of individuals. In contrast, shortly after Hopperâs book was completed, the executives at IBM commissioned their own history of the Mark I that gave primary credit to the IBM teams in Endicott, New York, who had constructed the machine. âIBM interests were best served by replacing individual history with organizational history,â the historian Kurt Beyer wrote in a study of Hopper. âThe locus of technological innovation, according to IBM was the corporation. The myth of the lone radical inventor working in the laboratory or basement was replaced by the reality of teams of faceless organizational engineers contributing incremental advancements.â In the IBM version of history, the Mark I contained a long list of small innovations, such as the ratchet-type counter and the double-checked card feed, that IBMâs book attributed to a bevy of little-known engineers who worked collaboratively in Endicott.The difference between Hopperâs version of history and IBMâs ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit. It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovations. Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBMâs Endicott facility. This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps â the Eureka moment â are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together. Neither way of looking at technological advancement is, on its oqn, completely satisfying. Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.â [Pages 91-92]Google about Disruptive and Incremental InnovationThis is very similar to what I read about Google: âTo us, innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas. Since ânovelâ is often just a fancy synonym for ânewâ, we should also clarify that for something to be innovative, it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising. If your customers are asking for it, you arenât being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive. Thatâs a good thing, but itâs not innovative. Finally âusefulâ is a rather underwhelming adjective to describe that innovation hottie, so letâs add an adverb and make it radically useful, VoilĂ : For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.â [âŠ] âBut Google also releases over five hundred improvements to its search every year. Is that innovative? Or incremental? They are new and surprising, for sure, but while each one of them, by itself is useful, it may be a stretch to call it radically useful. Put them all together, though, and they are. [âŠ] This more inclusive definition â innovation isnât just about the really new, really big things â matters because it affords everyone the opportunity to innovate, rather than keeping it to the exclusive realm of these few people in that off-campus building [Google[x]] whose job is to innovate.â [How Google Works â Page 206]
G**N
Amazing foreshadowing of technologyâs next leap forward (via creative humans)
With A.I.âs extraordinary gains over the past 7 yearâs, we are now on an accelerated schedule to prove our indispensable worth (in a soon to come, A.I. driven world). Isaacsonâs beautiful historic account contains the drama of any sci-fi tale with the difference that the cliff hanger ending is our real life. A.I. has gotten ahead of us (fueled by private industry). It is only a matter of time before our creative uniqueness coupled with super-human, A.I. assistance proves to be enough to establish and maintain an ethical and humane balance between humans and technology (as described in Isaacsonâs conclusion).I recommend this book for anyone interested in computer science, communications and the history and future of society.
H**U
For innovation, you need many bulbs shining together.
The changes in how people used technology, just The Innovators said, has been and will be made step by step. Given this âstep-by-stepâ feature and the complexity in each step, it was done in a collaborative fashion. âThe key to innovationâat Bell Labs and in the digital age in generalâwas realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork,â said Walter Issacson, the author.The fundamental shift in the fashion of innovation brought fundamental shift in how people should think and behave. The situation, in American physicist William Shockleyâs words, âthereâs only one light bulb to go on in somebodyâs head,â is no more.His collaboration with other scientists significantly developed semi-conductor. However, he was ruined by the mindset that âthereâs only one light bulb to go on in somebodyâs headâ. In his case, he thought the only light bulb was in his head. He fell into the meaningless battle for getting credit for inventions, became paranoia and was away from most of his friends and family - his children reportedly learned from his death through media.Shockley was living in the transition period from one mindset to another. When he was carried into the new period by time when achievements are collaborative, his mind was still living in the past.As what we are going to do was becoming more and more gigantic, any achievement now has been more of a beehive â everyone has his or her part. Steve Jobs was great, but it was simply impossible for him to design iPhone, which has thousands of patents and hundreds of thousands of applications at App Store, completely by himself. He wouldnât have iPhone if there were no Motorola or Ericsson. IPhone would also not be so perfect if there were no Tim Cook.Had Shockley learned that he had been just supporting others as others had been supporting him, he might have made more contributions to science, and maybe, I would have embraced One Drive five years earlier.Given the complexity of our jobs, we must learn how to share our ideas and our honor with many âlight bulbs.â But having many light bulbs doesnât necessarily make beauty. It may only add to the light pollution. We need to make them 1) shine; 2) shine in harmony 3) shine in beauty. If they donâtâ shine in beauty, no one would be willing to pay for the electricity. To shine in beauty, we need to make them shine in harmony, and to have some sort of harmony, we must need to make sure every bulb in our box is able to shine well.Human beings are much more complicated than light bulbs. A productive team has to be in good relations within, but we cannot just program how they âshineâ like light bulbs. We need to take into consideration many more factors. We have to make team members be able to do what they are good at and make sure they are happy.It brings serious managerial challenges. Thatâs perhaps why good innovatorsâ stories fall onto charismatic people with good educational background, good working experiences and good personality. And they, of the right types and complementing abilities, have to come together at the right time and right place. If we alter their names, we might well develop a romantic story.Individuals are not important compared to be a massive project, but to make a massive project work, we need so many good people. It appears contradictory, but actually not. Truly good people in modern times should be aware that individual talents would only be valuable in a group project, and instead of living in Boyzone in which one takes the lead, they would prefer Backstreet Boys mode where everyone is equally important.It is easier said than done to share the light with others, given their hard-cultivated talents, but thatâs also why only a small proportion of people in the world could be documented as innovators, whether the innovation is big or small.I am not a technician, but there are lessons I could draw from this book. News production is also in its own time of transition. Where is it heading?I donât read the New York Times now; instead, I read Wall Street Journal bogs, Vice and Buzzfeed. Why? Does it represent something? And if everybody around me is doing the same, how should I prepare for the change? As a journalist, what mindsets should I have and abandon? And if I were to have a small team, what team members should I recruit and how I should keep them together?Innovators not only talk about how the digital age evolves. It also provides illustrates how a transitional period works and provides many successful and unsuccessful examples. Many products are doomed to be forgotten because they are inherently unable to keep up with the new trend. Cassette tapes would never be digital in any form, and CDs would never be as portable as a MP3 player. But human-beings are different. They are not inherently unable to change their minds. The issue is not âcanâ or âcannotâ but how hard it is to make it happen and how motivated people are to make those changes.
C**.
Great read!
Ordered for my son who is in the industry and he thought it was a great read.
D**D
Excelent
Hay que leerlo varias veces,es un libro que describe a los innovadores desde Ada ,Turing hasta Jobs,Wales, Page.Quizas falto el creador de Oracle
J**A
Uma nova abordagem para o desenvolvimento tecnolĂłgico
O livro apresenta uma nova visĂŁo para o desenvolvimento tecnolĂłgico mais voltada para o desenvolvimento em grupo com vĂĄrias equipes em locais distintos trabalhando de forma cooperativa e concorrente no mesmo tema. Esta tese nĂŁo Ă© de fato nova e permeou a estratĂ©gia de gestĂŁo de pesquisa praticada por empresas como a IBM e Bell e tambĂ©m NASA e Departamento de Defesa americano, se propagando para o meio acadĂȘmico. VĂĄrias reformas de estrutura universitĂĄria tiveram como pano de fundo a substituição de luminares (catedrĂĄticos) por times multidisciplinares e multifuncionais liderados por pessoas mais criativas e/ou com grande capacidade de liderança. A experiĂȘncia mais marcante foi o projeto feito para decifrar cĂłdigo de mensagens durante a guerra, descrito com algum detalhe organizacional, e o projeto que construiu a primeira bomba atĂŽmica que nĂŁo Ă© abordado no livro. Tudo isso Ă© colocado na perspectiva da convergĂȘncia digital que Ă© a base do mundo moderno. A narrativa Ă© clara e apresentada de forma organizada fazendo com que haja continuidade entre as diversas fases.
D**
Wow. Tough start, but well worth the perseverance
What a journey through the history of computer innovation. Walter highlights the strengths and flaws of the heroes and heroines, and the recurrent themes across many of historyâs great computer breakthroughs.
è**G
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I**N
Uma verdadeira enciclopédia
Uma verdadeira enciclopĂ©dia sobre os "inovadores" responsĂĄveis pela criação e evolução da tecnologia da informação. Mas nĂŁo "flui" tĂŁo bem como outras biografias do autor, como Jobs e Leonardo. Exceto pelo capĂtulo sobre Ada Lovelace.
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