Book review The Innovators

During the wake of the Industrial Revolution, aspiring entrepreneurs scoured The Innovators' landmark biography for their secret to success. Five volumes of "Lives of the Engineers" by Samuel Smiles, the founder of the self-reliance movement, surveyed a century of human progress around the Renaissance classic "Lives of the Artists". Instead of tales about Italian sculptors and painters, he showed us portraits of bridge builders and engine builders (including a 500-page praise song for locomotive innovators George and Robert Stephenson) to reveal a personality of greatness: mechanical aptitude, frugality, masculinity and an insatiable desire for innovation.

"The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson, a broad companion to his bestselling "Steve Jobs", has moved into Smiles' field. The book combines the development of computers and the Internet from the 1830s to the present day, using the life stories of more than 60 individuals, partnerships and groups. Instead of emphasizing individual genius, however, Isaacson argues that knowing "how innovation happens in the real world" requires lessons of teamwork and complexity.

“The Innovators”, which was nominated for the 2014 National Book Award in the non-fiction category, reviews the Industrial Revolution to pinpoint the origins of the information age. At a party featuring fake androids and cartoon creatures organized by visionary technologist Charles Babbage, we met Ada Lovelace, daughter of libertine poet Lord Byron, as she captured The first creates the "analytical engine" that is an equal partner with humanity. For Isaacson, this feminist symbol embodies the "coherent faculty" that unites the different forces of the digital revolution: counterculture rebellion, business dynamics, technology. funded by the state and integrating art with science.

History at this scale tends to favor encyclopedias or decision-theory manifests, a fate that in The Innovators, Isaacson avoids by using his talent for stories to switch between sub-stories. Romantic theory, operating manual, legal briefs, memoir and humanistic lecture. This kaleidoscope story serves to explain the step-by-step evolution of the 10 core innovations of the digital age - from mathematical logic to transistors, video games and the Web - as well as illustrations. exemplary characteristics of their creators.

Synthetic creator Isaacson depicts completely different from previous hero portraits. Smiles's George Stephenson is a stubborn family man, industriously studying while his colleagues engage in pub brawl. Isaacson can tell us that JCR Licklider is "kind" and that Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce are "all nice Midwesterns" who have shared responsibility for the chip; But we like to recall his account of Jobs asking Stanford students whether they used LSD or got fired. During the age of invention, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla created new paradigms of the eccentric genius of the research lab that continued to hold our imagination. However, Isaacson clearly demonstrated the power of labor collaboration and interaction between companies and their broader ecosystems.

In The Innovators, an introduction to Bill Gates and Microsoft best demonstrates the relationship between individuals, teams and the innovation process. Gates is the face of the software industry's monopoly wing. The guy who claims to be a "fanatic" with "risk-taking genes" and "low respect for power" once negotiated a contract with his sister for non-exclusive rights to her baseball gloves. that. At the prestigious Lakeside school, he and his friends started a programming business and stole the admin's access codes. But Microsoft's success depends heavily on the additional skills of Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer like Gates.

Furthermore, while hailed as a Harvard dropout, Gates wrote his BASIC translation for the Altair personal computer on the university's military-sponsored PDP-10. Ultimately, although he asked members of the Homebrew Computer Club to "pay" for pirating his software, their free distribution made it the industry standard. . The first ethic is individual genius and team spirit going hand in hand; second, contradictory ideological styles and institutions that can be mutually beneficial.

Three intersecting patterns of collaborative creativity appear in the book's collection of digital life. First, from World War II until the end of the Cold War, government funding coordination in the military-industry-academic complex promoted electronic computing and the Internet. Second, the profit engine spawned enterprise research centers, venture capital firms and patent attorneys, which in turn led to "spectacular innovation in transistors, chips, and machines. computers, telephones, equipment and web services ”. Finally, loosely coordinated networks fueled by non-monetary rewards blossomed in the late 1960s and early days of the open Internet, creating open source, self-regulatory products like GNU. / Linux and Wikipedia. An ideal innovation policy, Isaacson suggests, promotes all three modes even though value systems sometimes conflict.

The “The Innovators” motif is the challenge of setting the priorities for complex innovation. For example, who "invented" the electronic computer? Was that John Atanasoff, the lone tinker working in a basement in Iowa; John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, ENIAC patent seekers; the "hands on" navy crew of Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper; Or John von Neumann? Isaacson favors those who convert ideas into reality and influence the most. "When people gather insights from multiple sources and put them together," he concludes, "it's natural that they think the resulting ideas are their own - as is the truth." .

This shared responsibility is not just for the readers. “The Innovators” is the most accessible and comprehensive history of its kind, but it builds on and synthesizes ideas and evidence from decades of early initiators. These include classics like "Hackers" by Steven Levy, literary competitors like "The information" by James Gleick, academic topics like "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner, history. word of mouth by Smithsonian, and the proliferation of technology journalism from Wired and other sources. Isaacson diligently took up the curriculum, but it limited his brand enthusiasm, and many anecdotes were lost. The closer the book gets to the present, the more interesting it is. Its in-house interviews reveal compelling stories about the intimate and often obscene origins of blogs, the rise of Google, and the magic of open source.

At the height of the book, Isaacson explores his past as an editor for Time's Internet strategy to comment on the Web's less-expected features. He gives a small story to ad-backed content, a model he sees as unsustainable, and he enthusiastically defends the Web's open community, whose fate belongs to the Commission. Federal Communications Department. But The Innovators book has very little time for the dilemmas of the digital revolution. Dickensian's lack of advocacy and smoke in his predominantly American digiratian life made it easy to overlook the effects of rare earth mineral extraction in making components, conditions in Chinese electronics factories, and an explosion of "adventurous labor" - important facts now even influence favorable descriptions of innovation.

Instead, Isaacson looks to the future of collaborative creativity with a clear call for "experimental science". He advocates unifying art and technology at the heart of the most successful innovators, from Lovelace to Jobs. "The Innovators is a story about the progression of human-computer symbiosis, not artificial intelligence," he wrote. Its next phase “will bring even more ways to incorporate new technologies. . . media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature and arts. Indeed, the universities of the world (including my university) are rapidly working on building infrastructure to give students "rebellious awe" for fear that they and the institutions that train them to become historical "outsiders".

What will bring The Innovators this worth? A diverse ecosystem is vital; a matter of time; you need venture capital; and an active government; Big ideas develop over generations; it helps if your mother is a mathematician; war is the engine of change; you never know who you will meet on the platform; childhood books deeply shape us; and continue. But digital enthusiasts in the IT community that scour their Kindle for deeper insight into "Lives" later on will also find that a fundamental secret still exists - the belief that the best. in all worlds may be limited only by imagination.