INNOVATION SPECIAL The
Hard Work of Invention
Walter Isaacson, CEO
of the Aspen Institute and author of Steve Jobs, plumbs the history of digitization to get to
the roots of successful innovation.
The Innovators: How a
Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by
Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 2014
In his later years,
when asked how he invented the shipping container, freight magnate Malcom
McLean would offer an anecdote. One day in the 1930s, the former truck
driver was waiting at a pier to deliver bales of cotton. Watching dockers load
thousands of cartons and barrels aboard the ship, young McLean wondered why the
cargo was not assembled in containers to speed up the process. From that
brainstorm, McLean said, the modern shipping container was born two decades
later.
This story, so far as
I can tell, was fabricated from whole cloth in response to a question—“How did
you invent the container?”—whose very premise, that the container had a single
inventor, was false. Yet people love McLean’s anecdote, because it confirms
common preconceptions. Call it the Isaac Newton theory of innovation: You
sit under a tree, an apple falls on your head, and voilà, you discover gravity.
I’m
hopeful that Walter Isaacson’s latest book will lay the Isaac Newton theory to
rest for good. The Innovators is a history of the
computer and the Internet that unfolds as a series of profiles of mostly
well-known individuals who played key roles in the development of modern
information technology. Whether Isaacson is discussing Ada Lovelace, who
sketched out the concept of the multipurpose computer in 1843, or Larry Page
and Sergey Brin, whose doctoral research at Stanford University turned into
Google, he focuses on a single question: What causes one idea to take root,
with world-changing consequences, while another idea is abandoned?
Isaacson, the author
of definitive biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, finds that
brilliant ideas invariably have a history, and that brilliant innovators are people
who know how to build on the work of others to turn ideas into reality. As he
puts it, “Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt.” The
Innovators repeatedly shows that coming up with breakthrough ideas is
the easy part of innovation. The hard part? Turning those ideas into advances
that are practical to implement—practical not only technically, but also
commercially. Doing so, Isaacson emphasizes, requires not just an idea, but an
ecosystem.
Nowhere is this
clearer than in Isaacson’s exploration of two men pursuing the dream of a
digital computer. Between 1939 and 1942, John Atanasoff, a physicist who taught
at Iowa State University—an institution known for cutting-edge work in
electrical engineering—developed a prototype designed to solve linear
equations. Lacking colleagues who could help him resolve problems with memory
units and punch-card readers, he usually toiled alone. Nor did Iowa State make
sure his inventions were patented. Atanasoff’s small model, stored in a
basement when he was called up to war, was forgotten, shortly to be dismantled
for parts.
Around the same time,
a physicist named John Mauchly was working along similar lines. Mauchly, like
Atanasoff, was not affiliated with a big-time school. (Mauchly taught at
Ursinus College.) Unlike Atanasoff, though, he was a networker, a regular at
academic conferences who discussed his ideas widely. When he learned of
Atanasoff’s work, he traveled to Iowa to see the computer Atanasoff was
building. Mauchly and an engineer, J. Presper Eckert, drew on Atanasoff’s work,
and that of many others, to develop the famed ENIAC at the University of
Pennsylvania, a 30-ton multipurpose computer that was 100 times faster than any
previous machine.
A quarter century
later, Atanasoff sued, claiming they had stolen his ideas. In 1973, a court
declared Atanasoff the inventor of the digital computer and nullified patents
granted to Mauchly and Eckert. This ruling, Isaacson insists, misunderstands
the nature of innovation: ENIAC was built on the work of Atanasoff and many
others, and properly so. “Great innovations are usually the result of ideas
that flow from a large number of sources,” he writes. “An invention, especially
one as complex as the computer, usually comes not from an individual brainstorm
but from a collaboratively woven tapestry of creativity.”
Isaacson might have
put greater emphasis on the way that collaboration can occur in different ways.
The boss who forces employees to work at a shared table to promote
collaboration may only be stoking resentment. Although it is true, as Isaacson
writes, that “innovation is not a loner’s endeavor,” it is also true that each
of us has individual preferences for interacting with others. Even with hard
work, The Innovators shows, breakthroughs may not arrive on a
corporate bean counter’s schedule. 
by Marc Levinson
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