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The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

2016; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 123; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1213/ane.0000000000001193

1526-7598

Deepak Gupta,

Science, Research, and Medicine

Since the time when it dawned on me that I am a dreamer who can be a creator, maybe an innovator but definitely not an entrepreneur, I have been a sucker for biographies and true stories craving for inspirations and motivations through the lives of documented legends. As soon as The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution hit the stands in 2014, I bought it because I had immensely loved the previous literary work Steve Jobs by the same author, Walter Isaacson. However, presumably because of my medical knowledge background, the book was initially too technical, and hence, I was not getting past the first chapter. However, this resolved as I progressed through the book, and I was stimulated to write this review for my medical colleagues and medical profession brethren because it provides inspiration and motivation on how to not only become a good creator/innovator, but also become a great entrepreneur. Walter Isaacson, the author of this book, is Aspen Institute’s CEO and a renowned American biographer. The intended audience is the general populace as a whole (and especially history buffs like myself) who enjoy the stories behind the mysteries of “miraculous” happenings around the world, especially when those “miracles” (like the computer and the Internet) have become indispensable in our day-to-day life. Moreover, by reading this book, those who are currently innovating and who aspire to innovate in time will learn how to avoid the trappings of personal successes and how to rise above personal failures. Innovations are the result of teams’ collaborative efforts, and successes and/or failures are those of collaborations themselves, nothing personal. Because the book follows innovations leading to the digital revolution, medical professionals may feel unaffected by the history of technological evolution. However, the essential ingredients for innovations and inventive philosophy as described in the book make it applicable for even nontechnological innovators like us. This book is divided into 12 chapters with a great Illustrated Timeline since the times of Ada, Countess of Lovelace in 1840s, and an apt introduction “How This Book Came to Be” by the author. In addition, the whole book is appropriately interspersed with black-and-white portraits of the innovators who led the digital revolution. The author has beautifully summarized the narrative at the end of the final chapter as “Some Lessons from the Journey,” which does NOT replace reading the entire succinctly written 490-page book. A key lesson of this book is that creations happen only with collaborations. The collaboration does not need to be just among the colleagues, but often from previous generations whose ideas are enhanced, corrected, or refuted to take the baton of innovations forward. Moreover, history of human industry needs to appreciate that innovators are gender-blind even when available opportunities may NOT be gender-blind. To invent, the innovators need to interact with a “wide array of specialties,” and for that to happen, working spaces often need to provide physical proximities for free exchanges of ideas across the collaborative specialists. Examples discussed included Bell Labs where the transistor was invented, the workplaces created by Intel’s founders, and the headquarters of Pixar designed by Steve Jobs. The inventive leadership must ensure teams composed of complementary styled members besides pairing visionaries and managers so that “non-executed visions do not turn into hallucinations.” However, this physical proximity does not exclude collaborations at a distance made possible by global digitization. For team formations to innovate, funding often comes from government/military sources with private enterprises following. However, free associations among creative peers (like for creation of Wikipedia) can equally contribute to the innovation revolution. The final and foremost dictum proposed by the book is that visions are lost without executions, and hence, the innovations that survive the ethos of relentlessly changing times are the ones that are executed under the apt leadership/entrepreneurship of the hands-on inventors who do not fail to collaborate with complementary styled specialists (including marketers) to create innovations for the society whose future needs are NOT predicted but created/invented in the “reality distortion fields” of visionaries like Steve Jobs. In summary, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is a good read for all avid readers who all get inspired by reading well-written, relatable, true stories. However, this book is a must-read for all the innovators including those creative minds in the medical profession, because there is a need for evolution from physicians to physician–scientists to physician–entrepreneurs so that the nonexecuted creative visions in the field of medicine do not “go down in history as merely footnotes.” Deepak Gupta, MDDepartment of AnesthesiologyWayne State University/Detroit Medical CenterDetroit, Michigan[email protected]