The Innovators Quotes

“During his Oxford years, microprocessors became available. So, just as Wozniak and Jobs had done, he and his friends designed boards that they tried to sell. They were not as successful as the Steves, partly because, as Berners-Lee later said, “we didn’t have the same ripe community and cultural mix around us like there was at the Homebrew and in Silicon Valley.”7 Innovation emerges in places with the right primordial soup, which was true of the Bay Area but not of Oxfordshire in the 1970s.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it’s done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. “What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works,” Torvalds said. “People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Torvalds explained. “When people trust you, they take your advice.” He also realized that leaders in a voluntary collaborative have to encourage others to follow their passion, not boss them around. “The best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“C. P. Snow was right about the need to respect both of “the two cultures,” science and the humanities. But even more important today is understanding how they intersect. Those who helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could combine science and the humanities. From her father came a poetic streak and from her mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical science.” Her father defended the Luddites who smashed mechanical looms, but Ada loved how punch cards instructed those looms to weave beautiful patterns, and she envisioned how this wondrous combination of art and technology could be manifest in computers.
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This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“atomic power, radar, and the Internet—were spawned by the military.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“I don’t think that kids starting out with computers today get as welcome of an entry to programming as I did.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academia was, in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological revolution of the late twentieth century.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“the best semiconductor engineers in the country”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Deep Blue ganó aquel torneo de ajedrez por la fuerza bruta, ya que era capaz de evaluar 200 millones de posiciones por segundo y compararlas con 700.000 jugadas”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“ninguna máquina ha superado el test de Turing, una prueba bastante sencilla y, posiblemente, no demasiado significativa. Y, desde luego, ninguna ha superado el listón de Ada —aún más alto— de ser capaz de «originar» cualquier pensamiento propio.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“Una de las premisas básicas de la innovación es mantenerse centrado.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“Una de las claves para que una innovación tenga éxito es simplificar el acceso del usuario. Para que los blogs se convirtiesen en”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“caso de John Atanasoff, el olvidado inventor de Iowa, la concepción de la idea es solo el primer paso. Lo que importa realmente es la ejecución.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“But when he and Zuse proposed it to the German Army in 1942, the commanders said they were confident that they would win the war before the two years it would take to build such a machine.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Many people who celebrate the arts and the humanities, who applaud vigorously the tributes to their importance in our schools, will proclaim without shame (and sometimes even joke) that they don’t understand math or physics. They extoll the virtues of learning Latin, but they are clueless about how to write an algorithm or tell BASIC from C++, Python from Pascal. They consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and a differential equation. These concepts may seem difficult. Yes, but so, too, is Hamlet. And like Hamlet, each of these concepts is beautiful.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“La conciencia pública es un componente importante de la innovación.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“que se convertiría en otro ejemplo de cómo la financiación pública de la investigación especulativa se amortiza a la larga cientos de veces en aplicaciones prácticas.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“Leibniz had little engineering skill and did not surround himself with those who did. So, like many great theorists who lacked practical collaborators, he was unable to produce reliably working versions of his device.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“It’s also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“innovación requiere contar con tres cosas como mínimo: una gran idea, el talento técnico para llevarla a cabo y la experiencia empresarial (además de la sangre fría para cerrar tratos) para convertirla en un éxito.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“se describe al director ejecutivo ideal como una persona expansiva, reflexiva y de acción. Grove se dio cuenta de que, en lugar de estar encarnados en un solo individuo, esos rasgos podían darse en un equipo directivo.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“Una de sus máximas clave relativas a la inversión era apostar por la gente más que por la idea.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great achievement there would be. “A personal computer,” he answered. Asked what that was, he picked up a notebook-size portfolio, flipped open its cover, and said, “This will be a flat-panel display. There’ll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That’s what I’m talking about.” His interviewer scratched his head and muttered to himself, “Yeah, right.” But Kay got the job.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“clave para la innovación: es necesario comprender qué industrias son simbióticas para poder evaluar de qué manera puede una estimular a la otra.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro