In his new book “The Innovators,” journalist, biographer, historian Walter Isaacson tells the stories of the creative geniuses behind the digital communications revolution that so dominates 21st-century life. From the world’s first programmers – Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace and her paramour, Charles Babbage – in the 1840s to the mathematicians John von Neumann and Alan Turing in the 1940s to the more familiar names of our age – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page – Isaacson recounts the patterns of thinking differently that were necessary for the radical transformations in communications we see today.

The book is undoubtedly riding on the increasingly celebrity-like status of our recent digital business giants and the boy billionaires of the social media world. But the most compelling insights from the book and the lessons most relevant for Maine are not what the book’s title and its accompanying headlines seem to imply. In Isaacson’s telling, revolutionary economic change is not the result of lone geniuses toiling in their labs or tinkering in their garages. It is not the cascading consequences of an explosive “Eureka!” moment that marks the abrupt crossing of some technological Rubicon. It is instead, the gradual elaboration of two activities – collaboration and incrementalism.

Revolutionary new ideas may, and probably do, spring fully elaborated from the heads of solitary geniuses. We just don’t know about it because they never become anything more than ideas. Revolutionary and economically meaningful new ideas seem, most often, to be the unintended result of two separate minds bringing different interpretations or perspectives to a problem. Each – because of the unexpected jolt from the other – comes to see the idea in a completely different light, and their collaboration rather than either effort alone is what produces the revolutionary new idea.

These new ideas then spread as experts in varying fields see their applications. The steam engine became economically revolutionary when Edmund Cartwright used it to power a textile loom. Electricity changed the nature of nighttime when Edison found a way to have it light a filament. Digital code enabled high-speed communication when engineers at the RAND Corp. in the U.S. and the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K. conceived the idea of packet switching. And on and on. … Economic revolution is the cumulative result of thousands and thousands of small changes, each initiated by two or three people who saw the implications of someone else’s idea in a new arena of activity.

Spreading economic prosperity, therefore, depends on the widespread exchange of ideas and the institutions of free enterprise that enable motivated individuals to try their new ideas. Some will succeed, some will fail, but we all benefit from the collective and continuing effort. And we all need to be vigilant to the threats to this ongoing process of innovation and entrepreneurship.

What is clear from careful consideration of Isaacson’s work is that the major threat to our engine of prosperity is not the absence of genius but the power of those who fear its results. Ironically, Lord Byron was a Luddite, who spoke in Parliament in support of those who sabotaged the steam-powered mechanical looms in an attempt to save the jobs of textile workers. Equally ironic is the fact that Lady Byron restricted her daughter’s education to science and mathematics in an attempt to prevent her from becoming a dissolute poet like her father. In both cases, fear of the consequences of unfettered freedom drove efforts to confine the spirit of human curiosity, ingenuity and enterprise. And in both cases, those efforts failed. And so they will in Maine if we try to constrain our future to what has worked in the past. Our future prosperity depends on looking not to the past with longing but ahead with faith in collaboration and incrementalism.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com


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