A lone inventor tinkers away in a garage or basement, verging on the next big technological discovery.

This romantic image should be relegated to myth status, says Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who is coming to Maine next week to discuss his new book, “The Innovators.” The book recounts the history of the people who created the first computers and Internet, ushers to the digital revolution.

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Walter Isaacson has written biographies about innovators such as Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Courtesy photo

WALTER ISAACSON AT USM

What: The 5th annual WEX Leadership and Creativity Event Series at the University of Southern Maine

Who: Walter Isaacson, biographer of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and author of the newly released “The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution”

When: Wednesday from 7:30 to 9 p.m.

Where: USM’s Hannaford Hall at the Abromson Center in Portland

Why: South Portland-based WEX, a payments company, hosts the speaker series to fund the WEX Scholarship Fund at USM

Cost: Tickets are $35 and the event is general admission

For more information and to buy tickets: usm.maine.edu/giving/wexseries

Isaacson, a former CEO of CNN and current CEO of The Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit policy and educational organization, will be speaking at an event sponsored by WEX, the South Portland corporate payment processor, to raise money for its scholarship fund.

Also the author of biographies on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, Isaacson has spent years studying innovation and interviewing some of the world’s most celebrated innovators – from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. He concludes that creativity is a collaborative process, and in his address, intends to focus on “flesh-and-blood examples of innovators who got something done.”

Q: Given the subjects of your books, it’s clear you’re interested in great innovators and the ingredients to foster innovation. What fascinates you about this topic?

A: I love exploring how people’s minds work. Over my years in journalism, I’ve met a lot of smart people, but I’ve come to realize that smart people are a dime a dozen and they don’t usually amount to much. It takes being imaginative and innovative to really accomplish significant things. And that first struck me when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin, who was the most inventive of all the founders. I also like combining the arts and the sciences. I like people who have a foot in both camps, because I believe that’s crucial for creative innovation. That’s something Steve Jobs used to say. He told me that he was a humanities kid and growing up he also liked electronics, and then he realized if he could combine a love of the arts with technology he could do things that are truly creative.

Q: In Maine, there’s a heavy focus on STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – education, perhaps at the expense of the arts and humanities. Should the arts be a central part of education?

A: I think the ability to connect the arts and sciences is crucial. The big advances in technology will come by connecting humans more closely to technology and by thinking imaginatively, and that’s what the arts and humanities teach us. However, when people sing the praises of arts and humanities, I often suggest to them that they should make the effort to learn science, engineering and math because a lot of people who love the humanities are willing to joke or even brag that they don’t even know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, and that they don’t like math. So I’ve written my books to partly help people who don’t know technology to understand and appreciate the human creativity that goes into our science, technology and engineering.

The book (“The Innovators”) begins with Ada Lovelace, who is daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She loved poetry, but she made the effort to become a really great mathematician and connect the understanding of math to both machinery and to allowing machines to do creative things. And that holds true all the way through Alan Kay and Steve Jobs and Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, and most of the innovators of our time.

Q: I think many people take things like the Internet and the World Wide Web for granted. But the story of these individuals and how they built upon each other is fascinating. Why was it important for you to tell these stories?

A: I think that in order to understand America, we have to understand the American Revolution and the heroes from Washington to Franklin to Jefferson who helped make it. I think likewise, and in order to truly understand the technology of our time, we have to appreciate the people who invented the computer and the Internet. Those are the two most important inventions of our time, but most people don’t know who created them. Once you know who created them, you can understand the digital revolution better and even understand where it’s going.

Q: What traits do innovators share?

A: Different innovators had different traits. There’s no one recipe and that’s good because every person can be creative in his or her own way. If you’re a visionary leader, that’s fine, or maybe you’re a good team builder, and that’s also important. So people should try to be innovative based on their own personalities and talents rather than seeking a set of rules. I showed that in my book by describing Bob Noyce, who created Intel. He was very different from Steve Jobs, who created Apple. They were friends and worked together, but they had different styles. Most of the innovators in the book were willing to be very curious, very passionate, question authority, think out of the box – or as Steve Jobs would say, ‘Think different.’ It takes a bit of a rebellious streak to be a good innovator.

Q: Another underlying topic of your book is the power of collaboration. How does a rural state, where people are spread out, foster innovation?

A: In a rural state like Maine, it’s important to create innovation centers, incubators, creative hubs, conferences and shared work spaces where people can come together to collaborate. One of the myths of the digital age is that we would all be able to network virtually and telecommute. In fact, getting together in the flesh is often the best way to collaborate and work in teams to build creative ideas. The more gathering spaces for entrepreneurs you can create, the better, I think, it will be.

Q: You spend time discussing Ken Kesey and the hippie era. Was that for historical context, or because those attitudes influenced the development of the personal computer?

A: I think in the 1970s there was a cultural atmosphere that led to the personal computer. In addition to the technological advances that made the personal computer possible, there were cultural attitudes that included a questioning of authority visible in both the anti-war movements and the hippie movements and the Whole Earth Catalog-commune movements and the community-organizing movements. All those contributed to the mindset to keep computers from being Orwellian tools of corporate America and the Pentagon, and turn them into something that were personal tools to empower individuals. That didn’t cause the invention of the personal computer, but it did provide the atmosphere that made it more likely.

Q: Many of the first computer programmers were women, from Ada Lovelace to Grace Hopper. How would we benefit from the inclusion of more women in the field of programming?

A: One thing I think is important is making sure that women know they have role models. Somehow women have not gotten their due in the history of technology. I wanted to make it clear in this book that the first major general-purpose computer – ENIAC – was programmed by six brilliant women mathematicians. Likewise, the Harvard Mark I (early computer) had as a lead programmer Grace Hopper. And they all followed in the footsteps of Ada Lovelace, who came up with the concept of programming computers so that they could do many tasks.

Q: Your book makes clear that innovation is a never-ending process and that the Internet is not in its final form. Do you have any predictions about the next big breakthrough?

A: I think that collaborative books might be the next big breakthrough. I put a lot of the early chapters of my book online so people could comment on it. And I do think that in the future we might have people go online to collaborate in writing nonfiction books and maybe even role-playing games and plays. I also think it could be helped by the growth of bitcoin and other easy payment systems so groups that create things collaboratively on the Internet can share the revenues from people who use those creations. I think it will help fix journalism and also help provide a revenue stream in addition to advertisements for bloggers and songwriters and storytellers and all sorts of other people who want to be creative in the digital realm.

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