Google, which had been designing a phone platform modeled after Windows and Blackberry, quickly pivoted to emulate the iPhone. Its Android devices would look and feel very much like an iPhone but be available from multiple manufacturers and—importantly—have a much wider range of prices. Soon Android and Apple’s iOS collectively controlled a commanding share of the smartphone market. This meant that when Apple launched the iPad, which was essentially a tablet version of the iPhone, it was launching a product that could fulfill many people’s needs for a personal computer, with an interface that was already well-known and well loved. The iPad’s launch must have given Bill Gates a sickening feeling—for the first time since 1983, Microsoft faced a challenger that posed a very real threat of overturning its near monopoly position in personal computer operating systems.54 By 2011, Apple and Android collectively controlled a larger share of the global computing platform market than Microsoft did. The share of iOS would continue to hover at around 20 percent for many years—bolstered by its devoted following and exceptional hardware but limited by its higher price. Android, which had emulated the style of Apple’s iOS but untethered it from expensive hardware, would continue to rise, quickly eclipsing both Microsoft and Apple.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had created the Apple I and the Apple II, Wozniak played the role of technical genius, and Jobs played the role of visionary. In the development of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin laid the groundwork for the device, and then Jobs harnessed an entire team of engineers to finish the product. It had taken Edmund Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Jon Lasseter, and many other brilliant people at Pixar to make a movie like Toy Story. And it took large teams of talented engineers and designers to bring the iPod, iPhone, and iPad to fruition. Is it thus fair to describe Jobs as the breakthrough innovator behind their creation? Without the technological and intellectual resources provided by Woz, Raskin, Ive, Catmull, Smith, Lasseter, and others, many of these products might not have been created. However, Wozniak is quick to admit that without Jobs he would have simply handed out his specifications for the Apple I at the Homebrew Computing Club—Apple would have never been founded, and it is likely that the Apple II would have never been created. Apple’s period without Jobs was notably fallow, with only one significant innovation during that time: the Newton, which flopped. When Jobs returned to Apple, the company roared back to life, creating one stunning and unlikely innovation after another. Apple’s products under the new reign of Jobs weren’t just good; they also transformed the way people lived. Jobs never strived to simply make a product better—he made products the way he believed they should be. He rarely used market research because he felt that most consumers’ imaginations were too limited; consumers, when asked what they wanted, would let their ideas be overly constrained by the parameters of products that already existed. Instead, Jobs would think about how the world should work without constraints. His gift of imagination and intuition helped him conceive amazing product ideas; his passion and tenacity brought them to life. As described by Fred Vogelstein in the New York Times, “When Jobs ran Apple, the company was an innovation machine, churning out revolutionary products every three to five years,” adding, “it hardly needed to be said. When you look back at how the iPhone came to be, it’s clear that it had everything to do with the unreasonable demands—and unusual power—of an inimitable man.”55
Jobs had a vision about what kinds of products he wanted to make and how they would affect the world. He was the creative force that fueled all of these breakthrough innovations that changed our lives. However, he also needed the intellectual and technological resources of others to execute his vision and turn his ideas into reality. It is also true that most of his products were not new-to-the-world ideas: the Altair predated the Apple I, Xerox’s GUI was the inspiration for the Mac OS, several portable MP3 devices hit the market before the iPod, and Palm, Handspring, Nokia, and Blackberry all had some version of smartphone before the iPhone was released. Jobs did not invent these product categories. However, what he did was conceptualize products that would revolutionize them. Almost all of Jobs’s breakthrough innovations would be in ways that humans interact with technology—ways in which these interactions could be made more intuitive, more beautiful, and decidedly more Zen.
Intellectual and Technological Resources
STEVE JOBS’S RISE TO prominence in the computer industry was heavily influenced by where he grew up—Mountain View, the very center of Silicon Valley. Jobs was literally surrounded by engineering expertise; nearly every house in his neighborhood was inhabited by an electronics or computer engineer. In fact, once when a teenage Steve Jobs needed some components he could not afford to buy, he got help from Hewlett (of Hewlett Packard) himself. One of Jobs’s most crucial early resources was his friendship with Steve Wozniak, a profoundly gifted engineer who had begun designing computer hardware and software in high school. Although the Altair is widely attributed to be the very first personal computer, Wozniak’s Cream Soda Computer was built five years earlier, in 1971, when Wozniak was twenty-one, and it did everything the Altair would later do.56 Wozniak had also developed (but had not named) the Apple I on his own, before Steve Jobs convinced him that producing the computers could be a business. Jobs was already very interested in electronics and computers when he met Wozniak—it was a key part of their mutual attraction—but without their friendship, it is unlikely that he would have been associated with the rise of the personal computer, and his future would have looked very different.
The most important technological and intellectual resources upon which Jobs would rely were people. We can identify many brilliant engineers and designers who were critical for each of the products associated with Jobs, but he is the link between them. He needed their technical and intellectual skills to enact his vision, and it is clear that he could not have developed most of the innovations for which he is known without them, but it is also clear that those innovations would not have been developed without Jobs’s vision and drive.
As we saw with Marie Curie, her life and career were also heavily dependent on unusual access to technological and intellectual resources. Her father was a schoolteacher and a person of extremely wide intellectual interests and expertise. When the Russian authorities removed laboratories from Polish schools, he brought home much of the laboratory equipment and used it to teach his children. Marie was thus steeped in a culture of science and intellectualism from a very early age. Later, she would marry Pierre Curie, who with his brother had created a state-of-the-art quadrant electrometer. Pierre spent fifteen days working intensely on the electrometer to modify it for Marie so that it would detect very weak currents. To accomplish this, he added another of his discoveries, a piezoelectric quartz that could measure in absolute terms small quantities of electricity and low-intensity currents. He also spent twenty days training Marie to use the complex and finicky equipment to measure the tiny currents generated by Becquerel rays. As noted by one her of biographers, Barbara Goldsmith, “Without Pierre’s equipment and instructions, this would have been impossible, a fact which has largely been overlooked.”57
Elon Musk, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin acquired much of the technological and intellectual resources they needed (at least early in their careers) from books. Each was characterized by multiple sources as a voracious reader. Einstein also drew upon the occasional help of colleagues, and Musk and Edison would go on to realize the importance of leveraging large teams of brilliant people in their innovations, but each began with a larger-than-average appetite for books.
The importance of access to books is epitomized by Franklin. He recognized that books had been an extremely important resource in his acquisition of knowledge, the refinement of his political and philosophical views, and his development of skills of persuasion. He spends many pages of his autobiography talking about the books he read and how they shaped him. Franklin learned to read early, beginning with his father’s library of books, most of
which were pious tracts about religion. Then, whenever a little money fell into his hands, he would use it to buy more books and, after reading them, would sell them to buy still more books. It was in this manner he read all of the work by John Bunyan (a famous Puritan writer and preacher whose nearly sixty works include Pilgrim’s Progress) and R. Burton’s Historical Collections, comprising some forty titles. It was Franklin’s “bookish inclination” that led his father to conclude that he should be apprenticed to a printer.58 This gave him better access to books, and he soon cultivated relationships with people who visited the printing house and could lend him books. The importance of being able to borrow books must have left a deep impression on the young man; in 1731 he would found the Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s first lending library and the predecessor of the free public library.59
Interestingly, though access to technological and intellectual resources was important for all of the innovators, most of the innovators I studied had far less formal education than you would expect for the domains in which they worked. As noted, Edison had only a few months of grammar school before being pulled out of school by his mother. Franklin attended two years of grammar school before being indentured to his brother’s printing shop. Jobs, Kamen, and Tesla dropped out of college while studying as undergraduates (and technically Kamen never even graduated from high school). Musk excelled at school but dropped out of a doctoral program after two days upon realizing he did not need a PhD. to change the world. Only Einstein and Curie went to graduate school, and of the two, only Curie was noted as a consistently exceptional student.
We should not conclude from this that education and training are unimportant for innovation. If we look more closely at the way that education played a role in the lives of these people, we realize that they were aggressive consumers of education, but they pursued it in their own rhythm and format. Although Jobs dropped out of college, he stayed on campus and sat in on the classes he wanted to attend. Musk rarely attended his college classes but studied on his own and showed up to take the examinations. Franklin and Edison were almost entirely self-taught, and much of Curie’s training was also accomplished through her own individually directed study before entering the Sorbonne. Einstein continued to study physics (and made his biggest contributions) while working as a patent clerk. Kamen notes that he relaxes by reading old math and physics textbooks.60
IT’S CLEAR THAT ACCESS to technological and intellectual resources was crucially important for the innovators. Common sense might also suggest that the same would be true about access to financial resources. Yet it was surprisingly less important for the innovators studied here. Jobs, to take one example, started Apple with money that he and Wozniak raised by selling Jobs’s VW van and Wozniak’s HP 65 calculator. Their first order for $50,000 worth of Apple I computers was financed by an agreement to not pay the chip supplier for thirty days. In this way, the computers could be completed and be paid for by the store that had ordered them before Jobs and Wozniak would have to pay the supplier.61 Later, Jobs would note, “I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money.”62 He would later add, “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about the money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.…”63
Curie’s story also illustrates how unimportant financial resources were to her innovation. She worked as a governess to put Bronia through school; then Bronia, in turn, helped pay for Marie to move to Paris and attend the Sorbonne. There she scraped by on very little money during her student years, living a spartan existence in a small and cold apartment. Although she received a small scholarship in 1893, she returned it in 1897 as soon as she had her own modest income. Later, she and Pierre would work at fractionating radium in a very modest wooden shack. The pitchblende ore they needed was considered to be a worthless residue after its uranium was removed, and they were able to obtain heaps of it for only the cost of transportation.64 Even later in life, after having achieved acclaim, Curie was known for her moderate lifestyle. She never patented the radium-isolation process, and she asked that monetary gifts go to the scientific institutions she worked for rather than to herself.65
Tesla started his journey to the United States with a small amount of money given to him by his family, but that money (and part of his luggage) were stolen from him on the ship. He arrived in New York with four cents, some poems, and a few belongings. Tesla remained notoriously unconcerned with money for most of his life (and nearly destitute for significant portions of it). He often lived in hotel rooms where he racked up significant debt. Yet with the exception of the tragic debacle at Wardenclyff, he always seemed able to raise enough money for his inventions. The similarly inauspicious arrivals of Franklin in New York and Musk in Canada were noted earlier.
Edison and Einstein developed their first important innovations while earning modest incomes at their regular jobs (Edison as a telegraph operator and Einstein as a patent clerk). Kamen got his start when he was sixteen years old by spending $80 on parts at Radio Shack and then secretly upgrading the lighting system at Hayden Planetarium at New York City’s Museum of Natural History. When the surprised chairman of the museum saw the effect of Kamen’s work, he agreed to pay him $8,000 under the condition that Kamen do the same for the chairman’s other three museums. By the time he started college, he was making $60,000 a year on custom light work66—a very good salary for the 1970s and more than his parents were making.
One of the implications of this chapter—and discussed further in the next chapter—is that we can increase breakthrough innovation by finding ways to widen the public’s access to technological and intellectual resources. Public libraries were a huge advance in this direction, and digitization of intellectual resources so that they can be more freely distributed and accessed will push that advance further. Finding ways to enable the nonscientist to access scientific resources and expertise—through public laboratories and incubators, for example—could also be extremely beneficial. Breakthrough innovations in science, as we have shown throughout, do not always come from people who pursued the “typical” path of the scientist.
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“You get creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support.…”
Nurturing the Potential That Lies Within
Our study of the breakthrough innovators—people as different as Benjamin Franklin and Marie Curie—has, I hope, been deeply revealing of the ways they were special in their capabilities, personalities, resilience, and motives. It also reveals that they benefited from situational advantages conferred by time, place, and social networks. These individual factors would be unlikely to work in isolation—for example, being unconventional without having high levels of confidence, effort, and goal directedness might result in rebellious behavior that does not lead to meaningful innovation. Intelligence, self-efficacy, and need for achievement, without unconventionality, might lead to other forms of exceptional performance rather than breakthrough innovation. It is the convergence of such traits that increases the likelihood of breakthrough innovation. Furthermore, these traits only increase the likelihood of breakthrough innovation; they by no means ensure it. Situational advantages such as resources, timing, and luck also play important roles. Some people with these traits do not become serial breakthrough innovators, and others innovate repeatedly but do so in ways that do not garner widespread recognition.
These are people in a league of their own, and most of us won’t play in that league. Their innovative output w
as to some extent a result of innate traits and situational advantages that are not within our control. Furthermore, these stories reveal the many costs of being a breakthrough innovator. A significant amount of suffering can be a major part of the relentless pursuit of goals, including forgoing personal relationships or relinquishing family ties and obligations. Edison and Franklin abandoned their wives and children for long stretches of time; Curie largely relinquished the raising of her children to her father-in-law. Neither Tesla nor Kamen ever married or had children, and Einstein’s familial relationships were, as he noted, rather detached.
The life of the serial breakthrough innovator is not for everyone. Many of the factors that helped them change the world in meaningful ways are inimitable, and many of us would not choose the kind of life they led even if we could. However, understanding how these factors helped them to become serial breakthrough innovators is instructive. Often the mechanism linking an innovator’s trait to an outcome—for example, separateness leading to the generation of heterodox ideas—is something we can tap even without possessing the trait. Furthermore, the stories of the innovators gives us ideas for how we can increase the likelihood of situational advantage, perhaps by increasing people’s access to the resources that help them act on their ideas. Overall, then, understanding what makes breakthrough innovators special simultaneously reveals that there is much we can do to nurture the innovation potential that lies within us all.
Challenging norms and paradigms. A sense of separateness helped the innovators to become original thinkers, freeing them from the constraints of accepted, or acceptable, solutions and theories. For example, Einstein was able to challenge well-accepted principles of Newtonian physics because he stood well outside academic circles and because it was his nature to resist authority. Musk pioneered reusable rockets—something the space industry said was impossible—in part because he was not in the space industry and in part because he wasn’t the kind of person who let other people define what was possible for him. Their separation meant that they were less exposed to dominant ideas and norms, and their sense of not belonging meant that even when exposed to dominant ideas and norms, they were often less inclined to adopt them. Being socially detached has its own costs, but the mechanisms by which separateness can prompt innovation provide useful insights about how we can foster it. Leaders of organizations can do much to encourage the kind of creative thinking that leads to fundamentally new kinds of solutions. Giving people flexible roles and autonomy, and demonstrating a tolerance for the unorthodox, will both attract more creative employees and nurture the creative side of existing members. Consider, for example, Al Alcorn’s interview of Steve Jobs when he applied at Atari. Alcorn was able to look past Jobs’s disheveled appearance and unusual social habits. What he saw was a creative and insightful person, and he found a way to employ him.
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