Book Review: The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

Growing up, I was fortunate to be surrounded by technical innovators. So many family, friends, and neighbors were engineers or entrepreneurs, either working at various technology companies or building their own thing. Growing up outside Boulder, Colorado contributed to this, being a hub of many scientific institutes and incredible scientists (case in point, my first job was as a research intern at the National Center for Atmospheric Research during high school!). Having spent the last five years at Stanford only turbo-charged my immersion in the world of technology, academia, and entrepreneurship. How did one subset of this ecosystem, specifically digital and computing, become as consequential as it is today? To answer that, I wanted a reading that could give a historical overview of the space, and the book I turned to was Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators. Isaacson is a well-known biographer of magnificent inventors. His book gave a detailed history of all the intricate developments that took place from Ada Lovelace to today’s social networks. There were a few key takeaways. First, engineering breakthroughs and digital innovation were rarely the result of one person: it was often produced by combinations of great minds. Second, digital and computing innovation resulted from a momentum of previous developments. Finally, it was interesting to note that today’s computing and digital innovations have been pushed forward by companies and sharp entrepreneurs, not just by academics and the government. Overall, this was a great read, and though it bit dense, I would recommend it.