For many years, it has been both my privilege and pleasure to serve on several committees that select the best business books of the given calendar year. This year, Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators is among my selections. You may be curious to know why it has received so much attention in recent months.

In my opinion, here are the five most valuable insights in the book.

o With rare exception, breakthrough insights are the result of collaboration, often cross-generational collaboration. For example, steam powered pumps removed water from the coalmines in England and steam power later enabled wagons to become vehicles, then trains, and later ships that no longer depended on wind.

o Over time, usually decades, great innovations have wide and deep impact. For example, Johannes Guttenberg modified a wine press to create a printing press. That in turn, led to tremendous demand for eyeglasses, the publication of books, and eventually the establishment of libraries.

o With rare exception, great teams produce the most important innovations. Examples include Thomas Edison’s research laboratory, Disney’s animators in the late-1930s, the Manhattan Project, Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC.

o All great teams have members with a diversity of exceptional talents and experiences. They share a passion for achieving “impossible” objectives and thrive on challenges. Their conversations are driven by principled dissent.

o We remember and praise the “geniuses” but Isaacson reminds us that most of those involved with achieving extraordinary breakthroughs were rather ordinary people. Edison once observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Had it not been for the six female programmers who went to work on ENIAC in 1946, the development of the first electronic general-purpose computer would have bee delayed for several years. Isaacson celebrates them and countless others who helped to make compelling visions into practical realities.