I have just read and will soon review Walter Isaacson‘s latest book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. In my opinion, it is his most valuable book, thus far.

In the final chapter, Isaacson shares some lessons to be learned from the journey of innovation from 1843 when Ada, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron) published her “Notes” on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine until 2011 when IBM’s computer, Watson, won at Jeopardy! against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.

Here are the lessons:

1. “First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments.”

2. People don’t invent something new on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists. “Therein lies another lesson: “the digital age may seem revolutionary, but it was based on expanding the ideas handed down from previous generations.” Creativity can also be a cross-generational process…and usually is.

3. “Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding fathers of the United States.”

4. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. [According to Thomas Edison] Vision without execution is hallucination.”

5. “There are three ways to put teams together in the digital age. The first was through government funding and coordination (e.g. Colossus, ENIAC, and ARPANET]…Private enterprise was another way that collaborative teams were formed [e.g. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC]…Throughout history, there has been a third way, in addition to government and private enterprises, that collaborative creativity has been organized: through peers freely sharing ideas and making contributions as part of a voluntary common endeavor” [e.g. Wikipedia, Linux, GNU, Open Office, and Firefox].

I really do think this is Walter Isaacson’s most valuable work…thus far…and highly recommend it as well as his earlier works that include biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Franklin; also two other works that richly deserve more attention and appreciation than they have received thus far: The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (co-authored with Evan Thomas) and Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness. To learn more about him, please click here.