The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson (review)

When chroniclers of technological change in the 20th century worship innovation as if it were a god, they often feel freed of the obligation to define the object of their worship. So it is with Walter Isaacson and his popular 2014 book, The Innovators, which begins with a beguiling confession by the author that innovation is “a buzzword, drained of clear meaning” (p. 1). Rather than address the implications of the elusiveness of the innovation concept or set down the terms of his engagement with the history of computing, which is more closely the subject of his book, Isaacson does neither, thus squandering a chance to present himself as what he probably aspires to be: a bridge builder between the two mighty rivers of innovation studies. On the one hand, he recounts the birth, life, and death of digital artifacts; on the other hand, he highlights the people and subcultures that shape digital innovations. But without a framework for understanding innovation, as activity and aspiration, he squanders an opportunity to clarify the relationship between the imperatives of digital electronics (to what extent these technical factors determine the digital field at play) and the various ways in which cultures and personalities construct and reconstruct their computers and computer networks in pursuit of human aims.

Isaacson, a journalist who penned the authorized biography of Steve Jobs after writing popular biographies of Einstein and Ben Franklin, fails to embed these trajectories into the wider context of technological developments in the United States and the world in the second half of the 20th century. In the wider frame of innovation, or why societies and national economies grow and change, Isaacson is even weaker, more uncertain and thinner in his use of sources. Because he only examines successes in computing, rarely looking at losing approaches, his insights into how innovation occurs are usually tautological. His logic is insufferably circular and rarely rises above the level of empty truisms. “The most successful endeavors in the digital age,” he writes in his closing pages, “were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision” (p. 484). For example, since plenty of leaders fail despite possessing widely admired traits, Isaacson resorts to identifying successful computer people—say Andy Grove, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs—and then posits that they must have these traits because they certainly succeeded in a big way. On closer inspection, however, these super-successful digital tycoons don’t possess all of these traits or have them in the combinations seemingly required for grand achievements. Isaacson is then forced to concede that a great innovator can be both passionately self-possessed and highly open: “The best leaders could be both,” he writes (p. 484). Such post-hoc analyses end up looking like history written by the winners (and for the winners).

When Isaacson does invoke an actual trait of successful innovators—that they know how to design and built the novel products they are selling—he again lapses into tautology. Innovators, he writes, share “one thing in common: they were product people.” True, but what else could they be? If the definition of an innovator is to back a novel thing or service and win in the marketplace against inertia or the power of tradition, how could they not possess mastery of their products?

Isaacson has written a book that demands attention becauseofthe author’s statureand thescale andscope of the capacious subject he tackles. But alas, The Innovators is not about innovation broadly construed or even innovators as individuals ranging across diverse areas. Rather, Isaacson concentrates on a specific area of innovation: computing and related digital electronics and communications. Following well-established paths that attempt to humanize computer history by associating a person or a set of people with major historical shifts in computing, Isaacson presents a series of potted biographies, largely if not completely derived from existing literature (some of which is decades old) that is organized around...