StrategyDoug Engelbart's Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations customers.com | July 17, 2013 | Patricia Seybold Change Your Organization's Nervous System - “I have been a fan and follower of Doug Engelbart since I first discovered his work in the early 1970s. After his death in 2013, I revisited a videotaped interview I did with Doug in November of 1991 [in which Doug described] much of his seminal thinking about how to design high performance organizations. [...] In this article, I summarize a few of the high points from that interview.”
TributeA few words on Doug Engelbart WorryDream | Jul 3, 2013 | Bret Victor “Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution. When I read tech writers' interviews with Engelbart, I imagine them interviewing George Orwell, asking in-depth probing questions about his typewriter. [...] Engelbart had an intent, a goal, a mission. He stated it clearly and in depth. [...] The least important question you can ask is, "What did Engelbart build?" [...] The most important question: "What world was he trying to create?”
StrategyDoug Engelbart: More Than the Inventor of the Mouse Learning Guild | May 11, 2016 | Clark Quinn The system he demonstrated, NLS, "was the first operational hypertext system. Even so, NLS itself was merely a tool to manifest the grander concepts that would provide us with the ability to raise what Doug termed the “collective IQ.” He was simply building the minimal infrastructure that was necessary to realize his vision.”
StrategyEngelbart on Improving Improvement Service Education & Research | Apr 8, 2016 | James Spohrer “Doug’s vision for improving improvement to better tackle complex, urgent problems is to many his most significant contribution.”
StrategyHere's How To Master The ABCs Of Innovation Forbes | Jan 10, 2017 | Chunka Mui “Fortune 500 CEOs cited dealing with the rapid pace of technological change as their "single biggest challenge." Another global survey [...] identified the speed of disruptive innovation as one of the highest risks facing their organizations. [...] Yet, the intense attention on innovation often misses a key element [--] being innovative in how they innovate. [...] Douglas Engelbart captured the critical difference when he wrote "the key to the long-term viability of an organization is to get better and better at improving itself."
Case ExampleInternet Pioneer's Greatest Contribution May Not Be Technological Internet Society | May 5, 2015 | Staff “Doug Engelbart's greatest breakthrough may be to change how we think, how we learn and innovate, and how we collaborate." The Internet Hall of Fame featured profile on this 2014 Inductee, including how one university is putting his vision to practice in an experimental MOOC and associated Engelbart Scholar Award program.
EducationChanneling Engelbart: Augmenting Human Education Connected Learning Alliance | Sep 15, 2014 | Howard Rheingold “Gardner Campbell not only teaches the ideas of Doug Engelbart — the visionary who invented the mouse, hypertext and many more of the digital tools so many people use every day — he understands that Engelbart’s technological attempt to “augment human intellect” also ought to be a central goal of pedagogy. Fortunately, [he] is in a good position to pursue this goal in practice.”
InnovationAlan Kay: How? - When “what will it take?” seems beyond possible Internet@50 | Jun 13, 2019 | Alan Kay “When “what will it take?” seems beyond possible, we need to study how *Immense Challenges* have been successfully dealt with in the past. [...] Need higher levels of qualitatively different thinking than the thinking that caused the challenges, including how to set up and nourish the communities of top people [pursuing the solutions]." Immense Challenges call for cosmic vision and collective synergy.
Watch Alan's session at the conference Scale Up the Circular Economy
StrategicSurprise: AI In 2019 Forbes | Feb 25, 2019 | Jim Spohrer “Later, when I was working at Apple in [Silicon Valley], a colleague introduced me to Doug Engelbart, and I learned about augmentation theory from the master. His view of augmentation was not just for individuals, but also teams, whole businesses, and all organizations, even nations, could be augmented to use advanced technologies to deal with complex and urgent problems.”
HistoricHow Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos WIRED | Dec 9, 2018 | Adam Fisher “Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs. [...] They should augment rather than replace the human intellect.”
HistoricHow design factored into "the mother of all tech demos" Quartz| Dec 12, 2018 | Anne Quito “A crucial, but rarely discussed element of Engelbart’s stagecraft was his custom-built [workstation]. Herman Miller designer Jack Kelley modified an Eames shell chair and affixed a detatchable tray to house a keyboard, a computer mouse, and a keyset.” Jack Kelly recalls the setup for the seminal demo - “I designed the computer chair with a swing-out console because Engelbart liked to work in different attitudes and statures … stand-up, sit down, relax. … How do you solve for that?”
HistoricHow the Mother of All Demos portrayed the power of possibilities Irish Times | Dec 13, 2018 | Karlin Lillington “Net Results: Five decades after Douglas Englebart clicked the first mouse, it is still a gobsmacking thing of wonder." [...] "In short, 50 years on, we still haven’t fully comprehended the vision, or the portent, of that astonishing Mother of All Demos."
HistoricValley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley Twelve Publishers | 2018 | Adam Fisher “New book by Fisher - A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Opens with chapter on Doug Engelbart and his team discussing their 1968 Demo. A masterfully woven collective oral history of events as they unfolded. See Preview.”
HistoricMother of Invention WHY Magazine | Jan 31, 2017 | Kristen Gallerneaux How a hacked Eames Shell Chair, the world's first mousepad, and a one-off keyboard console set the stage for the personal computer revolution. "In the lead-up to the Mother of All Demos, Engelbart recognized Herman Miller's work as complementary to his own goal to facilitate ... "better solutions, faster solutions, solutions to more complex problems, better use of human capabilities." When Engelbart called Herman Miller to help design both a new office and furniture for the demo, Kelley was a natural partner." See also:As tweeted by IDEO | Animation to accompany article
StrategyAugmenting Human Intellect: Vale Doug Engelbart Learnlets | Dec 10, 2013 | Clark Quinn “His vision didn’t stop there: he proposed co-evolution of people and technology, and wanted the people developing systems to be using the tools they were building to do their work, ... bootstrapping the environment. He early on saw the necessity of bringing in diverse viewpoints ... to get the best outcomes. And continual learning was a key component ... not just an ongoing reflection on work processes, but a reflection on the reflection process;sharing between groups to collaboratively improve.”
TributeInternet Hall of Fame Announces 2014 Inductees Internet Society | Apr 8, 2014 | Staff Writers “The Internet Hall of Fame welcomes 2014 Inductees at ceremony in Hong Kong... For his visionary work related to networking and the foundations of the information age, Doug Engelbart was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame." Further details on this posthumous award, see Doug Engelbart inducted into Internet Hall of Fame.
InnovationDouglas Engelbart and the Means to an End A List Apart | Jul 25, 2013 | Karen McGrane “Engelbart tells us what his intent was in developing these technologies—they were a means to an end. His point wasn’t to build a pointing device. His goal was to help humankind expand its capacity to solve problems...”
StrategyDouglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution MIT Technology Review | Jul 23, 2013 | Howard Rheingold “Engelbart’s ideas revolutionized computing and helped shape the modern world. [...] To Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created.”
TributeDouglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy Mercury News | Mar 3, 2013 | Tia O’Brien From the Archives (1999): “Engelbart still is working nonstop on the crusade he launched in the 1950s: He believes that as technology speeds up the rate of change, making the world increasingly complex, its power must be harnessed to help people collaborate and solve problems.” [...] "His reasoning goes like this: 'Every year sooner' that the world learns how to tackle problems collectively, then every year sooner the odds increase that we can cope before complex problems crash our whole society."
InnovationInnovation Magazine and the Birth of a Buzzword IEEE Spectrum | Jan 29, 2015 | Matthew Wisnioski “Today's technoculture of entrepreneurship and creative problem solving owes much to this 1960s magazine. In the Sep 1971 Issue, Innovation published one of the earliest profiles of computer visionary Doug Engelbart. Members could sign up for a seminar in his lab at SRI [to] try out the augmentation system made famous by his 1968 public demonstration, in which he debuted a number of groundbreaking technologies.”
See companion article featuring Doug Engelbart: Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop, by Nilo Lindgren, Innovation, Apr 1971,pp. 50-60.
HistoricCreation Myth Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation The New Yorker | May 16, 2011 | Malcolm Gladwell “So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute” [...] "If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept."
Doug Engelbart is inducted to the Internet Hall of Fame, Intelligent Systems Hall of Fame, Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, while his legendary demo is recognized as "a seminal event in the history of computing."
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