This story is exceptionally well told in the book Breakthroughs! by P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham (one of the best casebooks written on innovators who defied the odds), which describes Smith’s culture of mutual commitment as the true breakthrough.

After receiving my Ph.D. in 1974, I left Utah with a nice little list of innovations under my belt, but I was keenly aware that I’d only done all this in the service of a larger mutual goal. Like my classmates, the work I’d championed had taken hold largely because of the protective, eclectic, intensely challenging environment I’d been in. The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room.

Acknowledgements:

“Lindsay Oishi, Ph.D., and Tim Reilly, Ph.D., who made the huge personal investment of dedicating their doctoral research projects to demonstrating the efficacy of DYL, and in so doing set our work apart and ensured we gave people what they deserved. To Professors Dan Schwartz and Bill Damon, their advisers, for their support and guidance, and Dr. Denise Pope, founder of Challenge Success, for her careful research insights and demonstration that you can change the education system.

It is common, and natural, to tell the history of innovation through the exploits of men of genius, such as Edison and Tesla, and pioneers such as Berners-Lee and the Wright brothers. But if the Wright brothers had not flown in 1903, someone else would have done something very similar in some other location. Collective intelligence develops when the accumulation of collective knowledge reaches a point at which talented people identify problems that this shared knowledge can be employed to solve. And it is also common, and natural, to describe the history of innovation through the introduction of new gadgets, from aeroplanes to iPhones. I have taken running and apples as examples to emphasise that the

growth of collective intelligence has a range and applicability that extends well beyond technology.

I carried my bug book with me all the time, making notes when I’d notice things about the bug named Jim. Then, one day, I had a turning point in discovering my encodings. I was asked to research, learn, and teach the team about networked personal computing and its strategic implications for HP. I became enthralled with researching and trying to understand something big and new. And even more, I found myself entranced with the challenge of how to convert my understanding into digestible concepts. I’d started to discover an encoding that would animate me for the rest of my life: the ability to take a mass of information and make sense of it, to go from “chaos to concept.” Then came the day of epiphany, when I got to share my learnings with our internal team. I discovered that I had a peculiar capability for packaging and teaching concepts to other people in ways that would stick.