The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers who Transformed America

The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers who Transformed America

A richly illustrated introduction to the engineering triumphs that made America modern

In this age of microchips and deep space probes, it’s hard to imagine life before electricity or passenger trains. An astonishing series of engineering innovations paved the way to the twentieth century, and transformed America into the world’s mightiest industrial power. The Innovators tells the exciting story of the engineering pioneers whose discoveries so dramatically altered commerce, industry, and world history. The book takes readers into the workshops of America’s early engineering geniuses, explaining how they came up with their ideas and later applied them in the marketplace. Devotees of history and technology will appreciate the finely drawn profiles of America’s technical wizards, from the famous—including Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat; Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph; and Thomas Edison, inventor of the first electrical power network—to the lesser known, such as J. Edgar Thompson, who built the Pennsylvania Railroad.

• From the author of the critically acclaimed The Tower and the Bridge
• Features over 80 illustrations of the engineers and their inventions

DAVID P. BILLINGTON (Princeton, New Jersey), a professor of civil engineering at Princeton University, is the author of The Tower and the Bridge, and Robert Maillart’s Bridges: The Art of Engineering, which won the 1979 Dexter Prize as the outstanding book on the history of technology.In a world rocked constantly by an almost overwhelming string of technological wonders, it’s easy to lose sight of the 18th- and 19th-century engineering breakthroughs that set the stage for today’s scientific and electronic advances. In The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern, David P. Billington presents a series of intriguing profiles of such pacesetters as Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, and Samuel Morse, whose inventions are responsible for so many of the developments we currently enjoy.

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Meet the Class of 2010: An Overview of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s 204th Commencement

Meet the Class of 2010: An Overview of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s 204th Commencement
This year, 1,378 students will receive degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Saturday, May 29, at 10:30 a.m. in the stadium at the Institute’s new East Campus Athletic Village (ECAV). They represent the next generation of leaders, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, patent holders, game designers, and innovators, in fields ranging from engineering to architecture, from fine arts to …

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Taking Technical Risks: How Innovators, Managers, and Investors Manage Risk in High-Tech Innovations

Product Description
How do technology innovators, business executives, and venture capitalists manage the technical elements of business risk when developing and launching new products? Overcoming technical risks requires crossing the so-called valley of death–the gap between demonstrating the soundness of a technical concept in a controlled setting and readying the product technology for the market. Crossing the valley of death may mean bringing university-based research to the point where it appears viable to venture capitalists, or bridging the cultural gap between technical innovators and the managers who are being asked to risk their institutional resources. In every context, purely technical risks are coupled with the market risks inherent in innovation. In this book Lewis Branscomb and Philip Auerswald address early-stage, high-tech innovation in the context of business decision making and innovation policy. The topics addressed include the extent to which purely technical risk is separable from market risk; how industrial managers make decisions on funding early-stage, high-risk technology projects; and under what circumstances government can and should act to reduce the technical risks of innovative projects so that firms will invest in them. The book includes contributions by Mary Good, George Hartmann, James McGroddy, Mike Myers, Michael Roberts, and F. M. Scherer.

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Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate

Product Description
Serious Play is about serious work: how the world’s leading companies model, prototype, and simulate to innovate. Increasingly, prototypes are the key platforms and models are the core media for managing risk and creating value. They allow for cost-effective creativity, encourage profitable improvisation, and inspire organizations to collaborate in unexpected ways. Serious Play is a crisply written handbook for product, process and project leaders who are determined to manage their innovation initiatives successfully.

As digital technologies for modeling and simulation offer more value for less money, they provoke fundamental challenges to organizational culture and design. MIT research associate Michael Schrage asserts that conventional wisdom surrounding innovation gets turned inside out: What innovative companies choose not to model often proves more important than what they do. Contrary to the popular assumption that innovative teams generate innovative prototypes, in fact innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. How innovators play with their models and simulations invariably matters far more than what they actually plan. In fact, Schrage shows why innovative firms cannot seriously plan unless they seriously play.

Drawing upon a range of companies as diverse as Walt Disney, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, General Electric, IBM, IDEO, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler and American Airlines, Schrage identifies the common patterns and practices that distinguish productive prototyping cultures from pathological ones. He explores the intimate connection between how leading innovators model reality and how they actually manage it. He examines prototyping failures as rigorously as he explains prototyping successes.

The essential message of Serious Play is that tomorrow’s innovations will increasingly be the byproduct of how companies and their customers behave-and misbehave-around this new generation of models, prototypes, and simulations. The distinction between serious play and serious work dissolves as technology gives innovators ever-increasing opportunities to simulate and prototype their ideas. As the media for modeling radically change, so will the organizations that use them.

With real-world examples and engaging anecdotes, Schrage argues that the future of prototyping is the future of innovation. A User’s Guide included in the book helps readers quickly take away the innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive voices in the field of innovation, Serious Play will lay serious claim to the hearts and minds of forward-looking business managers.Amazon.com Review
Recall the old saying about all work and no play making Jack a dull boy? World-class companies today need play–serious play–if they want to make truly innovative products, argues Michael Schrage, an MIT Media Lab fellow and Fortune magazine columnist. In Serious Play he writes, “When talented innovators innovate, you don’t listen to the specs they quote. You look at the models they’ve created.” Whether it’s a spreadsheet that tests a new financial model or a foam prototype of a calculator, what interests Schrage is not the model itself, but the behavior that play–be it modeling, prototyping, or simulation–inspires.

Schrage examines the approaches to successful prototyping at companies such as AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft, and DaimlerChrysler and describes the kind of culture that’s needed for encouraging innovation. In the last chapter, he lays out the 10 rules of serious play, including: Be willing to fail early and often; know when the costs outweigh the benefits; know who wins and who loses from an innovation; build a prototype that engages customers, vendors, and colleagues; create markets around prototypes; and simulate the customer experience. Well-written and inspiring, Serious Play, is a first-rate user’s guide for managers, project leaders, and other innovators. –Dan Ring

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Commercializing Infrastructure Technologies: A Handbook for Innovators

Product Description
This comprehensive handbook, written for both the layperson and the seasoned professional, describes the procedures necessary for successful commercialization of infrastructure technologies. The stages of the technical innovation/commercialization process are presented, in addition to the roles stakeholders play throughout different stages of the process. Potential barriers and challenges to infrastructure innovation and commercialization are also examined, and suggestions for overcoming these barriers are provided. Topics include the environment for infrastructure innovation, players and stakeholders, moving from concept to production, and business and marketing issues. CERF Report.

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