2 More Questions to Bjarne Stroustrup: Locations, People and Innovaton

I received several very positive comments about the interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. People really like it.

I re-read the interview, and I wanted to ask Bjarne two more questions which are interesting to me addressing how Locations and People relate to Innovaton

Here is his reply...

2 More Questions to Bjarne Stroustrup

In your professional career you left Denmark and studied in UK and then immigrated to the USA to do research. What is in your opinion the influence that a "location" (country/region) plays with respect to the possibility to be a successful innovator?

I left Denmark to meet people doing more interesting work and having more interesting "toys" (i.e. advanced computers and software) than I could find at home. After a while, I found that it was not easy to return. The kind of work I was doing wasn’t done in Denmark and both industry and academia seemed closed to the kind of outsider I had become, working in Cambridge and at Bell Labs. I believe that Denmark (and Europe in general) is now far more open to ideas of practical research, but then there were few places for the kind of work I like to do.

For me as a young researcher, the quality of my colleagues dominated my choices. Denmark is one of the very best places in the world to live, but it did not have people like Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Roger Needham with an establish organization complete with great students. Cambridge is a town that – as a social environment – is second to none, even compared to my native Aarhus, so I didn’t feel serious social dislocation. However, the suburbs of Northern New Jersey are not a match for either, so I felt a loss. On the other hand, the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Center was – at the height of its powers – a uniquely stimulating environment. The people there, such as Doug McIlroy, Al Aho, Brian Kernighan, Bob Morris, Sandy Fraser, Dennis Ritchie, and many others, just made the Labs the greatest “playground” for a young computer scientist. Importantly, all the people I listed and the many more that I couldn’t mention without becoming tedious, are not just great technical people, but also real three-dimensional people with a wide variety of non-technical interests.

I’ll get back to “location” in the answer to your next question, but for me “people” trumped “location”.


What would you recommend to make a "location" attractive for innovation?

What you say “location”, I immediately think of places with a stunning physical presence, such as California (remember PARC, Stanford, CalTech, etc.), Provence (INRIA in Sophia Antipolis). Next I think of places, such as Cambridge (England) and Cambridge (Mass.) where great universities have created their own environment with little help from the surrounding countryside. A great university is essential – that’s where you find the talent and inspiration.

Families are crucial. No great place can stay great unless it can both attract young people and also sustain them as they build their families and bring up children. Recruiters talk about “the two-body problem” and usually miss the point that you don’t just have to attract talent; you have to make whole families grow in a community. Just about anyone worth employing can get another job elsewhere.

Every great place I have visited had – at least during the early years – a nucleus of really exceptional people. You need someone completely off the scale to get started. Later, merely good people can sustain an institution until the next great people come along. Organizations that foster innovation seem to have people who inspire and to leave ample time and space for younger talent to thrive and explore unexpected areas.

Building an environment for innovation isn’t done overnight – it takes decades. It follows that an organization that is stable over decades – such as a government or a university – must be involved. Commercial enterprises have – for good reasons – trouble looking that far ahead, but they thrive best in a location with at least one great university and a variety of other (competing and collaborating) commercial enterprises (hence the “research parks” that seem to spring up everywhere).

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10+1 Questions on Innovation to Bjarne Stroustrup

One of the main driving force which influenced the introduction of new generation database systems, such as ODBMS, was Object Oriented Programming (OOP). C++ is notably one of the most important. I had the pleasure to interview Bjarne Stroustrup who invented C++.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of "The C++ Programming Language" and “The Design and Evolution of C++”. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.
Dr. Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He retains a link with AT&T Labs – Research as an AT&T Fellow. Member of the National Academy of Engineering. ACM fellow. IEEE Fellow. Bjarne Personal Page

1. What is "Innovation" for you?

I basically agree with Edison: “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. There are few great ideas, and many good ones. Even the great ones require much work to validate them and to make them into useful tools for someone. I think he called it “invention”, though, but the main point is that you need a good idea (or several) carefully refined and embodied in some form of gadget, tool, or system to make a real innovation. An idea by itself isn’t much. Think how far the idea of “atoms” have come since the early Greeks. Think how far computing has come since Turing’s paper. And those were two of the most revolutionary ideas in history – the 99% perspiration is probably an underestimate.

Obviously, I associate “innovation” with technology, rather than pure science or art, though I have no doubt that the notion of an idea needing serious thought, development, and experimentation to become more than “just a good idea” applies universally.

2. Who are your favorite innovators?

OK, let’s get back to earth and look at ideas and innovations of a more manageable magnitude. Consider the relatively few and simple ideas that became Unix, such as “have each program do one thing well and combine them using streams of characters”. The Unix pioneers, McIlroy, Thompson, Ritchie, Aho, Kernighan, Feldman, Morris, and many more created a system and a set of related ideas and tools that live on today inside most of our software based systems.

3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?

That’s hard to say. As a rule of thumb, a major success exists in embryonic form 15 years before it becomes a major success. The one with the most ramifications to programming and software systems is multi-cores. We now have to get serious about quite fine grained concurrency, and we have never been very good at that.

I have a camera, a cell phone, an MP3 player, and a laptop. It is obvious that some synthesis of these three will happen. We see it happening: last week someone in Amsterdam showed me a talk I gave in Canada in August on his iPod. I want such a gadget that is good at each of the tasks, rather than just a compromise that is mediocre at each and relatively large. For example, as long as a camera phone features 3Mpixels and a lousy lens, it’s unacceptable as a camera.

These two examples are huge. They are not individual innovations but sums of many and drivers of further innovation. Design – aesthetic concerns – will be important. I’m very keen on solid, functional, and beautiful designs. A beautiful and functional system contains innumerable small innovations and refinements. These are easy to overlook because they so quickly become taken for granted. For example, for decades, shower-curtain rods were straight, running parallel with the rim of the shower area to ensure than water didn’t splash out. This led to most people – literally – having too little elbow room until some genius though of having the rod curve outwards. Brilliant! Water that splashes out is caught be the curtain and runs back into the tub – and life is just a little bit better for a few hundred million people.

4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?

A solid technical education, a sense what is practical, persistence, impatience with dogma, a willingness to take (calculated) risks. In many cases, an aesthetic sense that deems existing solutions inadequate and guides innovation. You can’t innovate in the abstract, every innovation is a response to problems.

I think idealism often plays a part. Individuals who are just out for themselves are too easily diverted in short-term money-making schemes or corporate climbing.

5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?

To be an innovator in a technological field, you have to have a serious technical education and work hard at developing your ideas. You become a “geek”. That’s great and often involves desirable personal traits, such as trustworthiness, stamina, and a skeptical attitude towards unproven ideas in general. Unfortunately, those are not universally appreciated traits – especially among technophobes – so it can carry a social cost. You must also devote serious time and effort to “technical details” that are often not appreciated by managers or people in general – even if their lives or livelihood depend on them. On the other hand, survey after survey have shown engineers to be among the most stable and satisfied groups in society, so maybe the negative aspects are overrated.

6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?

Satisfaction of having made a positive contribution to the world, and sometimes status and wealth. Most of the successful innovators I have met also built up a network of friends and colleagues that can sustain them for life. I think that the “lone wolf” image of an innovator is misleading. Many of the most successful innovators are at the center of a network of exceptional people.

7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?

Curiosity, persistence, and – of course – luck.

8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?

Get a good degree in a technical subject – science or engineering – and then get a bit of practical experience trying to put ideas into working products. Also exposure to an aesthetic field, such as literature, architecture, furniture design, image composition.

9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?

That’s harder than it appears. Most cultures highly value and encourage regularity, predictability, providing the right answer to conventional questions, respect of authority, not wasting time on “extraneous matters”, etc. This is especially true in educational settings. Major innovation more often arise from asking unconventional questions and working hard to find elegant answers.

We need to tolerate and encourage people to “take a walk in the forest” (as A.G. Bell expressed it) repeatedly in their education and career. We are too keen on giving people well-specified tasks and having them set definite short-to-medium-term goals. Sometimes, there has to room to do a task, a project, a course “just for fun”, etc., and there must be rewards for coming up with something unusual. A culture goes stale fast if the greatest awards typically go to people who never take a chance and never look up from assigned tasks.

10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?

Lots of specific tasks; tight deadlines. Lack of general direction; lack of deadlines. Lack of rewards, trivial rewards. Emphasis on huge, life altering, monetary awards for the very few. Emphasis on individuals moving from technical work into management.

10+1. Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?

I think I have seen it done. In Bell Labs technical managers and senior researcher often spend serious time Mentoring a new researcher. I think “innovation” is more suited to one-to-one discussions than to courses; also, what is required successful innovation in one field and in one company isn’t necessarily the same as is required elsewhere in industry or in academia. The selection of a mix of topics to work on – such as, short-term, long-term, risky, and low-hanging fruit – can be crucial. I doubt that the more personal aspects of innovation, such as calculated risk taking, perseverance, and curiosity can be taught, at least not to adults.