Bush changed national research the same way Vail changed corporate research. Both recognized that the big ideas—the breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history—fail many times before they succeed. Sometimes they survive through the force of exceptional skill and personality. Sometimes they survive through sheer chance. In

Earlier I mentioned that Newton and Jobs were great synthesizers. Newton brought together planetary astronomy, laws of motion, differential mathematics—ideas developed by others—and synthesized them into a coherent whole the world hadn’t seen. Jobs brought together design, marketing, and technology into a coherent whole, as few others could do. But

Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed tha

The scientists could move from one project to another, which meant, member Chuck Thacker recalled, the best projects attracted the best people and “as a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to wither.”