Doug Engelbart is best known for inventing the mouse and other tools; however his greatest innovations have been in the vision and strategy he devised for bootstrapping the innovation, creating a very fast sort of turbo charged learning curve in his lab out of which emerged unprecedented levels of insight and breakthrough innovation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Doug began seeking an approach that might offer the most cost-effective leverage for accelerating the advancement of our Collective IQ capabilities to the highest levels in the shortest timeframe. Why the urgency? If you consider the rate and scale of change in the world on every level, the complexity and urgency of every challenge we face increasing explonentially, what will be the difference between the organizations, initiatives, and societies that find the shortest path to significantly elevating their Collective IQ, and those that don't? 1a
Thus emerged his bootstrapping strategy, which is simply a set of strategic organizing principles that he specifically designed to accelerate progress toward his goal. He embedded these principles in the inner workings of his lab for unprecedented results.
