Quote of the Day: Geoffrey Moore about the invention of the Integrated Circuit.

The Integrated Circuit (IC) invented in the late 1950s is one of the greatest inventions of all time. We'll be discussing the impact of ICs on the world in Lecture 2 of the Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley course John Kelley and I will be teaching this quarter at Stanford University CSP.

Today, all computing devices — from tiny brain implants to giant data centers — use the technology for running a myriad of applications. Nevertheless, according to Gordon Moore, the author of the famous Moore's Law, at the time of the invention it was extremely difficult to envision the future importance of IC. Here's an excerpt from an interview Gordon Moore gave to Michael Wolff in 1976,

Wolff:
You didn't realize at the time how significant this would be?
Moore:
Absolutely not. Even after a family of integrated circuits was introduced, we didn't have the remotest idea that this was truly a major difference in the way electronics was going to be done in the future.

In my view, the moral of the story is, when you've made an invention use your imagination to see how the invention can scale up to revolutionize the world. Several tools would be particular applicable in this situation: the STM operator, 10X diagram, 4Q diagram, a system diagram in combination with the S-curve (to check for Synthesis).

tags: quote, invention, innovation, example, technology, 10X, imagination, creativity