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What makes for success in the fast-paced world of high-technology business? History offers important guidance. A look at the career of one of the most charismatic and important inventors and entrepreneurs of the twentieth century - Robert Noyce - makes it clear that in order to succeed as an inventor or as a business leader, it is essential to collaborate with others and to understand that an important par: of any invention is the business of selling it. In 1959. Noyce co-invented the integrated circuit, a device that lies at the heart of modern electronics. Noyce also cofounded two extremely successful companies: Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon firm in Silicon Valley, and Intel, today the largest semiconductor company in the world (1). Right up until his death in 1990 at the age of sixty-tvvo, Noyce was a daredevil. His jacket bore a patdi that read, "No guts, no glory." It was a fitting motto for a man who flew his own jets and skied mountains so remote that they were accessible only by helicopter. It s no wonder, then, that for many, Noyce's life represented the high-flying, high-risk, high-reward world of high technology.
Noyce's life and career offer many lessons, but this essay will focus on just two. the importance of collaboration in high-technology invention and entrepreneurship, and the connections between invention and entrepreneurship. We often hear that a single person is the inventor of an essential technology or the force behind a successful company. Noyce's story makes it clear that in the modern world of high technology, invention and entrepreneurship are team endeavors.
The Child Is Father to the Man
Robert Noyce's core was shaped by his Depression-era boyhood in the small town of Grinnell, Iowa. Though he tinkered with machines from the time hi was very small, the childhood invention that foreshadowed his later successes as an adult took shape in the summer of 1940. when twelve-year-old Noyce and his beloved fourteen-year-old brother, Gayiord, inspired all eighteen children in their neighborhood to work together to build a boy-powered glider. After a few experiments jumping off low hills and towing the glider like a kite behind a moving car, Noyce decided to try "to jump off the roof of a barn and live."...