THE INNOVATION MILLIONAIRES: How They Succeed

by Gene Bylinsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1976

Breathless with admiration, Bylinsky spins out the biographies of a group of computer-age Cinderellas and the financial midwives who deliver their ideas from the lab to the marketplace. There's General Doriot, president of American Research and Development and his philosophy of picking winners: ""A grade-A man with a grade-B idea is better than a grade-B man with a grade-A idea."" Among Doriot's ""children"" is High Voltage, maker of atom smashers, and Ionic, which is developing machines to desalt brackish water. The other giant of venture capital is Ned Heizer who backs lasers, semiconductors, and ""miniature drug delivery machinery."" A wedding of MIT technology and Harvard Business School finance creates and sells this futuristic gadgetry forming companies which are ""the lifeblood that drives the heart of the free enterprise system."" Bylinsky damn near runs out of adjectives to describe these entrepreneurial wizards--courageous, visionary, persevering, innovative, youthful, handsome, indefatigable. These for the likes of Kip Sigal of laser fusion and Alejandro Zaffroni of--among other things--""dried blood."" Many of them cluster along Massachusetts Route 128, or in Palo Alto, California, ""a kind of twenty-first century community"" and spawning ground of millionaires. Bylinsky, a Fortune writer, is a true believer in technocratic salvation and the almighty buck. And you thought the heroic age of capitalism was dead.

Pub Date: July 1, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION