Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, is proclaimed as a Silicon Valley visionary. Until now his message has been limited to the High Tech elite. His hidden legacy lies with his ideas that laid the foundation for the shift from the Industrial to the Information Age. The Engelbart Hypothesis clearly articulates his message for the first time in 50 years–– shedding light on the secrets long ignored about the potential of the internet, social networking, and a method for harnessing collective intelligence. By understanding this framework, large groups of people can unleash their full potential to augment natural intelligence for collaborative problem-solving.

A host of luminaries explain Engelbart's influence on their work including:

Vint Cerf, Evangelist, Google
Kristina Woolsey, Cognitive Scientist
Lev Gonick, Vice President, Case Western Reserve
Howard Rheingold, author of “Smart Mobs"
and others

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.

This report covers the first phase of a program aimed at developing means to augment the human intellect. These "means" can include many things--all of which appear to be but extensions of means developed and used in the past to help man apply his native sensory, mental, and motor capabilities--and we consider the whole system of a human and his augmentation means as a proper field of search for practical possibilities. It is a very important system to our society, and like most systems its performance can best be improved by considering the whole as a set of interacting components rather than by considering the components in isolation.

Abstract for Hyperscope 2004 Keynote Speech

Positioning organizations to meet the unprecedented challenges of the 1990's and beyond will require sweeping changes in every facet of organizational life. It will not be a simple matter of replacing our existing work structures, procedures, and technologies. What is required is a strategy for organizational fitness, including leveraging limited resources to effect dramatic, continuous, and rapid improvement.

The following outlines a comprehensive strategic framework for bootstrapping organizations into the 21st century, and an explicit proposal for launching an exploratory pilot implementation of this strategy.