More with Less

Posted by: Alissa Ampezzan

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to get into a sold-out talk by Steve Wozniak at Macomb Community College. Maybe you don’t know who Wozniak (or just “Woz”) is, but you certainly know his more famous counterpart: Steve Jobs. The two Steve’s co-founded Apple in the 1970s, starting the personal computer revolution. The reason you may not hear as much about the self-proclaimed “geek” is that he has chosen his quieter role; he is, after all, an engineer, not a businessman. The technology was his idea; the idea to sell it was Jobs’.

Wozniak was invited to Macomb Community College as a part of their speaker series, “American Ingenuity: Embracing the Freedom to Dream,” focusing on entrepreneurship and, particularly, its role in the reinvention of metro Detroit. I complained after to my friend Mike (an IT specialist who joined me) about the overuse of a very vague word: innovation. Not by Wozniak, but by the moderators and (it seems to me like) everyone else in Southeast Michigan. Innovate. Innovate. Innovate. What does that really mean?

At the very end of his talk, I felt that I had finally gotten a direct answer: “Just do more with less.”

The computer already existed before Wozniak started tinkering, but they were complicated, expensive monstrosities. He just made it simpler, cheaper. And, with time, even simpler and cheaper. That seed grew into where we are today, just 30 years later: a world of iPhones and iPads. He explained, “Even a chair. If someone figures out how to make a chair with one less part, one less production process. That’s innovative.”

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