Our Mission

The Doug Engelbart Institute was founded by Doug Engelbart with daughter Christina Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting our collective capability to solve important problems intelligently, for which he coined the term Collective IQ.

We recognize that the opportunities, problems, and challenges we face – whether business, social, political, economic, environment – are increasing exponentially on a global scale, so finding exponentially more powerful ways to collectively address important challenges is critical;

This is both a dire threat and a golden opportunity – companies, initiatives, regions, nations that kick into gear on this soonest will likely surpass those that don't in leaps and bounds.

The sooner we reach critical mass as a planet, the better off we all are, and thus there is tremendous value in sharing best practices, and in addressing this collectively as a Grand Challenge.

Our mission is to accelerate progress toward this goal through broad-based collaboration, education, outreach, consulting, and hands on exploratory implementations. See Doug's call to action in Augmenting Society's Collective IQ and Bootstrap "Paradigm Map", with practical pointers and toolkits on our Bootstrapping Innovation resources page.

Meet Alan and Larry at the NMC at Bootstrapping Innovation in Action

In the News

• Improve Your Ecosystem's Ability to Tackle Complex Issues
• Bootstrapping Innovation: Leveraging the Collective IQ
• Doug Engelbart Receives Weatherford Award
• Visit our Press Room

Site Showcase

• The NMC Story: Bootstrapping Innovation the Doug Engelbart Way
• Story of the Mouse
• Engelbart Video Archives
• Student-Faculty Showcase
• Just for Kids
• About our Website

Recent Publications

• Boosting Our Collective IQ: A Knowledge-Centric Approach
• A day in the life of a personal archivist
• How Doug Engelbart taught kids to ride a bike (without training wheels)

Blog Spotlight

• More on getting beyond paper and linear media
• Dreams About How the World Could Be
• Christina Presents at Personal Digital Archiving 2011
• Celebrating 65 Years of “As We May Think”