I received several very positive comments about the interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. People really like it. I re-read the interview, and I wanted to ask Bjarne two more questions which are interesting to me addressing how Locations and People relate to Innovaton Here is his reply...

Q. In your professional career you left Denmark and studied in UK and then immigrated to the USA to do research. What is in your opinion the influence that a "location" (country/region) plays with respect to the possibility to be a successful innovator?

I left Denmark to meet people doing more interesting work and having more interesting "toys" (i.e. advanced computers and software) than I could find at home. After a while, I found that it was not easy to return. The kind of work I was doing wasn’t done in Denmark and both industry and academia seemed closed to the kind of outsider I had become, working in Cambridge and at Bell Labs. I believe that Denmark (and Europe in general) is now far more open to ideas of practical research, but then there were few places for the kind of work I like to do.

For me as a young researcher, the quality of my colleagues dominated my choices. Denmark is one of the very best places in the world to live, but it did not have people like Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Roger Needham with an establish organization complete with great students. Cambridge is a town that – as a social environment – is second to none, even compared to my native Aarhus, so I didn’t feel serious social dislocation. However, the suburbs of Northern New Jersey are not a match for either, so I felt a loss. On the other hand, the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Center was – at the height of its powers – a uniquely stimulating environment. The people there, such as Doug McIlroy, Al Aho, Brian Kernighan, Bob Morris, Sandy Fraser, Dennis Ritchie, and many others, just made the Labs the greatest “playground” for a young computer scientist. Importantly, all the people I listed and the many more that I couldn’t mention without becoming tedious, are not just great technical people, but also real three-dimensional people with a wide variety of non-technical interests.

I’ll get back to “location” in the answer to your next question, but for me “people” trumped “location”.

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