John Kao grew up in suburban New York, where his parents, Chinese emigres, played music together in the evenings - his mother on piano, his father on violin - and became an accomplished jazz musician himself.
He played keyboards with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention when he was just 19, spending the summer of 1969 with them in a Los Angeles recording studio. He studied philosophy and medicine at Yale, earning a medical degree in psychiatry and received a MBA from Harvard. He created a course in innovation at Harvard Business School that he taught for more than a decade. In the 1980s and '90s, he lectured widely and taught on organizational transformation as a visiting scholar at MIT's Media Lab and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
Meanwhile, he produced Broadway plays and Hollywood films, including Steven Soderbergh's "Sex, Lies and Videotape." And he wrote a book about the intersection of art and business called "Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity," which made the Business Week best-seller list.
He has written a book, "Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters and What We Can Do to Get It Back" (Free Press). In it, Kao proposes a kind of Marshall Plan for the United States to stop its fall from prominence in the increasingly competitive, globalized world of science and technology.
Kao argues that the United States desperately needs another "Sputnik moment." That moment, when the Soviets launched the first satellite and beat the U.S. to space, sparked the 1958 National Defense Education Act, for which the government pledged $900 million ($6 billion in today's dollars) to increase science research and improve science education.
Kao believes innovation is inherently multidisciplinary. From his sunny Presidio suite, he briefly sketches what he has learned from each genre he's plumbed. From psychiatry, "I learned to take in a complicated situation, quickly form a hypothesis and try to do something useful." From film, "you never know whether the person you're working with is going to be the next Stephen Soderbergh." From music: "You need to have finger skills and be able to be naive in the same moment." (Source: Heidi Benson, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 24, 2007).