Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments

Embracing innovation at the source leads to technology breakthroughs

At the heart of National Instruments' success over its 30 years is a culture of innovation. The founders – Jeff Kodosky, Bill Nowlin and I – were young, and possibly naive. However, not knowing what couldn't be done was probably a benefit. We had a dream in the late 1970s: 'To do for engineers what the spreadsheet did for financial analysts.