The Bootstrap Institute was conceived by Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting individual and organizational ability to better address problems that are complex and urgent.* It is along this chosen career path that he became prominent as a pioneer of the digital age. He garnered fame especially through his invention of the computer mouse and was the first to use the cathode-ray tube for the display of text, of graphics and of the mouse pointer (the monitor as we know it today). He is credited with pioneering online computing and email, and other inventions and innovations. More on this will be found in the Chronicle, a part of this website that conserves the past. We hope that the Chronicle will prove especially useful to those of a historical bent of mind as well as to members of the press. However, the overarching aim of these web pages is to inform decision-makers and a wider public about a strategy and tools for achieving peak performance within public institutions and commercial enterprises in the interest of mankind as a whole. 2A

Foundation for Engelbart's experience-based and logically worked out strategy is an optimized bootstrapping approach for drastically improving on any organization's already existing improvement processes. Referring to an organization's principal work as an A-activity and to ordinary efforts at process improvement as a B-activity, he denotes bootstrapping as a C-activity, which is an improving of the improvement process. His paper Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware argues that highest payoff comes from engaging in that C-activity.