innovation

The Idea Factory

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This book is a history of the Bell Labs run by AT&T for much of the 20th century. These are the labs which produced many of the things I use day to day — Unix and the C programming language for example, although this book focuses on other people present at the lab, and a bit earlier than the Unix people. Unix, a history and a memoir for example is set in the same location but later in time.

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The Idea Factory Book Cover The Idea Factory
Jon Gertner
Business & Economics
Penguin
March 15, 2012
434

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.

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The Man Who Broke Capitalism

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With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are -- seeking to understand the behavior of our corporate masters once more. This book starts with this quote: To understand a civilization, consider its heroes. Which is telling because its so true. I think it also works for organizations -- if you want to see the values of an organization, don't look at what they say, look at who they promote and idolize. That's really the author's point though, so I shouldn't take too much credit. It's clear from the start that the author doesn't like Jack Welch or his leadership of General Electric and that he thinks Welch's legacy is toxic. Honestly though, he makes a pretty convincing argument that leaves me not being a huge fan either and certainly GE didn't survive the experience of Welch and those he chose to replace him upon retirement. It is asserted that Welch had three main maneuvers in business: downsizing;…

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Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy

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This book is an interesting read coming straight off the back of Human Origins. The book starts out by explaining the impact the invention of the plow had on humanity -- it asserts that farmers being able to produce substantially more than they needed for their own subsistence was a driving factor in the creation of both other specializations (by freeing people up from farming), but also a more unequal society (as it allowed a ruling class to live off resources produced by others). This is an interesting assertion to me. Next the book moves on to observing that with all innovations there is a winner and a loser. An early example is the phonograph -- before the invention of recorded media there was a market for quite-good-but-not-great performers to entertain people. Once there was an ability to record great performers, the earning capacity of the great performers went way up but the earning capacity of the not-quite-great performers went down. So while society overall might benefit from innovation, it is not true that all participants in the market benefit at the time of the innovation. The book then starts walking through a series of inventions. Each is presented as…

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The Innovator’s Dilemma

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So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War's approach of telling the story of the semiconductor industry. Apparently the universe thinks I need to know more tech history! The book asserts that disruptive innovation occurs when incumbent players become too good at serving their current market with improved products or services. While this might seem like the result of rational management, often those products end up over delivering compared to what customers want, and as a result then costing more than customers really want to spend. Disruptors on the other hand often launch with a worse product which doesn't meet the needs of the incumbent's customers, but does address the needs of some previously unserviced market segment. That's great for everyone, until the new player adds sufficient functionality to now be competitive with the incumbent player, but at a lower price point -- that's when life gets sad for the incumbent. An interesting point in the discussion is that the…

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Complexity Arrangements for Sustained Innovation: Lessons From 3M Corporation

This is the second business paper I've read this week while reading along with my son's university studies. The first is discussed here if you're interested. This paper is better written, but more academic in its style. This ironically makes it harder to read, because its grammar style is more complicated and harder to parse. The take aways for me from this paper is that 3M is good at encouraging serendipity and opportune moments that create innovation. This is similar to Google's attempts to build internal peer networks and deliberate lack of structure. In 3M's case its partially expressed as 15% time, which is similar to Google's 20% time. Specifically, "eureka moments" cannot be planned or scheduled, but require prior engagement. chance favors only the prepared mind -- Pasteur 3M has a variety of methods for encouraging peer networks, including technology fairs, "bootlegging" (borrowing idle resources from other teams), innovation grants, and so on. At the same time, 3M tries to keep at least a partial focus on events driving by schedules. The concept of time is important here -- there is a "time to wait" (we are ahead of the market); "a time in between" (15% time); and "a…

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A corporate system for continuous innovation: The case of Google Inc

So, one of my kids is studying some business units at university and was assigned this paper to read. I thought it looked interesting, so I gave it a read as well. While not being particularly well written in terms of style, this is an approachable introduction to the culture and values of Google and how they play into Google’s continued ability to innovate. The paper identifies seven important attributes of the company's culture that promote innovation, as ranked by the interviewed employees: The culture is innovation oriented. They put a lot of effort into selecting individuals who will fit well with the culture at hiring time. Leaders are seen as performing a facilitiation role, not a directive one. The organizational structure is loosely defined. OKRs and aligned performance incentives. A culture of organizational learning through postmortems and building internal social networks. Learning is considered a peer to peer activity that is not heavily structured. External interaction -- especially in the form of aggressive acquisition of skills and technologies in areas Google feels they are struggling in. Additionally, they identify eight habits of a good leader: A good coach. Empoyer your team and don't micro-manage. Express interest in employees' success…

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