The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

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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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proftihar citeretfor 5 år siden
first sight,” the writer Arthur C. Clarke noted in the late 1950s, “when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.”2 Some contemporary thinkers would lead us to believe that twenty-first-century innovation can only be accomplished by small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs working amid the frenzy of market competition. Those idea factories of the past—and perhaps their most gifted employees—have no lessons for those of us enmeshed in today’s complex world. This is too simplistic. To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.
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While our engineering prowess has advanced a great deal over the past sixty years, the principles of innovation largely have not. Indeed, the techniques forged at Bell Labs—that knack for apprehending a vexing problem, gathering ideas that might lead to a solution, and then pushing toward the development of a product that could be deployed on a massive scale—are still worth considering today, where we confront a host of challenges (information overloads, infectious disease, and climate change, among others) that seem very nearly intractable. Some observers have taken to calling them “wicked problems.
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men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct. Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.
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