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By Gertner, Jon
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.
it was believed that basic research preceded applied research, and applied research preceded development. In turn, development preceded manufacture.
Men like Kelly and Davisson would soon repeat the notion that there were plenty of good ideas out there, almost too many. Mainly, they were looking for good problems.
Phone service not only had to get better and bigger. It had to get cheaper.
The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs inhabited what one researcher there would aptly describe, much later, as “a problem-rich environment.”
The 512A was an example of how, if good problems led to good inventions, then good inventions likewise would lead to other related inventions, and that nothing was too small or incidental to be excepted from improvement.
WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then—sometimes—a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious.
“When you don’t know what to do,” he would say, “do something.”
Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.
the coming age of technologies owed its existence to a quiet revolution in materials.
The solution, as Baker described it, was to literally create new types of matter.
It wasn’t necessarily clear at the start why this was so—or whether it was even important.
“A research man,” he later remarked, “is endlessly searching to find a use for something that has no use.”
The formal purpose of the new solid-state group was not so much to build something as to understand it.
“Who is in a better position than the originator to recognize and profit from further advances?”
They were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of his rank or department, when it might be necessary. And perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed.
In his view, innovation was not a simple action but “a total process” of interrelated parts. “It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market,” he later wrote. “Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.”
He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives. As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn’t sold anything you hadn’t innovated
it was hard to deny that wholly unscientific factors—serendipity and chance, for example—played a part in the Labs’ innovations.
“I am more interested in the elegance of a problem. Is it a good problem, an interesting problem?”
“With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”
It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.
He was categorized, still, as a scientist. But it seemed obvious that he had the temperament and sensibility of an artist.
Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other.
Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another.
To Kelly, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things.
IN TECHNOLOGY, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure. That was why Kelly let many members of his research department roam free, sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.
There is a certain logic in the reasoning that methods which have produced much new knowledge are likely to be the best to produce more new knowledge
Though there is also something paradoxical in the thought that there should be established methods of creating the revolutionary
An institute of creative technology needed to house its critical mass close to one another so they could exchange ideas; it also needed to give them all the tools they needed.
A new device or a new invention,” Kelly once remarked, “stimulates and frequently demands other new devices and inventions for its proper use.
You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.
the Labs policy did not require us to get the permission of our bosses to cooperate—at the Laboratories one could go directly to the person who could help.
Of all corporation research groups these two are precisely the two that believe in ‘idle curiosity.’
that in any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise.
“Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess.
AN INSTIGATOR is different from a genius, but just as uncommon.
Humans all suffered from a terrible habit of shoving new ideas into old paradigms. “Everyone faces the future with their eyes firmly on the past,” Pierce said, “and they don’t see what’s going to happen next.”
“We do what we can, not what we think we should or what we want to do.”
Ideas may come to us out of order in point of time,” the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Simon Flexner, once remarked. “We may discover a detail of the façade before we know too much about the foundation. But in the end all knowledge has its place.”
“There’s a difference, you see, in thinking idly about something, and in setting out to do something,”
Project Echo proceeded quickly and smoothly in part because it was considered eccentric: Few people in the business community perceived its practical importance
it served as an almost perfect example of Pierce’s contention that innovations tend to happen when the time is right. Indeed, Telstar was not one invention but rather a synchronous use of sixteen inventions patented at the Labs over the course of twenty-five years.
One of the more intriguing attributes of the Bell System was that an apparent simplicity—just pick up the phone and dial—hid its increasingly fiendish interior complexity.
his deep belief that science rests on a foundation of inquiry rather than certainty
Innovations are to a great extent a response to need. Phone engineers in Europe—Kao included—weren’t looking for a complex new technology, such as the waveguide, for intercity communication. They needed intracity communication.
Innovators make different kinds of mistakes. The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception. It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere
Mistakes of perception are not the same as mistakes of judgment, though. In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not.
But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
“You don’t have to worry about this,” the AT&T executive assured them, “because we have the network. No one else has the network.” For a short while, at least, that was true. They didn’t realize at the time that anyone could build a network.
“That does not exist,” he noted, but “that does not cause us to sit around waiting.”
It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.”6 It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project.
“You have to understand,” Joel Engel says of the entire effort, “we were all very young, we were unscarred by failure. So we always knew it was going to work.”
The knowledge needed to make such an engine had by then coalesced to the point that his innovation was, arguably, inevitable. By the 1970s, the mobile business was ready to happen, Engel was sure, even if the marketers had their doubts.
“Cellular is a computer technology,” Frenkiel points out. “It’s not a radio technology.”
All the innovations returned, ferociously, in the form of competition.
Kelly did not want to begin a project by focusing on what was known. He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known.
Kelly’s tack was akin to saying: Locate the missing puzzle piece first. Then do the puzzle.
In sum, it had become difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, for a company to capture the value of a big breakthrough. So why do it?
“The only really important thing about communication is how well it serves man,” he said. “New gadgets or new technologies are important only when they really make good new things possible or good old things cheaper or better.”
Regrettably, the language that describes innovations often fails to distinguish between an innovative consumer product and an innovation that represents a leap in human knowledge and a new foundation (or “platform,” as it is often described) for industry.
Do we yet have the scientific base—akin to the “substantial gains” of transistors or lasers or optical fiber—on which to build that future economy? Or are we still living off the dividends from ideas that were nurtured, and risks that were taken, a half century ago?
Kelly believed the most valuable ideas arose when the large group of physicists bumped against other departments and disciplines, too. “It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas,”
Venture firms are averse, understandably, to funding an entrepreneur seeking out new and fundamental knowledge. As one venture capitalist for Kleiner Perkins puts it, “We don’t fund science experiments.” In some respects, then, this leaves a gap.
How do you manage ideas? And that’s very different from managing people.
They weren’t about making people feel good. They were about motivating people—not to do the conventional thing, but to do the unconventional thing.
“Incentives are fine,” Mayo says, “but they produce incremental improvements in what’s there.
A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.
And what about competition? It is now received wisdom that innovation and competitiveness are closely linked. Companies that are good at innovating are good at competing in the market; the uncompromising nature of the market, in turn, is a powerful force on companies to innovate. But Bell Labs’ history demonstrates that the truth is actually far more complicated. It also suggests that we tend to misinterpret the value of markets. What seems more likely, as the science writer Steven Johnson has noted in a broad study of scientific innovations, is that creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition. Indeed, one might concede that market competition has been superb at giving consumers incremental and appealing improvements. But that does not mean it has been good at prompting huge advances (such as those at Bell Labs, as well as those that allowed for the creation of the Internet, for instance, or, even earlier, antibiotics). It’s the latter types that pay to society the biggest and most lasting dividends.
We learned that the impossible is not impossible. We learned that if you think you can do something you may very well be able to do one thousand times better once you understand what’s going on.
encouraging their staff to understand a technology, they could create advances that were not only useful but revolutionary.
They were there to get ahead. But Kelly could see that they were only going to get ahead by understanding what they were doing.
They exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products.
Bell Labs represents a useful model for energy innovation—a model that’s arguably better than the Manhattan Project (for the first atomic bomb) or the Apollo program (for the first moon landing).
The Labs’ research department was conceived upon the notion of constantly looking far ahead, toward the goal of big and risky breakthroughs.
Bell Labs’ other dimension—the ability to exhaustively develop a product and get it ready for mass manufacturing and deployment—is perhaps even more crucial.