Looking for dragons drives progress - by David R. MacIver
What sorts of problems create innovations? Bell Labs seems like a pretty central example, and I argue that a lot of why they were as successful as they were is because of the pretty mundane reason that they wanted to build a telephone network.
Hi everyone, First, let’s talk about Bell Labs. Bell Labs was an/the R&D department at AT&T and invented a really alarmingly large fraction of the computing infrastructure we use today. I didn’t really appreciate quite how much until I read “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner (I just thought of Bell Labs as the unix and C place), but examples include transistors, information theory, mobile phones, and a whole host of other things. People talk a lot about what it was in the environment of Bell Labs that made it so productive - whether it was the people involved, the organisational structure,…
related reading
- How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?freaktakes.com
- How to Get Startup Ideaspaulgraham.com
- The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab - Works in Progress Magazineworksinprogress.co
- What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?construction-physics.com
- The idea mazecdixon.org
- How to Get Startup Ideaspaulgraham.com
- Review of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation | by Javier Escribano | Mediummedium.com
- How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?freaktakes.substack.com
- How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?goodscience.substack.com
- Effective Startup Ideationbenjaminfspector.com
- Excuse me, is there a problem?longform.asmartbear.com
- Shifting the impossible to the inevitableblog.benjaminreinhardt.com