The Idea Factory

How do you create and sustain truly life-changing innovation? Jon Gertner’s book, The Idea Factory, on the rise and fall of Bell Labs tells the story of one approach. I read Gertner’s book back when I was involved in starting a new college and fresh with enthusiasm eight years ago. I hadn’t started blogging then, otherwise I would have surely mused in writing about some of the ideas I gleaned. I just finished reading it for the second time this past week, and perhaps time and experience has led me to a more measured perspective. 

 

Bell Labs was unique. Fostered in AT&T’s monopolistic telecom industry, it had resources to sustain long-term industrial-scale cutting-edge basic research, and a huge team of engineers on the payroll to turn seemingly idealistic technological dreams into reality. Gertner focuses on the famous individual personalities of Bell Labs lore, from the eccentric pursue-what’s-interesting mathematician Shannon, to the brilliant egotist Shockley who ended his career in infamy. While Gertner finds ways to pay tribute to the thousands of unnamed engineers, his narrative may not have been as engaging – and by focusing on the narrative arc of select lives, he keeps the reader engaged. (This says something more about twenty-first century readers than it does about writers.)

 

There’s no doubt there were some brilliant minds and able hands in the research teams at Bell Labs. Visionary management and some very savvy and capable leaders also helped. The design of research spaces and opportunities to interact also enter the story, and are perhaps the most visible part that “innovative” companies (by their own assessment) have tried to replicate. Think about open office plans. Or designing hallways, spaces, locations, cafeterias, to “catalyze collaborations” among experts with different expertise. Think different. Think Apple Park and Googleplex. Or maybe this is not so different after all. The vision of Bell Labs reborn.

 

Has throwing all that money at people and buildings given us what is truly innovative? Bell Labs provides a number of positive examples, well highlighted in The Idea Factory. The hiring of very smart and capable people seems to be as important, if not more so, than providing the infrastructure. Have those that followed a similar path shown the same kind of creativity and innovation? Arguably so, arguably not, and the old is often found lurking between the new and shiny. Dreams of software, cloud applications, and leveraging lightning-fast connectivity, don’t come without hardware and painstaking materials development. Bell Labs was a single shop. Today’s architecture is both more complex and diffuse.

 

The rules of the game have also changed. Gertner’s most insightful contributions are his reflections on the politics and economics, particularly focusing on the interacting roles of government, industry, academia, and the market. If I would summarize the narrative arc of the book and my take-away message, I would say this: The dictum that any truly innovative technology will sow the seeds of its own downfall is one that I’m still trying to grasp. I’ve nibbled at thinking how I might innovate myself into obsolescence. 

 

I was hoping that re-reading The Idea Factory would give me fresh energy as I imagine education in a post-Covid19 world, but one that now knows that pandemics are here to stay and likely to get more intense over time. I think it highly likely we will see another pandemic within the next ten years, given present trends. The question is whether we will be better prepared to respond. There is no easy reversal. Like climate change, there are no easy solutions. Nor is there agreement how to respond. Global food inequality is still a problem whether you listen to the wizards or the prophets. We’ll certainly need to generate better ideas, like folks did at Bell Labs in its heyday. But will that be enough?