bell labs and the great age of american innovation

( MORE: Encourage Innovation on Your Team)

And sometimes innovations sprang from military necessity-an invention such as radar or automatic anti-aircraft guns, which were urgent for national defense.

Sometimes, innovations sprang from cultural necessity-making something that appealed to an evolving society, such as a new Bell product in the 1940s like the car phone. Sometimes innovations sprang from operational needs-making something that worked better and faster, such as direct dialing so subscribers wouldn’t need to use an operator to complete a phone call. Sometimes innovations sprang from economic needs-making something cheaper, for instance, such as a long-distance phone call, by efficiently combining many different conversations on a single cable, interleaving them at different frequencies or at different time intervals (or both), and then pulling apart those conversations at the receiving end. Bell Labs, however, had the advantage of necessity its new inventions, as one of Kelly’s deputies, Harald Friis, once said, “always originated because of a definite need.” In Kelly’s view, the members of the technical staff had the great advantage of working to improve a telephone system where there were always problems, always needs. He knew they would fail far more often than not.īut what was the secret of success? Just because you had made something new and wondrous before didn’t mean you could make something else new and wondrous. That was why Mervin Kelly, the president of Bell Labs, let many members of his research department roam free, sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.

Follow technology, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure.

Bell labs and the great age of american innovation