Bell Labs has something to teach today's American companies about innovation, according to Jon Gertner, author of the forthcoming “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.” Writing in the New York Times, he says Bell Labs “presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today” at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, whose present culture of innovation we idealize too much.
Writes Gertner, “In his recent letter to potential shareholders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg noted that one of his firm’s mottoes was 'move fast and break things.' Bell Labs’ might just as well have been 'move deliberately and build things.' This sounds like the quaint pursuit of men who carried around slide rules and went to bed by 10 o’clock. But it was not.”
Gertner cites a list of the innovations that flowed from Bell Labs and asks, “So how can we explain how one relatively small group of scientists and engineers, working at Bell Labs in New Jersey over a relatively short span of time, came out with such an astonishing cluster of new technologies and ideas? They invented the future, which is what we now happen to call the present. And it was not by chance or serendipity. They knew something. But what?”
He cites much of Bell Labs' success to the culture of creativity established by Mervin Kelly, who brought physicists, metallurgists, and electrical engineers all under one roof in a building whose architecture fostered interaction. In particular, he notes the importance of time: “Mr. Kelly talked fast and walked fast; he ran up and down staircases. But he gave his researchers not only freedom but also time. Lots of time—years to pursue what they felt was essential.
Gertner contends that today, we are even struggling with what the term innovation means: “By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) 'better, or cheaper, or both.' Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system.”
The differences between these two definitions, he says, are immense: “One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society’s wealth and well-being.”
Of course, as has been often noted, Bell Labs operated as the research arm of a government regulated monopoly willing to fund ambitions products that may never yield a commercial product. Gertner doesn't dwell on this but does note, “…it would be absurd to return to an era of big monopolies.”
But he says that “move fast and break things” isn't necessarily the best way to get where we are going. He concludes, “To a large extent, we’re still benefiting from risks that were taken, and research that was financed, more than a half century ago.”