Invention and innovation are closely linked ideas but Rosan's Bell Labs/Facebook juxtaposition is interesting in revealing difference. Bell Labs invented a lot of stuff (in the full, traditional sense of the idea of invention.) Their main business model and their infrastructure was not particularly conducive to rapid basic changes of the sort that Facebook's lauding of "breaking things" implies. It's hard to make direct comparisons between the innovative tendencies and inventiveness of groups working in the internet model of a dumb pipe between smart entities and the old telephone model of a smart switching system between relatively dumb entities. Certainly, the former makes for easier innovation and the latter might allow for the sort of stability and pace that makes basic invention more likely.
My sister has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since the 1970s. I sent her the link to the article about Bell Lab and she replied that it reflected what she had heard about Bell Labs (she's an information theorist who used to have a server named "Shannon" and we have a cousin who worked at Bell Labs for about forever so she has a fairly strong impression) and it also reminded her a lot of JPL when she first got there. It would be interesting to compare Bell Labs, NASA, and Xerox PARC. (I'm probably showing my ignorance of the business literature; it's hard to believe someone hasn't done this several times over.)
Both the management policies and the physical structure of Bell Labs favored a fair amount of broad collaboration. That's something that can be designed (Ford changing building structure so that designers, manufacturing people, and marketing people actually met each other comes to mind) or by chance. Legend has it that biochemistry as a field developed because of a cafeteria at Cal Tech where faculty from different disciplines met because of the limited availability of table space. Eighty years later, there's a good taco truck there and I think most professors eat from it so I have no idea what that means for the future. Anyway, Rosan's reference to Facebook makes sense in that context but the question is how one makes an internet gathering place that doesn't get ghettoized.
On Mar 2, 2012, at 3:55 AM, Rosan Chow wrote:
> find it rather sobering to think that AT&T was a monopoly and Bell Labs in its heydays was a microcosm of military-industry science complex. None of these facts can tarnish the Nobel medals won, but they do put things in a different perspective and render comparisons more difficult.
AT&T was a (near) monopoly; that was part of what made Bell Labs possible. I don't know that FB is a keystone of the military industrial complex but that complex is the source of the infrastructure that makes FB possible and that complex is alive and well on the web. It is hard to extract any single part of our reality from others. The irony of considering whether an award named for and financed by Nobel would be tarnished by military connections is a good indication of that.
Gunnar
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