My shallow blueprint for replicating Bell Labs
- Find a (really) wicked problem
- Start a business around it
- Become profitable to some extent that you can afford to do fundamental research
- Give your researchers the freedom they want
- Free the researchers from all burdens (funding, marketing, manufacturing) except for a pressing urge to solve hard problems
- Become even more profitable, and invest more in research
- repeat the cycle
- Eliminate competition, not by becoming a monopoly, but rather by making all people around you win to the greatest possible extent
- Eventually, it will degrade, make sure that happens gracefully.
Quotes
To Kelly, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things.
“Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess.
We do what we can, not what we think we should or what we want to do.
NSA very existence was the considered a national secret. So Baker was organizing a committee that didn’t officially exist to write a top secret report about how to improve an organization that didn’t officially exist either.
While only four percent of the [U.S.] work force is composed of scientists and engineers, this group disproportionately creates jobs for the other 96 percent.
— the National Academy report.
You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories,” he once remarked, “only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.
Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things:
- A technically competent management all the way to the top.
- Researchers didn’t have to raise funds.
- Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years.
- Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.