Corporate industrial labs have been responsible for some of the world’s greatest innovations. None more so than the Bell Telephone Laboratories during the twentieth century.
For example, from Bell Labs came the transistor and the laser, among many others. It is fair to say that much of modern communications we owe to that single organization and its scientists and engineers, some of whom are legendary.
I won’t attempt here to recount how they did it. But for anyone interested, I’d highly recommend Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012). As the author puts it, “For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well.”
For me, that makes it one well worth studying and paying homage to.
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