Another thread on classic industrial R&D labs. Bell Labs was the birthplace of information theory. Nine Nobel prizes(!) and four Turing awards(!!). I’m mostly quoting this neat new .@Nature article on how they operated with actual quotes.

www.nature.com/articles/s42254-022-00426-6

Riordan attributed the success of Bell Labs to the “combination of stable funding and long-term thinking”

But there were other ingredients articulated in 1950 by Mervin Kelly, director of Bell Labs.

Kelly’s core belief was that “basic research is the foundation on which all technology advances rest.”He called the labs “an institute of creative technology” and had a very clear vision of how such an institution should be run, from the people he hired to the layout of the rooms

He was looking to hire men (remember this is the 1950s!) “of the same high quality as are required for distinguished pure research in universities”. Attracting such talent was not a problem, rather the challenge was to create the right environment for it to thrive.

We give much attention to the maintenance of an atmosphere of freedom and an environment stimulating to scholarship and scientific research interest. It is most important to limit their work to that of research”

Kelly believed that distractions would make researchers lose “contact with the forefront of their scientific interest”and decrease their productivity in research. Kelly saw research as a “non-scheduled area of work” translating to no deadlines, objectives or progress reports.

Kelly was also very particular about the physical environment these bright minds would thrive in. Like Steve Jobs decades later, Kelly had a hands-on involvement in the architectural design. This layout brought together theorists, experimentalists and technicians.

The policy of keeping the office doors open fostered an atmosphere for the free exchange of ideas where newcomers could meet William Shockley, an inventor of the transistor, or Claude Shannon, father of information theory.

Is it time to revisit Kelly’s lessons? Recreating his recipe for success will be challenging. In some respects, we are now better placed than Bell Labs was. Today a company can hire from a larger and more diverse pool of talented people.

Perhaps, and most importantly the author believes that the freedom and time to pursue any research interest is a luxury very few scientists in academia or other research organizations can afford. (Bell Labs didn’t have to worry about grants, say.)

Still, I think the mistake is in trying to recreate Bell Labs instead of coming up with something new. Too often we try to recreate the past. There are lessons to be learned from, but their success was precisely because they were not trying to imitate anything. Neither will we.

In some ways we need new categories that transcend labs. Follow .@mldoing .@DevEconX