Pundits are arguing that trendy social media companies are diverting capital from more serious, productive ventures.
In the years immediately after the breakup of the Bell System in 1984, a question arose: What was the purpose of this company—and what was the purpose of its laboratory, arguably the finest in the world—going forward?
In technology, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure. Innovation requires certain conditions for an idea to blossom into a useful solution. Bell Labs had the right mix of talent, resources, and problems to be solved for innovation to run wild.
In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in enormous brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. In a time before Google, Bell Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It was where [...]
Organizations need innovation on all fronts, not just in new products, services, or technologies. But many managers don’t innovate because they don’t think it’s their job. Here’s how you can build a stronger innovation culture on your team:
If the gap between the “stock” cars on the track and those driven on regular streets has never been wider, NASCAR and the auto industry are now intent on shifting that trend into reverse.
Here’s Jim Manzi (no, not that one; this one), writing in National Affairs (via Michael Pettis) on the question, addressed here a couple of days ago, of balancing economic security with economic dynamism: Conservatives have …, as a rhetorical and political strategy, downplayed the problems of cohesion — problems like inequality, wage stagnation, worker displacement, [...]
