True Innovation

In reading Jon Gertner's most enlightening and eloquent piece on Bell Labs titled True Innovation, a telling quote says it all regarding what true innovation really means and how it impacts society. 

"In his recent letter to potential shareholders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg noted that one of his firm’s mottoes was “move fast and break things.” Bell Labs’ might just as well have been “move deliberately and build things.” This sounds like the quaint pursuit of men who carried around slide rules and went to bed by 10 o’clock. But it was not."...

Why study Bell Labs? It offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about. Yet Bell Labs also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today. Its staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable.

Indeed, in the search for innovative models to address seemingly intractable problems like climate change, we would do well to consider Bell Labs’ example — an effort that rivals the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project in size, scope and expense. Its mission, and its great triumph, was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together."

Read Gertner"s piece, you will not be disappointed. In retrospect, it reminds me of The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks captivating and brilliant book articulating how innovation comes about, in this case, in software engineering, but is applicable to every endeavor known to man requiring planning, communication and an atmosphere of creativity in order for said endeavor to succeed. 

"adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - Fred Brooks