What Do You Do With an Idea?
Yet understanding the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947 at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises a number of insights into how societies progress. With this in mind, one might think of a host of reasons to look back at these old inventions, these forgotten engineers, these lost worlds.
Jon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
The idea was that you could build a network of printers and computers and they could all talk to one another. We showed Interpress to Xerox management and they were extremely excited about it. They said, "We're going to promote this as an internal standard that we're going to use on all our products." I said, "That's fantastic. When
... See moreJessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up wit... See more
The Atlantic • Is America Really Running Out of Original Ideas?
Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That’s true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization.