Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle

I was recently talking with Prof. Dave MacQueen about this (he ran a group at Bell Labs for around 20 years before the Lucent debacle). The most amazing thing was the management style of that lab. Once a year, you had to write an "I am smart" report (yes, the actual name) where you told management why you were doing good, smart things. Management would then meet on two separate days, once to ensure everyone was meeting the bar of doing good things and once to figure out how the money thing should be handled.

That's it. No assessment of "high-impact publications this year"; no assessment up the chain of how many $100MM businesses had been created by your group (thanks, Lucent!); no demo days to see if some product group is going to give you the "leave research and work on this or work on something else" ultimatum...

"Regrettably, we now use ["innovation"] to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense."

I cannot agree with this more. We may not be able to re-create the environment of Bell Labs, but I'm hoping to see more in terms of actual science (and it will be at the nano-scale) in the future, rather than seeing so many people create yet another social app, claiming that it's "revolutionizing" an industry.

In defense of Google, I think their machine translation is highly underrated, its simply incredible how good it is, at least for European languages. As is their contribution to building large data centers and manipulating large amounts of data (mapreduce, Bigtable was the first major nosql).

Facebook is too young to tell.

Still, IBM is the gold standard for CS research - Microsoft appears to have many productive researchers but I'm not sure they have made fundamental advances like virtual memory, hard disks, relational databases (all of which came from IBM).

Having worked at Bell Labs, I gotta say the culture of innovation was paramount best described by this statement of an old supervisor: "You should do what you feel is the right thing, it's my job to align that to the needs of the business." So you might spend weeks researching highly available protocols and data distribution techniques to get the one feature correct. It should be no surprise then that the old refriderator-looking phone systems pioneered in the late 70s and 80s had a well known 5 9's of reliability.

I thought this op-ed was important because I agree with the author that companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook (etc.) get the bulk of the media's attention when none of what they do could have been done without the work that came out of Bell Labs. Real innovation is not done at Google or Facebook or Apple for that matter. Those companies are too tied to meeting quarterly results to invest in real innovation.

I think the other important implication is that the US doesn't have an entity like Bell Labs innovating today. And so we rest on the work that was done back then (cramming more transistors onto a smaller chip, etc.) vs. new innovation that would provide the platform for decades of future growth.

At first, I really agreed with this piece. I think it's an awesome point that the overuse of the word innovative deflates its meaning, just like calling every programmer a "hacker" or saying "let's do this 'the hacker way!'" makes it less meaningful, or calling every member of the military a 'national hero' is maybe a little degrading to purple-heart recipients.

But on a second reading, this article really uses a straw man. Comparing a facebook and a few cherry-picked innovations from Bell Labs is a little disingenuous for a few reasons.

The most obvious comes from the fact that there were a lot of people working at Bell Labs. See that first picture? Halls so long they ended in the vantage point? There were a lot of ideas that never quite made a splash in the 70 years of Bell Lab's heyday.

The second part is that the innovations of Bell Labs may not have been lost, but transferred. There's still quite a lot of research done in this country, although most of hit has slowly been shifting to universities. I'm not sure if this is better, but no one can say there isn't tons of cool stuff being done for the "understanding" and not the short-term profit. I think there should be more, but that's not the point. While we're cherry-picking, I might point out brain machine interfaces that let monkeys (and soon humans) control prosthetic limbs directly from their brains, nano-scale machines a few molecules large, quantum computers. These things are anything but short-term profit focused, and everything but falsely innovative.

Finally, the real straw man lies with the fact that Bell Labs has the benefit of hindsight. We now know the transistor was an incredibly useful invention. Before we knew what we could really do with computers, it wasn't quite so obvious. It might end up that facebook doesn't turn out anything more innovative than extremely well executed social networking, but that's going to take more than 8 years to find out.

Don't overuse innovation, but don't become so narrowmindedly awed by the past that you don't take part in the tumult of things that might (or might not) share the same sentences as the transistor when someone write an article in 30 years wondering why we don't have the same pizzazz as those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at Google.

Guess who. Ok, when it was still in NY.

"I went to Princeton to do graduate work, and in the spring I went once again to the Bell Labs in New York to apply for a summer job. I loved to tour the Bell Labs. Bill Shockley the guy who invented transistors, would show me around. I remember somebody’s room where they had marked a window: The George Washington Bridge was being built, and these guys in the lab were watching its progress. They had plotted the original curve when the main cable was first put up, and they could measure the small differences as the bridge was being suspended from it, as the curve turned into a parabola. It was just the kind of thing I would like to be able to think of doing. I admired those guys; I was always hoping I could work with them one day."

I have watched this more than a dozen times, I'm still awe-struck every time I watch it, and it barely scratches the surface of all that was created at such a magical place:

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/innovations_song/

My dad worked at Bell Labs in the 80s, and he's always telling me about the quality of the experience there.

I'm not sure if it was the politics, or the people, but he said there was an Apple or Google-like quality of innovation and inspiration. What's amazing though is that this innovation extended to basic research as well, and not just consumer products. He always tells me that when his team was using an early implementation of C++, a member simply called up Bjarne (creator of C++), and got an answer within seconds.

I agree with others about shifting research locations, but I think we have some fundamental problems with the attitudes of research. I've researched heavily outside of school for the past 4 years (thousands of hours, multiple publications) and the thing I've learned is that there's gotta be a better way to do this. Labs aren't the best place for industry and academia to talk to each other, because we'll always have conflicting motives.

Perhaps a move towards more technology incubation from university research - a Y-Combinator for universities, perhaps - is the future.

"Two of its researchers were awarded the first patent for a laser, and colleagues built a host of early prototypes."

I hear that most companies own the things that their employees create while working there. The above quote seems to imply that the patents were owned by the individual researchers. Did Bell Labs have a policy of researchers owning their inventions?

Single page:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...

For insight into the computing side of Bell Labs, Doug McIlroy's retirement lecture is a great read: http://research.swtch.com/bell-labs.

A paper covering the earlier period is A History of Computing Research at Bell Laboratories (1937-1975): http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/99.pdf

a book bell labs' innovations already exists, "three degrees above zero" by jeremy bernstein. highly recommended. i have a copy i got used off of amazon, but here it is for preview in google books.

http://books.google.com/books?id=N6s8AAAAIAAJ&dq=three+d...

I'm another Bell Labs alum. This article seemed banal and backward looking.

Think about what a "hothouse of innovation" is and was. Back then, you had to physically gather people together to get ideas flowing. Today, we can do it here, on chat rooms, listservs, irc channels, blogs.

For all the genuine innovations that came out of Bell Labs, it's also the case that they killed inventions that would have threatened their telecommunications monopoly, such as the magnetic answering machine that was invented at Bell Labs in 1934!

http://gizmodo.com/5691604/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-fo...

The article never mentioned the creation of Unix. How could any tech loving journalist miss this point?!!