9/21/2023 0 Comments Who discovered theine![]() For instance, a multidisciplinary team at Bell Labs, the research arm of AT&T during the company’s decades as a telephone monopoly, created in 1947 the integrated circuit, which became the building block for digital computers and the massive semiconductor industry. Some of their most illuminating examples come from the co-evolution of physics and electrical engineering in the twentieth century. The authors maintain that rather than science serving as nourishment for engineering, some forms of research, whether done by scientists, engineers, or even use-inspired amateurs, “proceed interactively.” Citing seminal papers by the historian Edwin Layton in the 1970s on “ technology as knowledge,” they persuasively argue that many crucial inventions in the past “reached relatively advanced stages of development before detailed scientific explanations about how the technologies worked emerged.” Arguing that government funders and policy makers remain devoted to a false, unidirectional understanding of the flow among science, engineering, and innovation, they deliver the bracing conclusion that federal research policy-and some significant funded research-”has become so divorced from actual practice that in many cases it is now an impediment to the research process.” In debunking this model, the authors draw on evidence from the history of science and technology as well from detailed accounts of private-sector innovation. In their wide-ranging, well-documented, and deeply informed analysis, the two scholars of innovation effectively demolish the so-called “linear model.” In this conceptual framework, technological innovation begins with basic research-often in a scientific laboratory-and moves to applied research and engineering, followed by diffusion of the innovation. Whereas scholars take for granted that government is often the handmaiden of vital innovations, the case for the centrality of public funds is today battered and beaten by conservative and corporatist critiques that insist government spending on research and development too often amounts to a form of glorified welfare for scientists and engineers isolated from markets.Ĭoncerned by what they consider to be weak outcomes from publicly funded science and engineering, Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Toluwalogo Odumosu have produced a necessary new book on the politics of research, Cycles of Invention and Discovery: Rethinking the Endless Frontier. ![]() ![]() More urgent than a fundamental understanding of innovation in all its marvelous forms is public understanding of and appreciation for the relationship among public funding, government policies, and innovation outcomes. If culture conditions innovation, as surely it must, then can some national and subnational cultures possess more innovative capacity than others? How much does geography matter? Is innovation in digital electronics fundamentally different than in, say, energy, transportation, or biopharma? Is it possible to speak of social and technological innovation in the same breath? What does it mean to go from “imitation to innovation,” as South Korea’s national champions have done, and yet still insist that science and the discovery of new knowledge decisively contribute to technological advance and human well-being?įortunately for innovators, whether situated in universities, industry, or civil society, advances across a range of fields can occur without ever answering any of these questions. Confusion abounds over such basic tasks as how to describe how innovation works and even what counts as innovation. Innovation is almost universally desired but almost always misunderstood. ![]() ![]() Cycles of Invention and Discovery: Rethinking the Endless Frontierīy Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Toluwalogo OdumosuĬambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, 176 pp. ![]()
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