Class 3- The Organization of Innovation Systems at the Face-to-Face Level

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Students will take from this discussion class an understanding of how people-driven and team-driven, as opposed to institution-driven, the innovation stage is, and of the rule sets that appear to influence innovation success.

Class Three will be more informal and more student-led. We will note that although innovation systems function at the institutional level in the public and private sectors, as discussed in Class Two, they also must function at the personal, face-to-face level. The class will review a series of breakthrough innovations and look at the R&D teams that assembled them, discussing the organizational rule sets that appear to be common to these great innovation groups. The focus groups include Edison's "Invention Factory", Oppenheimer and Los Alamos, Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley at Bell Labs, Boyer and Swanson founding Genetech, Venter and the genome project, and Robert Taylor and Xerox Parc.

Lecture notes

Lecture 3 (PDF)

Readings

Required Reading

Bennis, Warren, and Patricia Ward Bierderman. Organizing Genius, The Secrets of Creative Collaborative. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998, pp. 63-86 and 196-208. ISBN: 9780201339895. [Preview with Google Books]

Other Readings for Class Discussions

Evans, Harold. They Made America – From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of American Innovators. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 2004, pp. 152-171 and 420-231. ISBN: 9780316277662.

Bird, Kai, and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, pp. 205-228, 255-259, 268-285, and 293-297. ISBN: 9780375412028. [Preview with Google Books]

Hoddeson, Lillian, and Vicki Daitch. True Genius – The Life and Science of John Bardeen. Washington, DC: 2002, pp. 115-154. ISBN: 9780309095112.

Morrow, Daniel S., and Dr. J. Craig Venter. Oral History. Video interview transcript. ComputerWorld Honors Program, 2003, pp. 3-53 and 56-58.