Content area
Full text
In 1877, after one year of operation, a single laboratory had developed a set of technologies that would revolutionize the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and incandescent light industries. The laboratory belonged to Thomas Edison and, from 1876 to 1881, it produced innovations in highspeed, automatic, and repeating telegraphs, telephones, phonographs, generators, voltmeters, mimeographs, light bulbs and filaments, and vacuum pumps. It also produced many promising but ultimately fruitless innovations in iron mining, electric railroads, thermal sensors, ink for the blind, electric sewing machines, and vacuum storage of food. Edison built the laboratory, in his own words, for the "rapid and cheap development of an invention," and he promised "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so."' He delivered. In six years of operation, the laboratory generated over 400 patents and was known worldwide as an invention factory.
To the public, Edison exploited the image of inventor as hero and lone genius, but in truth his greatest invention of all may have been the invention factory itself. The Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory represented the first dedicated research and development facility, and showed the industrial world the power of organized innovation.2 Over a hundred years later, it still provides valuable insights into the innovation process for modern managers or researchers. For rapidly shifting markets where new technologies proliferate, Ikujiro Nonaka warns that successful companies will be those whose "sole business is continuous innovation."3 Further, he provides a framework for understanding the role of knowledge creation in the development of new products and processes. But few can claim their sole business is innovation. After all, manufacturing and sales remain essential activities to most firms, and these still rely heavily on established processes and tightly linked relationships. But there is one set of organizations, Edison's modern-day counterparts, that pursue strategies of continuous innovation. As "invention factories," their sole products are new solutions that take the form of new product or process designs. These organizations consult to others, and though consultants vary widely in their organizational forms and in their reputations, some, like Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory, have played central roles in the development and spread of new knowledge across industries.
What sets Edison's laboratory and its modern counterparts apart from other consultants...